171–180 of 332 posts
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And if you're going to rig up a volcano for power production, maybe use that power for something useful in your own country.
Geothermal power in El Salvador represents 25% of the country's total electricity production.
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This is a false dichotomy. They can subsidize the startup costs for harvesting geothermal energy from Bitcoin mining and then use the geothermal infrastructure to produce electricity for the country.
It's not a false dichotomy. The infrastructure does not exist and they can't do both things at once
As a Salvadoran living abroad but keeping an eye on politics there, I feel the need to comment given the amount of skepticism shown here, which is understandable given the history. I believe that what the president, Nayib Bukele, and his team have done is monumental. The reason is that I also believe that the financial system crashed back in 2008 and has been kept alive by central banks worldwide. Last summer we saw…
That could have been done with just like a public bank instead of bitcoin though.
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PoW keeps things fair, you have to spend money on hardware and energy or become irrelevant. In other consensus systems like PoS, whoever has the most capital controls pretty much everything and has 0 incentive to sell what they get since they aren't really spending any energy for their cryptographic signature. It literally says "rich gets richer" in the protocol which is fundamentally broken in my humble opinion.
Compute power requires money though, no? Whoever has the most capital now controls the BTC blockchain, which happens to be mostly miners in China. It’s a lot easier for me to stake ETH than to buy hundreds of GPUs. And my reward is linear with how much I stake or put down, whereas with economies of scale in mining the reward is more like quadratic. Seems to me that with PoS the rich get richer linearly, with PoW the…
So whatever Bitcoin reward you get barely covers your running cost + small profit margin. Imagine like you're running from a monster, you can't stop or you'll become irrelevant.
Whereas with ETH, I can buy 100M$ worth of it, I'll get say 5% back which means I'm making 5M$ every year, thing is I don't have any pressure to sell it whereas the poorer stakers will have to sell to cover their cost of living or other reasons, so over time the % of my stake in eth grows. Things get even worse when you include custodians into the mix, exchanges will have much larger wallets and get much larger rewards which they may not share with the actual holders or keep a small % for themselves.
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> Mandating BTC as legal tender is an awesome move. To me the most important benefit is that the 70% of the population which was excluded from banking and relegated to use physical currency will now be included. If the economy is an engine and money is the oil, El Salvador, which had only some drops of oil, will now get a complete oil change with synthetic on top of that. You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly def…
> You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function, it encourages people to hold onto it with white knuckles. It's not oil for the economy, it's sand. In my opinion, that's the biggest lie that people have been made to believe to justify constant stealing of their purchasing power over time. People will always spend money for things they need, they will al…
I mean, it's literally the #1 meme for cryptocurrency.
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Or option A + B: Invest in more geothermal - they already have a lot -, and use bitcoin mining when demand is low to help offset the cost. If mining makes it cost-effective to increase sources like geothermal past the point where it covers the base load so it reduces the need for peaker plants, that might be worthwhile (though of course the other option is to invest in storage) But the potential geothermal output for…
> use bitcoin mining when demand is low to help offset the cost I've looked at income statements of a bunch of public companies that mine Bitcoin, and one of the most striking things is how much of the cost is actually depreciation of hardware. Granted, part of this is that they are running the hardware to its limits, but another aspect is that new improved mining hardware comes out frequently and pushes the old hard…
May well be that it won't change the cost structure enough - I treat this as the president deciding an announcement like this, which amounts to little more than "I've asked them to look into it", as a way to get some publicity. It could very well end up being silently put aside if the costs don't stack up.
It just gets better and better. - ES makes BTC fiat - ES taps volcanoes to mine BTC What next? - ES uses natural wormholes to plot the future timeline and win Earth?
> makes BTC fiat Did I miss a memo? Or is this a sort of Freduian slip wherein you said 'fiat' when you meant to say 'official'? It seems to me that we've been conditioned to conflate the two.
The alternatives would be that it is commodity money (which is not the case because you can't use a Bitcoin other than exchange it for something else) or representative money (which is not the case because Bitcoin isn't backed by anything else for which it can exchanged).
Up to this point, it's been a rather degenerate case of fiat money because the agreement that it has value has not been governmentally backed.
But now that's no longer the case. Congrats, Bitcoin, you now absolutely meet all the requirements of fiat money!
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They are doing it to make money how is making money a fad? The reality of living in a poor nation like this is that unless they take a gamble they will most likely continue with the same level of violence and poverty. Its very easy to look down on people from an ivory tower though and call it a waste.
> They are doing it to make money In no scenario does "they" refer to El Salvador's poor population, especially not the indigenous peoples. The money will go to the colonizing foreign investors and circulate in things like CDOs. A few crumbs that fall off the table will go to improving the lives of the upper end of El Salvador's people, and incidentally some crumbs of the crumbs might fall down to the rest of the pop…
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They will literally have more money in their pockets. Good things happen when people have more money in their pockets - people save more, invest more, build more.
I have a sneaking suspicion the folks with "more money in their pockets" from this are most likely to be President Bukele and his friends.
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> You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function, it encourages people to hold onto it with white knuckles. It's not oil for the economy, it's sand. In my opinion, that's the biggest lie that people have been made to believe to justify constant stealing of their purchasing power over time. People will always spend money for things they need, they will al…
Euh... HODL ? :) I mean, it's literally the #1 meme for cryptocurrency.
Life is short, you enjoy/spend what you have while you're here.