81–90 of 394 posts
An authoritarian banana republic is pretty much the only place where something like this would happen : https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/05/21/us-can-stop-el-salvadors...
Generally speaking banana republic is an offensive term to those living the states you’re referring to.
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> prompt the USA to import more products from El Salvador to reduce the size of the remittances sector and thereby lessen the reason people use Bitcoin Who in America would benefit from fighting this? Crypto is a real industry. It’s more profitable for the financial sector than similar activity in U.S. dollars. And the Fed doesn’t thoroughly love that it has to take international factors into account when its politic…
> Crypto is a real industry. Not really. An industry produces goods and services. What does crypto produce?
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?
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/03/el-salvador-homicide-hi...
Why go with Bitcoin specifically? Why not use the Celo blockchain or Algorand instead and create their own stable coins on there? Both these networks are proof of work, transactions are very fast and cheap as well. Bitcoin is slow to validate transactions, is environmentally costly, and its value fluctuate, so I'm not sure what they were thinking. I wonder what the 30$ they receive from the gov is worth today after t…
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> Bitcoin could be used by the whole world with mining only happening on a laptop. That would not change anything for Bitcoin users. No, that is completely inaccurate. First of all, with current parameters that would mean that you need a good few hundred years to process a few seconds of world-wide transactions. And if the parameters were adjusted such that it would be that easy to mine blocks, bitcoin would become v…
>First of all, with current parameters that would mean that you need a good few hundred years to process a few seconds of world-wide transactions. Completely wrong. Go run a testnet yourself and you will see. >And if the parameters were adjusted such that it would be that easy to mine blocks, bitcoin would become valueless, as everyone with a laptop could produce their own longest blockchain where they have half of a…
If you imagine that a laptop has enough hashrate to mine all the world's transactions in realtime, then how do you explain to yourself that the actual Bitcoin network is only able to add a few hundred transactions per second to the chain?
> The difficulty adjusts automatically. The energy usage comes only from the competition aspect - people are competing to earn blocks. You are lacking basic understanding of how PoW functions.
PoW works because miners have to invest significant resources in building and maintaining their mining rigs. As such, no one who wins the race to add a new block will want that block to contain false transactions, as that would bring down the value of the currency and leave them with extremely expensive mining equipment that is useless (once the deception would be noticed by others).
If the bitcoin network was run on 3 laptops, I could buy 100 laptops and start advertising my own blockchain which reverts the entire previous blockchain and replaces it with transactions I like. Since I can mine many more blocks with my 100 laptops, I can create a longer chain, so all clients will accept my chain and discard the old one, reverting all transactions that ever happened.
Instead, if I wanted to mount such an attack on the actual bitcoin network today, I would have to spend billions of dollars on equipment and electricity - ensuring that I wouldn't want to do so.
It’s amazing how countries are wholeheartedly adopting this thing as an official currency that we have no idea who invented and for what purpose. I mean sure, there’s a white paper that says why it was invented, but why should anyone believe it? If it does turn out to be malicious it’s going to make for one hell of a cautionary tale.
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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…
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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…
Because they have both Dollar and Bitcoin as legal tender, the result is unclear. In theory, because USD is still cheaper (if Bitcoin is supplied constrained as it is promised), people will trade with USD and hoard Bitcoin. However, when crossing borders, USD is more cumbersome to move around, that may deter people to import products with "cheap" USD. It would be very interesting to observe, whether they will eventua…
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In El Salvador it means an obligation to accept it. Which is good for bitcoin adoption but does reduce people's freedom to refuse it
I'm envisioning a lot of dirty looks from paper cash-preferring shopkeepers to crypto tourists when the tourists buy up all shop's inventory and leave the shopkeeper with just a few numbers in some app. EDIT: To be clear, I mean tourists each individually buying a normal amount of things using BTC, which adds up to the store exchanging it's inventory for a number in the app.