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Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

bitcoinmagazine.com

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Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#71

Post by pjc50 »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #11
themodelplumber wrote: post #3

Went diving for the lede and gave up somewhere near the wreck of the titanic. Maybe I scrolled right past but wow that was a lot of extra context.

The bitcoin part of the piece is based on interviews with 3 people: 1. supposedly buys bitcoin with the funny money the article complains about, leaves unclear where her disposable income comes from and also how people get bitcoin and why they want funny money if they have bitcoin 2. estimates there are hundreds of thousands of bitcoin users in cuba, people get bitcoin sent by family abroad, businesses which want to…

> this guy uses bitcoin as an uber eats

This is the famous 10k BTC pizza again, isn't it?

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#72

Post by otherme123 »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #52
lefrenchy wrote: post #2

I think removing embargos would help more than a volatile cryptocurrency.

That embargo is always such a mystery to me. Why on earth is it still in place in 2021? Is it because no US politician want to submit a motion for it to be repealed? Or is there a powerful anti-Cuba lobby keeping it there? So much misery can be lifted with little effort by so few, yet here we are.

The embargo has no mistery. You can be pro or against it (I'm against), but it has solid bases. Current regime stole/seized/expropiate a lot of USA business assets in Cuba in 1960 (valued today around $6 billion), so it's USA right to embargo the country. Given the economical assymetry, USA can keep the embargo forever without consequences.

Some countries were in the same position as USA of assets seized by the regime, but they accepted symbolic paybacks. USA didn't, probably because they didn't like Cuba destabilizing the Caribean region in the Cold War. At the time, they probably believed that the embargo will damage Cuba regime and cause a quick coup, nobody thought that the regime will survive more than a decade.

Through time this has become a political matter (softening the embargo loses votes in USA, specially in Florida; paying back would expose the regime failure in Cuba when the boogeyman is gone), so both sides at political level are very interested in mantaining the embargo. I tend to see politics as a game of staying in power as long as possible, and here we have a Nash equilibrium where trying to end the embargo goes against both parts. Some people believes (I do) that the embargo helps the regime.

There's no "anti-Cuba" lobby: there's a "anti-Castro lobby". Sadly, this lobby believes in the embargo, and sees its lifting as a weak position against Castro regime.

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#74

Post by mdp2021 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #64
choeger wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It slowly bleeds the countrie's economy dry. I witnessed the problem first hand when visiting Cuba: Rented a car and a driver for a private tour of Havanna and the driver was absolutely fluent in English. Like, better then me, close to native speaker, with only a slight accent. So I was complimenting him and asked, where he learned it. I was expecting something like really good language courses, because the typical C…

What's the difference between that story and the tons of smart people trying to create dark patterns to trick people into clicking ads instead of researching and developing great things?

The "contempt for efficiency" disaster also has other sides: all the time you lose to navigate into what should have been done properly in the first place.

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#75

Post by bawolff »

jbverschoor wrote: post #64
choeger wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It slowly bleeds the countrie's economy dry. I witnessed the problem first hand when visiting Cuba: Rented a car and a driver for a private tour of Havanna and the driver was absolutely fluent in English. Like, better then me, close to native speaker, with only a slight accent. So I was complimenting him and asked, where he learned it. I was expecting something like really good language courses, because the typical C…

What's the difference between that story and the tons of smart people trying to create dark patterns to trick people into clicking ads instead of researching and developing great things?

Most people consider smart people diverted to creating dark patterns, to be a bad thing. OP clearly thinks the tourist-dual ecconomy thing in Cuba is bad (for cuba as a whole).

So why should there be a difference? If person A says X is bad, and person B says Y is the same as X, and everyone thinks Y is also bad, where is the contradiction? Its not like there can only be one bad thing in the world.

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#76

Post by arcticbull »

stale2002 wrote: post #68
arcticbull wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father is an anesthesiologist in Canada and my mother an audiologist, so my position isn't exactly arms-length [edit] and my father has always been very opinionated about the role of the public service within a civil society - before the Alzheimers anyways. I agree with you that they aren't paid the same, just that the band is tighter than in the US. Canadian doctors get paid a good deal less than American doctors…

> Unless you pay them both an upper middle class wage ;) Feel free to give an example of an actual major country that does that then. If you can't think of such a real life example, then maybe that is your answer as for why this does not work. As someone who lives in America, I am more than supportive of Canada spending all of their money, overpaying their trash collectors. That way, Canada can get their trash collec…

This is quite an incomplete analysis.

First off, neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in supporting immigration into America. The last major immigration tightening was Clinton with the IIRAIRA and the last amnesty was under Reagan. Since then, neither side has been interested in bringing more legal immigrants to the US. After all, the Biden administration is about to allow 100,000 green cards to expire unprocessed and disappear into the aether. At least Donny was honest about it.

> As someone who lives in America, I am more than supportive of Canada spending all of their money, overpaying their trash collectors.

I also live in America, and I am not saying anyone's overpaying trash collectors.

> That way, Canada can get their trash collections, and we in America can get their engineers.

And yet this is only part of the story.

> That way we can poach your high value citizens who are overtaxed.

The lowest tax rate in the US/CA is Alberta and the highest is Quebec. The rest of the US and Canada exist in between these two Canadian provinces. If you factor in health care, basically all of Canada costs less to live in than America for the average individual. YMMV of course.

However, saying Canadians on the whole are "overtaxed" is an indication you haven't given an honest look at what the rest of the western world looks like outside of the US.

As I've been saying, that's only part of the equation. Folks don't move to the US to evade taxes lol - Silicon Valley is among the highest taxed places on earth but still attracts the world's best talent. It's not about the taxes - it never has been. Some small tax break isn't going to get me to leave the Bay Area. I'm confident my opportunity here will outperform the delta. Until that opportunity no longer exists, then I will leave without looking back.

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#77

Post by phreeza »

jbverschoor wrote: post #64
choeger wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It slowly bleeds the countrie's economy dry. I witnessed the problem first hand when visiting Cuba: Rented a car and a driver for a private tour of Havanna and the driver was absolutely fluent in English. Like, better then me, close to native speaker, with only a slight accent. So I was complimenting him and asked, where he learned it. I was expecting something like really good language courses, because the typical C…

What's the difference between that story and the tons of smart people trying to create dark patterns to trick people into clicking ads instead of researching and developing great things?

Pulling a chair onto the beach for someone actually has value?

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#78

Post by mschuster91 »

jmstfv wrote: post #33
arcticbull wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A volatile currency with direct transaction fees ranging from $0.05-60 [edited per FreeRadical - thanks!] and indirect transaction fees of roughly $90 (socialized block reward). Whose value dropped 50% in a month then went up 50% in a month (which of course still leaves it 25% below its near-term highs). I don't think even the Cuban Peso performs like that. Think about both of those in terms of the average salary of…

> A volatile currency with direct transaction fees ranging from $0.05-60 [edited per FreeRadical - thanks!] You don't need to transact on-chain (i.e. settlement layer). There's a lightning network, where transactions are instantaneous, and fees are a few satoshis. It's amusing how most Bitcoin critics focus on on-chain fees and pretend that lightning doesn't exist. > And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the wo…

> It was the China FUD

It's not just FUD. It's been known for long that a lot of the Chinese interest in crypto is nothing more than evasions of China's capital export controls (see e.g. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3098981/c...).

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#79

Post by phreeza »

I remember reading stories about the great cuban sneakernet where people got all kinds of tv shows, etc, with quite low latency, all without internet access through USB sticks. I wonder if there is a way to run something similar to a cryptocurrency on such a "network".

Re: Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

#80

Post by copirate »

arcticbull wrote: post #37
jmstfv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A volatile currency with direct transaction fees ranging from $0.05-60 [edited per FreeRadical - thanks!] You don't need to transact on-chain (i.e. settlement layer). There's a lightning network, where transactions are instantaneous, and fees are a few satoshis. It's amusing how most Bitcoin critics focus on on-chain fees and pretend that lightning doesn't exist. > And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the wo…

> You don't need to transact on-chain (i.e. settlement layer). You can use a lightning network, where transactions are instantaneous, and fees are a few satoshis. Sure, however LN is not sufficient because it requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel. To open a channel for everyone on earth would cost up to a third of a trillion dollars and take over 75 years, plus or minus deaths and births. Like getting a…

> To open a channel for everyone on earth would cost up to a third of a trillion dollars and take over 75 years

Not with the upcoming[1] "channel factories"[2].

[1] http://anyprevout.xyz/

[2] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-c...

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