Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 115 posts

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

#51

Post by Tenoke »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #46
Tenoke wrote: 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.

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...

That's not a hack that's a scam.

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

#52

Post by bellyfullofbac »

tffgg wrote: post #42
eur00t wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, pro-coiners probably fail to realize, if they've put their money in it, that means they've bought the hype. And people don't like to believe they're stupid, but since they also have a confirmation bias, they also look for proof that they're right, and all the stories from random websites saying "Crypto is the future!" remain in their minds, while all the skeptical articles, they just say "Pah, another luddite!" and dismiss.

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

#53

Post by southerntofu »

eur00t wrote: post #10
chedine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average HN is a salty nocoiner.

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

A blockchain is a way to reach a decentralized consensus, but the devil lies in the details. Who gets to take part in this consensus? On what criteria? Most blockchains are vulnerable to 51% attacks, rendering them quasi-useless to actually distribute trust.

Consensus can also be achieved by trusting a 3rd party in a certain context. Funny that's precisely what BTC people are doing with their exchanges, with Lightning, and even with Bitmain & Cie owning the majority of the network.

Also, you should know historically the luddites were artisans who destroyed the machines (introduced by the bosses) that ruined their lives and work conditions. They were not loonies opposed to any form of technological progress. In that sense, maybe some of us from HN are in fact luddites, because we want the machine to help, not to ruin society and the environment.

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

#54

Post by celticninja »

southerntofu wrote: post #49
celticninja wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>capitalism and speculation ruin lives

And yet here you are on hackernews, owned and run by ycombinator, an organisation that exists to capitalise on both of these things, with the aim of making a small group of investors and founders very very rich.

https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/

Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?

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

#55

Post by southerntofu »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #50
eur00t wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins

Yes and no. The latter is built from the former. But the former is ensured to build wasteful tech. I explain the difference between consensus and gossip in an article about decentralized forging, if you're interested:

https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/

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

#56

Post by amelius »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #37

It seems like many here don't get what I think they're doing: government buys 180 million USD worth of Bitcoin, stores it in their wallet, and creates an SQL database (well, with a bank as a wrapper) with 6 million entries with $30 (or whatever that is in BTC) each. The transactions can just be recorded in this SQL database, and the "reserve" would be untouched. If someone wants to exchange their BTC to USD or Euro,…

But what if someone wants to pay in BTC?

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

#57

Post by southerntofu »

celticninja wrote: post #54
southerntofu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>capitalism and speculation ruin lives And yet here you are on hackernews, owned and run by ycombinator, an organisation that exists to capitalise on both of these things, with the aim of making a small group of investors and founders very very rich. https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?

> Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?

I am more than aware of my position and my surroundings. But i don't feel any dissonance, though i do feel a lot of ethical/ideological conflict in these forums (which i'm happy to take part in on occasion).

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

#58

Post by celticninja »

celticninja wrote: post #54
southerntofu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>capitalism and speculation ruin lives And yet here you are on hackernews, owned and run by ycombinator, an organisation that exists to capitalise on both of these things, with the aim of making a small group of investors and founders very very rich. https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?

For reference I also got involved in a similar period and used it successfully to transact business with people in foreign countries at a much lower cost than via bank transactions.

Yes bitcoin has pivoted now to a store of wealth or even a cheap way to move large sums and it is less efficient for smaller transactions, but lightning network solves this problem sufficiently.

Again pivoting is not something unique to bitcoin and many tech firms have pivoted to find their niche. Being able to react and respond is a feature not a bug.

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

#59

Post by Clewza313 »

Tenoke wrote: post #43
Clewza313 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, this was the GP's point. Many of those "salty nocoiners" are invested in assets that produce reliable cash flow, which is considerably safer than holding a purely speculative asset like crypto.

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

#60

Post by robjan »

aaronhayes wrote: post #19
altacc wrote: 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…

But over the lightning network it will be close to free

They'd still have to open 6M channels which would create the same number of transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain
Post reply on HN