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

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

#91

Post by Tenoke »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #87
Tenoke wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Solana would be a much better choice IMO. They already have Saber and Serum.

And raydium which is the 4th biggest DEX in crypto[0].

Yes, from those I follow Solana would also be my choice if I had to bet because they are already at/close to the point where they can have high tps, low fees, POS, and still be decentralized (more work on that end is needed but now they are nearing 1k validators). They also have built their chain in 2 years which is barely enough time to implement minor changes for competitors. Additionally, they just got the hype/huge investments so they have the users and attention, too.

0. https://www.coingecko.com/en/dex

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

#92

Post by atlacatl_sv »

yep, That's why protests are taking place in El Salvador. We have also uncovered some security holes.

https://twitter.com/Rchr2M/status/1435236141112905732 https://twitter.com/david_a_garcia/status/143525911196544614...

Protests:

https://twitter.com/OscarMachon/status/1435272669189087236

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

#93

Post by ridethebike »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #27
aazaa wrote: post #22

> To warm up a skeptical public, Bukele has promised every citizen $30 in bitcoin if they sign up for a government digital wallet. Ahead of the launch, El Salvador bought 400 bitcoins, Bukele said, helping drive the currency price above $52,000 for the first time since May. > In the early hours of Tuesday the wallet had not appeared on Apple Inc., Google and Huawei’s app download platforms, however, prompting a serie…

I’d be skeptical about using a government wallet as well, though it could potentially make initial disbursements easier.

This probably eliminates this whole "bitcoin is privacy and independence from government" thing but I think for majority of bitcoin buyers it was not more than just a nice talking point anyway.

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

#94

Post by kobieyc »

aazaa wrote: post #22

> To warm up a skeptical public, Bukele has promised every citizen $30 in bitcoin if they sign up for a government digital wallet. Ahead of the launch, El Salvador bought 400 bitcoins, Bukele said, helping drive the currency price above $52,000 for the first time since May. > In the early hours of Tuesday the wallet had not appeared on Apple Inc., Google and Huawei’s app download platforms, however, prompting a serie…

I've been watching this situation from 50K feet and I think the reason they built their own wallet is for the ability, for merchants, to cash out any bitcoin payment in USD instead of BTC using the government swap system

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

#95

Post by yebyen »

m00dy wrote: post #72
simiones wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Chivo wallet, the official standard and the new national wallet of El Salvador, evidently has an interface with Lightning and the Bitcoin network, and it is an optional way for merchants and consumers in El Salvador to begin accepting payments denominated in Bitcoin or USD.

Nobody is required to use Chivo, but people are required to accept legal tender. There's no reason to expect that Chivo-Chivo transfers will go to the trouble of opening individual lightning channels for each user, which costs non trivial amounts of money for each opened and closed channel.

It would make sense that users of the app can settle with each other and it doesn't so much as escape the four walls of a database at Chivo-HQ. But McDonalds is a multi-national enterprise and won't be trusting Chivo (or any El-Salvador official banking infra, I'd assume) to manage their wallets.

It is really cool to see a (hopefully) successful application of Lightning on Bitcoin in the wild, from a person who has been nay-saying about Lightning. I will be really glad to see it succeed. But I'm dubious about the success of this app.

One should hope the two successes are not tied to each other – it's encouraging that there are other companies. I have no way to judge Chivo and I've never used their software, but I have little trust of governments to implement complex systems well, and if there ever was a case study of a burgeoningly complex system, I think Lightning and Bitcoin is the big one.

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

#96

Post by Godel_unicode »

aazaa wrote: post #22

> To warm up a skeptical public, Bukele has promised every citizen $30 in bitcoin if they sign up for a government digital wallet. Ahead of the launch, El Salvador bought 400 bitcoins, Bukele said, helping drive the currency price above $52,000 for the first time since May. > In the early hours of Tuesday the wallet had not appeared on Apple Inc., Google and Huawei’s app download platforms, however, prompting a serie…

The government is going to have to make an official recommendation for which wallet to use, and from their perspective the risk of promoting an existing wallet whose provenance they don't know is pretty high.

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

#97

Post by emersonrsantos »

remir wrote: post #14

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…

Celo is a proof-of-stake blockchain.

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

#98

Post by Tenoke »

gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #88
Tenoke wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

is it because of programming difficulties with their runtime (non-turing complete?), bugs in their runtime, or just no one interested in programming on their platform?

I believe the first (incomplete implementation). There's definitely plenty that tried (with money behind them). I hear that with some changes to the chain it might be feasible soon (there are some demos on their testnet, none on mainnet) but I've stopped following them much.

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

#100

Post by OscarCunningham »

liuliu wrote: post #70

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…

In what sense do you mean that the dollar is cheaper than bitcoin? Surely it doesn't mean anything to say that one currency is cheaper than another, since the exchange rate is what it is.

I would predict that people prefer dollars to bitcoins, since they are less volatile.

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