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

finance.yahoo.com

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

#71

Post by justsomeperson »

chinathrow wrote: post #70
bluepnume wrote: post #30

Before you post a comment about Bitcoin fees, please take a little time and try out lightning. It's come an incredibly long way, it's very fast, and very cheap, and very easy using a mobile wallet.

What happens if you lose your mobile wallet?

You can restore from a backup surely? Unlike losing a physical wallet, which in most cases, means losing the cash it holds at least, but possibly getting things like your ID returned. If you lose your mobile, you will likely never have it returned, but any funds or accounts you have on it can be reinstalled on a new mobile.

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

#72

Post by justsomeperson »

Reason077 wrote: post #21

If you’re distributing $180m in Bitcoin to 6 million wallets, do you pay transaction fees (currently about $6) once, or 6 million times?

if you send them all as a single transaction i.e one transaction with 6 million outputs, you would pay 1 transaction fee. However I dont think that is what is happening here. All the transactions are likely to made on the lightning network, which is a layer on top of bitcoin, designed to facilitate smaller transactions with lower fees.

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

#74

Post by rocqua »

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,…

It would be interesting if this is indeed the case. With the government not giving salvadorians custodial wallets. That also explains the idea lower down this thread [1]. That stated this might be done so the government can print their own money.

With the SQL database, that would be quite easy. With actual bitcoin wallets (or the lightning network) essentially not doable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628739

p.s. for people wondering what LN is, it is essentially:

Pairs of people agree to split some locked up bitcoin a certain way.

If they want to exchange bitcoin, they agree on a different split.

If someone tries to cheat, Hashed Time-locked contracts (the crypt magic that makes this work) means you get to take all of the locked up bitcoin".

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

#75

Post by rocqua »

celticninja wrote: post #18
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…

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...

Lightning network helps repeated small transactions between the same pair.

However, the first transaction between a specific pair (channel opening) still needs to occur on-chain. That transaction still pays a full fee.

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

#76

Post by rocqua »

tffgg wrote: post #32
celticninja wrote: post #18

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?

There are risks, you need to remain online to catch your counter-party cheating. There are ways to outsource this to so-called watchtowers. This can generally be done privately, and the watchtowers generally get to take at least some of the cheater's money.

I haven't heard of any successful malicious channel theft. I have read quite a few stories of people losing local data making it much harder to recover the money in the channel.

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

#77

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…

I have had a chance to read the article now. I still have some BTC and I have made money from it. I am not looking to make any money back, I can never make a loss. Same for all the people I advised to get into it in 2011/2013.

I am also fortunate and with enough self-awareness to understand that the economy that I operate in is not the same for everyone all over the world. I understand what being un-banked means, I understand the extra costs that come with being poor. I understand that remittances from developed nation to developing nation are a lifeline for many many families. I understand that the traditional ways of sending money to these destinations involve fees as high as 20% or more and doesnt always include the ability to immediately access those funds at the other end. I know that there are unscrupulous Western Union branches/employees that will charge further fees at the receiving end. So whilst it is nice to have a high horse to sit upon, perhaps you could use that perspective to understand that not everyone is in the same position as you. Where you see waste someone else sees financial access, where you see speculation others see utility.

You don't plan for the future because you forsee the downfall of society, so through choice you elect not to plan. Others don't plan for the future because they cant plan further than a week or 2 weeks ahead because the subsist and survive on a day to day basis.

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

#78

Post by chinathrow »

justsomeperson wrote: post #71
chinathrow wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you lose your mobile wallet?

You can restore from a backup surely? Unlike losing a physical wallet, which in most cases, means losing the cash it holds at least, but possibly getting things like your ID returned. If you lose your mobile, you will likely never have it returned, but any funds or accounts you have on it can be reinstalled on a new mobile.

Go tell 6M citiziens to back up their mobile wallet - how exactly is the key here.

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

#79

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

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 literally trying to be this guy as some kind of parody?

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

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

#80

Post by bellyfullofbac »

jl2718 wrote: post #67
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,…

Interesting. So what they are actually building, is a Bitcoin reserve for a central digital currency, replacing USD, SDR, or gold reserves. The trick here is that it is a one-way accumulator. Bitcoin comes into the reserve but never leaves. The initial money may come from existing USD reserves, or it may be undercapitalized fiat Bitcoin. Every currency has a value theory. USD has military hegemony and financial marke…

TBH it's just my speculation, if I wanted to attach my implementation to the hype-train of crypto, that's how I would do it.
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