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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

#381

Post by topranks »

simiones wrote: post #379
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what the lightning network is? It changes all of these relationships, and it is key to what we are talking about, but you didnt mention it in this comment. Separately to the lightning network, the security (hashrate, energy usage) is still not directly linked to the number of on-chain transactions that are processed. You can compute "a practical energy/block" specifically for bitcoin but it does not trans…

What do off-chain transactions like Lightning have to do with the transaction costs of the blockchain itself? We can trade bitcoin over HN comments, that doesn't mean that the bitcoin blockchain is involved in our trade. The whole discussion is about the Bitcoin blockchain itself. Altcoins, lightning, payment apps etc are all entirely irrelevant to this point. The bitcoin blockchain as it exists today has a pretty we…

I hear where you are coming from.

But changing the blocksize is just a software change. It doesn't require outlay on a "bigger engine", or any new engineering. The "existing bitcoin network" could switch to it with a 1 line change in the code.

So it's not quite the same as some of your examples.

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

#382

Post by topranks »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #263
bethecloud wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't the security of the blockchain fundamentally tied to the mining difficultly? I don't see how you could significantly reduce the energy usage without sacrificing security (unless you make structural changes such as moving to POS)

You could reduce the energy use per-transaction if the block size limit was increased.

That's not gonna happen at this stage however.

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

#383

Post by Geee »

Devasta wrote: post #319
Geee wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such an ignorant comment. There are hundreds of millions Bitcoin users globally, and only a very small fraction of them are criminals of any kind. And let's ignore the actual criminals who legally counterfeit US dollars to finance war all around the world.

Hundreds of millions in possession of bitcoin maybe, but the number using it for any legitimate purpose is a miniscule fraction of that. The vast majority are in it under the assumption that bigger rubes will come along later to buy it off them.

Possession is a legitimate purpose. The primary function of money is to be a store of wealth. Medium of exchange and unit of account are secondary.

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

#384

Post by yebyen »

el-salvador wrote: post #322
yebyen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

From a screenshot I earlier today, McD El Salvador is using Opennode.com for Bitcoin payments.

I'm hearing reports (unsubstantiated, but reports) that Chivo is built on "a partition" of lightning and that it will be difficult for people who want to get their money out.

I don't know enough about lightning to dispute it, but it would seem these reports about Opennode and McDonalds are in conflict with those reports. Do you have any local color or stories to add? I'm interested in what they actually are technically doing, I didn't know that Lightning could be "partitioned" but my Technical Spanish is rusty.

Are there any controls that would prevent folks from using Chivo to spend their $30 literally anywhere they wanted, in as much as there is a Bitcoin receiving address for them? (If I opened it up to "all lightning-capable nodes" would that change the story? I understand little in spite of knowing lots about Bitcoin and friends, something something, needs to be a route/path from one node to another?)

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

#385

Post by topranks »

bee_rider wrote: post #325
throwdecro wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean one tourist buying everything (which would be problematic no matter what the currency was), I meant in the aggregate. I've added an edit to my comment to clarify.

Bitcoins are currently at $45k, so I guess this would mostly just be an issue at a luxury car place, which... should probably prepare to handle these types of transactions I guess. But that's not like Grandpa's Little Old General Store, so I bet they can handle it. I'm actually curious how this will be implemented specifically. I guess (although I'm not well-informed on the ecosystem) that most of the places that let…

Bitcoin was always designed to allow fractions of 1 coin.

Its fundamental unit it the "Satoshi", of which there are 100 million in a "Bitcoin".

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

#386

Post by topranks »

carnitine wrote: post #90
throwdecro wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn’t the grandparent comment explain that in such a case, legal tender doesn’t apply? There’s no debt in a normal shopping transaction, the shopkeeper is free to accept whatever they wish or reject the transaction entirely.

The law is here:

https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1402446890466217985

Art. 7 states "Every economic agent must accept bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service".

So it goes beyond merely saying it's "legal tender".

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

#387

Post by lottin »

topranks wrote: post #380
lottin wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Securing the blockchain and processing transactions is the same thing. What do you think "securing the blockchain" entails other than processing transactions?

The point is the number of transactions in a block could vary, and not require additional hashpower. Obviously it's limited now by the blocksize (let's not go there). But the point is the "per transaction" figure is based on the currently imposed limits.

Okay, but this has nothing to do with the fact that miners do one job, and this job is processing transactions. They don't have another job that consists in "securing the network", in addition to processing transactions. Therefore the entirety of the energy spent by miners is spent processing transactions.

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

#388

Post by Devasta »

Geee wrote: post #383
Devasta wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of millions in possession of bitcoin maybe, but the number using it for any legitimate purpose is a miniscule fraction of that. The vast majority are in it under the assumption that bigger rubes will come along later to buy it off them.

Possession is a legitimate purpose. The primary function of money is to be a store of wealth. Medium of exchange and unit of account are secondary.

Even if we pretend that's true for the moment, it's also a shitty store of wealth, being propped up by a never ending supply of totally-backed-by-USD tether.

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

#389

Post by NicoJuicy »

thesmok wrote: post #370
NicoJuicy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0 currently. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1435197879795212291?r... Also. Lightning network can give unreliable transaction costs ( eg. When sending to an unknown wallet) It's weird that everyone is supporting an off chain solution. It kinda defeats the purpose of Bitcoin in general.

It depends on what you think the purpose of Bitcoin is. In my mind Bitcoin is digital gold. It's not really convenient to pay for McDo in gold, so I would hold my gold in a bank and pay with fractions of my gold certificates. If I want, I can go to the bank and exchange my certificates for the actual bullions.

I look at it as the first implementation of the Blockchain.

While Blockchain can be valuable, Bitcoin is not.

Note : i did hold btc until late 2017.

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

#390

Post by ridethebike »

danlugo92 wrote: post #168
ridethebike wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> privacy From the original bitcoin white paper: > The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. Salvadorians can transfer…

Ok, good points
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