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El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

finance.yahoo.com

41–50 of 115 posts

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#41
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been said before on almost every thread about this, lightning network alleviates the issue of high transaction costs for small transactions. https://www.coindesk.com/strike-launches-bitcoin-lightning-p...

How secure is it compared to real transactions?

As far as I know you have to be on the internet at least once in 30 days, so it's good only for hot wallets. Also for payments over $1k probably right now Bitcoin transaction is more practical (I have heard of $100k lightning transactions though).

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#42
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average HN is a salty nocoiner.

I notice that hn largely ignores blockchain tech. It almost feels luddite.

Because it is over hyped by coin owners who want you to buy coins and make them rich

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#43
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a weird thing to brag about - if talking about past returns there's few 'cash flow producing assets' that'd have done as well as just putting the money in btc. Also flash loans don't take anything out of your wallet/account either and I know of people whose bank accounts have been hacked. There's plenty to complain about btc but you've somehow chosen the least convincing argument for why you are a noncoiner.

Bitcoins do not produce any cash flow, the only way to profit is to sell them to a greater fool.

There's plenty of crypto (including e.g. ETH) that does so via staking but that wasn't the point anyway.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#44

A small developing country with little industry, high inequality and some of the worst murder rates in world decides to spend their very limited money and attention on populist nonsense like this. I guess the gangs will appreciate it?

About 1/4 of the citizen's wealth comes from US dollar transfers from abroad (ie., from immigrant families). (Their currency is the US dollar.) Presently very high transaction fees and poor banking-system support eats up a significant amount of this wealth. Can you see why this isn't "populist none-sense" ?

Transaction fees is one thing, but going to the city by bus to pick up the money is extra cost and hours of time. I sometimes wish people from US would travel to these places to understand the life other people were born into.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#45
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, if you want to receive business for money laundering and want to obfuscate it by using civilians. I don't see another reason to go down this path...

I think el-salvador is going down this path because their current path doesn't work. So instead, they are trying another monetary theory. Short term profits might come, not from money laundering, but from bitcoin whales that are true believers and decide to come live there. Some of those whales might have gotten their bitcoin illegally, and are happy to avoid a fiat off-ramp. I suppose that might be money-laundering…

> Short term profits might come (...) from bitcoin whales

I don't understand. How are you supposed to make money from wealth hoarders? The trickle-down fairy?

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#46
post #33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, lots of people here are just like me: proud salty nocoiners. We poor old salty nocoiners can only wipe our flowing tears with the 100$ rags from our fat wallets. Oh poor us, we foolishly put our wealth into cashflow producing assets. Oh the sorrow every quarter as the dividends are deposited in our flash-loan-hack-proof bank accounts.

Thats a weird thing to brag about - if talking about past returns there's few 'cash flow producing assets' that'd have done as well as just putting the money in btc. Also flash loans don't take anything out of your wallet/account either and I know of people whose bank accounts have been hacked. There's plenty to complain about btc but you've somehow chosen the least convincing argument for why you are a noncoiner.

Victims of bank fraud mostly receive their money back by the bank.

This one recent example of an crypto exchange that fled with the money, has defrauded more in value than the entire ACH payment system worth ~51T ( fraud = 0,0008 % = 0,08 basis points).

https://www.engadget.com/africrypt-bitcoin-disappearance-174... https://silamoney.com/ach/understanding-the-basics-of-ach-fr...

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#48
post #15

The current bitcoin transaction fee is about $7, so nobody is going to be using this for everyday transactions, making $30 not much of an incentive. It sounds like there will be the option of choosing to accept cash instead, so it will be interesting to see how many prefer $30 of real, spendable cash over $23 of virtual, difficult to spend tokens. Edit: Perhaps I was a bit glib as using the lightning network will pro…

While tx fees are pretty volatile, I see about 3$ (65 sats/vB) to get into the next block (even looking back to when you wrote this) and <1$ if you’re ok with waiting an hour or so.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a gross generalisation. One would think, that average HNer would be a coiner because of their background.

What happens is that many on HN were around in 2009-2011 when it first appeared and was cheap. Everyone who didn't buy in then has a vested interest in it failing because then they feel like they didn't miss out and that their decision not to get involved was validated. It is becoming apparent as time goes by that there are very many of them here. I seem to have attracted some that downvote every comment I make.

I owned Bitcoin back in 2012-2014 when i thought it was going to be an actual currency to exchange goods and services. Since then, it has become a tool for speculation and an ecological disaster, both of which are strongly opposed to my ethos.

I now own precisely 0€ worth of Bitcoin and strongly recommend all my friends never to fall into that kind of trap. Because capitalism and speculation ruins lives, whether you trade stocks or magic BTC numbers.

I'm not alone: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#50
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average HN is a salty nocoiner.

I notice that hn largely ignores blockchain tech. It almost feels luddite.

That's not true.

Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins/crypto's.

Just like Stackoverflow doesn't correlate with the value of the .Net framework or HN doesn't correlate with the value of the ARC programming language ( since it's build on that tech)

It's an example of the tech, but the value of blockchain does not have a correlation with any of the 8000 implementations as crypto.

Additionally, the implementation of El Salvador uses Lightning network and since that obfuscates transactions off-chain to a centralized authority. It's not what i'd call blockchain anymore.

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