Live data from Hacker News

El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

nbcnews.com

71–80 of 394 posts

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using lightning wallets. So no on chain settling. No (extra) trees were harmed for hamburgers (though obviously opening and closing of channels and initial mining it self is energy intensive).

Actually, they are not even using lighning wallets. They are using a centralized payment processor that has personal accounts for users, like any other payment app. This centralized processor happens to use lightning wallets in its backend, but there is no 1:1 mapping of payment_account:lightning_wallet. And since Lightning itself doesn't interact with the blockchain except when you open/close payment channels, there…

You have the first part right, but to insinuate that lightning is not using the bitcoin blockchain is entirely wrong. In the case of lightning, the bitcoin blockchain is only used in a dispute over funds. This is how you properly scale a decentralized blockchain.

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using lightning wallets. So no on chain settling. No (extra) trees were harmed for hamburgers (though obviously opening and closing of channels and initial mining it self is energy intensive).

Actually, they are not even using lighning wallets. They are using a centralized payment processor that has personal accounts for users, like any other payment app. This centralized processor happens to use lightning wallets in its backend, but there is no 1:1 mapping of payment_account:lightning_wallet. And since Lightning itself doesn't interact with the blockchain except when you open/close payment channels, there…

I think you are spreading misinformation. Your whole comment is absolutely wrong.

[0]: https://twitter.com/OpenNodeCo/status/1435264127241527306

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#73
post #8

Best part is the President trolling the IMF on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1435263064933285898

Yea, best to troll on Twitter than fix your country that has the literal highest homicide rate in the world. Murder good for Bitcoin?

Fixing crippling poverty a big part of fixing murder. The president thinks that this is their path to leap-frogging into the lead w/ a digital economy and giving people opportunities not linked to drugs and crime.

Is it how I do it? Probably not exactly. But it's disingenuous to say that economic and financial changes are not a piece of fixing social problems like persistent crime.

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please point me to good answers on why proof of work is a reasonable way to run a currency

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Downvoted for snark that doesn't contribute to the discussion. I would like to see less of this on HN.

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#75
post #8

Best part is the President trolling the IMF on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1435263064933285898

Yea, best to troll on Twitter than fix your country that has the literal highest homicide rate in the world. Murder good for Bitcoin?

Good argument. /s

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#76
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what an awful waste of energy. Each bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree. Effectively, each bitcoin transaction is cutting down of tree... in this case, for a hamburger

Nope. Bitcoin use and mining power are completely uncorrelated. By mining bitcoins, your earn as much as the computational fraction you are representing. So, indeed, there was a race to more and more mining power in the recent years but it can completely be reversed. For example if electricity prices rises. Bitcoin could be used by the whole world with mining only happening on a laptop. That would not change anything…

That's not how either Bitcoin or electricity pricing works.

Bitcoin is secure only under the assumption that a 51% attack is computationally difficult, i.e., that it is not cheaper to acquire more mining capacity than the non-malicious miners collectively have (whether by creating a conspiracy of existing miners, or by becoming new miners) than to actually pay whatever transaction you're trying to get away with not paying.

This means two things (which are, in a sense, the same thing in two different directions).

First, Bitcoin needs to have a nontrivial fraction of the world's computational power in order to be secure. If mining happens on a laptop, well, I personally own at least two laptops, so I can easily double-spend coins, making the currency worthless. It doesn't have to be 51% of the world's total computational power, but it has to be enough that nobody can easily and cheaply put together enough additional power to mine false chains at a rate that keeps up with the non-malicious miners.

Second, if it were ever the case that secure mining was happening on a single laptop, that would mean that this one laptop represents a huge portion of humanity's computing power, meaning that, first of all, the fair market value of being able to use this laptop would be incredibly high (both because it needs to be high enough that a double-spend attack isn't profitable, and because of simple supply and demand), and second, there would be a separate moral question of why we're using this laptop to mine Bitcoin instead of, say, powering any of the scientific research (like vaccine development) that now has to happen on TI-83s.

It is technically true that Bitcoin could "work" with mining only happening on a laptop (and probably did "work" in this sense when Satoshi was developing it on his personal laptop), but that's like saying that, say, MD5 is a "secure" hash provided the attacker only has pen and paper. True, but that's not what anyone means by "secure."

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#77
post #16
post #7

Found this interesting deck[1] on El Salvador's digital climate while looking for smart phone adoption statistics. It would appear that there are more than enough smart devices to allow for such a transition successfully. Already on Twitter we're seeing crypto-punks there using Bitcoin to pay for their McDonalds, paying something like 0.000002 Bitcoin. I can't help but wonder what the outcome +1 year / + 5 years will…

what an awful waste of energy. Each bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree. Effectively, each bitcoin transaction is cutting down of tree... in this case, for a hamburger

I think awful is how the banks of the developed world are earning money with the poorest. The fees for remitance make up for a large portion of the el salvadors GDP. The developed world is responsible for climate change, so I guess the poorest have their right to use their money how they want and not in the way some banks or you consider it.

The impact of the lightning network on energy consumption is even neglible...

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorand is not proof of work. Its a variation of PoS with very interesting use of VRF functions.

More than a year after its smart contract introduction devs have still failed to create a single DEX (let alone something more complex) there despite trying. The one Algo were hyping about having a dex last October (idex i believe) have quietly removed mentions of Algo on their site after failing despite all the PR. This should tell you how good of a choice Algo is for anything. There's plenty other promising POS cha…

True. They never had any good growth strategy anyway. Also there is no good plan to keep the ledger size sane. Like I mentioned, their consensus algo is innovative the execution beyond that is lacking because there wasn't any organic growth happening.

Re: El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

#80
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "problems" you've listed have been very clearly debated for the past 5 years. You can find answers. Youre just repeating talking points.

Please point me to good answers on why proof of work is a reasonable way to run a currency

Well, it's the only way to run a trustless currency that has been tested at scale. I dislike energy waste as much as anyone else, but that's the current state of things. We will eventually move past this phase with PoS or something, but all the approaches are still in their infancy.
Post reply on HN