101–110 of 930 posts
They have made just over 300 Million off the initial BTC purchase, and as of 15 minutes ago, continue to buy BTC everyday. They even have their own tracker, https://bitcoin.gob.sv/
It's interesting and nice to see how progressive and creative El Salvador has been. Some failures are perfectly understandable when one is willing to try new things. Their approach to crime is another thing that comes to mind that was lambasted and ridiculed by the "international community" and "experts". Yet in the space of a single decade they went from murder capital of the world to safer than New Zealand (in term…
Alright so let's have a look at these progressive/creative approaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_El_Salvador
(a) Mass arrests of anyone who merely had a gang tattoo, (b) Jailing of children, (c) Security cameras everywhere, (d) Inhumane treatment of prisoners.
Trashing human rights is always effective but hardly creative nor progressive.
Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. If king for the day with a sovereign wealth fund I wouldn't forbid investment choices like this on risk grounds, I mean you need risk assets as well as boring ones, right? But I have problems with the moral quality: it's like state investing in the casino business. Monaco? works fine. Anywhere else? It's got problems. Like a lot of people, I probabl…
Trump Calls for Wealth Fund in Executive Order https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/sovereign-wea...
It's interesting and nice to see how progressive and creative El Salvador has been. Some failures are perfectly understandable when one is willing to try new things. Their approach to crime is another thing that comes to mind that was lambasted and ridiculed by the "international community" and "experts". Yet in the space of a single decade they went from murder capital of the world to safer than New Zealand (in term…
That's heavy editorializing: El Salvador keeps buying the Bitcoin for its strategic reserve. Businesses and citizens can keep using it. But for getting an IMF loan, IMF (which, to put it mildly, doesn't like Bitcoin) required the end to Bitcoin legal tender status. Now the businesses are free to accept it or not instead of being required to accept it. That's all. The government plans to keep buying and using it.
The other concept is that it is a good medium of exchange. I think that is not so true because 1) its neither cheap nor easy to buy a lot of things with it 2) a thing that goes up in value is not a good medium of exchange because people don't want to spend it, they want to hoard it.
If you accept that BTC is a reasonable investment, but not a great medium of exchange then what is happening makes sense.
I am not saying that a decentralized token couldn't be a good medium of exchange -- honestly I don't know. But so far BTC is not that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > Salvadorans, with the exception of a few, never embraced Bukele’s initiative, who enjoys enormous popularity for his war against gangs, which dropped homicides to historic lows in El Salvador. A recent survey by the Central American University (UCA) revealed that 92% of Salvadorans did not use bitcoin in their transactions in 2024. I would say this points to an actual failed experiment, if true.
8% is quite a lot though.
In a place where people (who have on average very low incomes) were given $30 worth of bitcoin by their government just for signing up to a wallet app, so a very, very large proportion of the populous (compared to any other country on Earth) already had an app and wallet set up and ready to go. That's not a lot. That's a clear indication that the experiment simply didn't work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly because transferring BTC is very expensive. Every time I’ve done it I’m shocked at the fees that sites like Bitbuy requires. So if you’re going to do it then it has to be for a good reason.
This is fascinating to me because we were told 15 years ago (ish) that one of the main things that made crypto special (besides it being guaranteed finite unlike fiat) was that unlike say, Visa, it would be economic to use, even for small transactions, because The Big Banks wouldn't take their ~3% cut of every transaction. We all assumed that cut was determined by greed, but if Bitcoin is expensive to transact in now…
Technically cryptocurrencies were meant to be held and exchanged directly, without an exchange.
Of course that isn’t convenient for non-enthusiasts…
How fortunate we are that crypto exchanges, run by private companies with little government regulation, operate out of the goodness of their heart /s…
Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. If king for the day with a sovereign wealth fund I wouldn't forbid investment choices like this on risk grounds, I mean you need risk assets as well as boring ones, right? But I have problems with the moral quality: it's like state investing in the casino business. Monaco? works fine. Anywhere else? It's got problems. Like a lot of people, I probabl…
> sovereign wealth fund That reminds me of Hong Kong, where I used to live and which maintains a large sovereign wealth fund to ensure its currency is pegged to the US dollar. While various US think tanks ranked it well on their checklists of "economic freedom", they tended to gloss over the rest of the recipe that made it work. Not just the huge sovereign wealth fund, but also how half the housing is government-run…
That doesn't sound like a soverign wealth fund. Foreign currency reserves are not the same thing as a soverign weath fund.
It's interesting and nice to see how progressive and creative El Salvador has been. Some failures are perfectly understandable when one is willing to try new things. Their approach to crime is another thing that comes to mind that was lambasted and ridiculed by the "international community" and "experts". Yet in the space of a single decade they went from murder capital of the world to safer than New Zealand (in term…
Regardless of whether you think of them as successful or failed, I don't think you can see El Salvador's policies as "progressive".
I don't particularly like BTC (as it senselessly burns huge amounts of energy, thereby actively contributing to the destruction of our biosphere), but this news post is intentionally misleading. As reported by many other outlets (e.g. [1,2]), El Salvador abandons BTC to qualify for an IMF loan - so the IMF is pressuring them towards this move (presumably for political reasons). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/el-s…
What were Bukele's goals with his policy of adopting bitcoin?