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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

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261–270 of 930 posts

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't really own land, you just rent it for a very long term from the government. This is probably economically a good idea, absent something like georgist land taxes. It eliminates some or all of the incentive to speculate in land, which is of course the whole problem El Salvador ran into with bitcoin as currency.

Economically, communism is a great idea. In practice, you get "collectivization" in the Soviet Union that basically starves millions to death

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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#262
post #157
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kowloon Walled City ended because it was attacked by the state, rather than through market forces. Many of those people are now likely in worse shape effectively renting a cage sized bed, but now paying the governments cut on top of whatever black market shenanigans goes on in both the slum housing and kowloon.

Kowloon Walled City was neither a dystopia nor a utopia. It works and was able to maintain itself, but it could have been done better if it was actually supported by the government.

That's "just" a bug-feature of common law systems

>The Kowloon Walled City was exempt and remained under the control of Qing China.

https://www.thecollector.com/kowloon-walled-city-lawlessness...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_leases_in_Hong_Kong#V...

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#264
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What currency is stable in value? Certainly not the U.S. dollar.

The USD doesn't frequently lose all or nearly all value as we see from cryptocoins. My $10 today will be worth $10 tomorrow barring nuclear war or an apocalypse.

And anything beyond 3m you put into real estate, stocks, or bonds anyway. Real rates have mostly been positive; and if not, that's the result of an economy wide equilibrium process that can't be undone risklessly by some magic beans.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.

It’s being “used” as a speculative asset. That’s not a firm foundation to run a governmental monetary system on. Maybe there are other cryptocurrencies better suited to the task, but BTC isn’t

Governmental monetary systems are usually founded on hopes and prayers (and military might).

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#266
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dare you to come up with a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets. They probably don't exist: "billionaries" are worth billions on paper, thanks to stocks, investments, real estate holdings, etc. All in all, billionaires are a bad example of holding legal tender, because that just doesn't happen.

"I dare you to come up with a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets." royal family kingdom of saudi arabia

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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#267
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive success actually for anyone holding. Did you forget the price is $100k?

What does that mean? USD value decreased that much and bitcoin proved itself as an asset with tangible value (like gold?), or did value of bitcoin itself rise? I’m not a currency guy, so I don’t pretend to know crap, it’s a real question, not rhetorical.

It means that if you bought under $100k, you are no longer the biggest fool. Bitcoin is completely unworkable as an everyday currency and this this is due to multiple factors. Any attempt to address these shortcomings ends up slowly[0] re-inventing the modern financial system and its various systems of trust. People who try to convince you otherwise are simply in search of a bigger fool, since they bring up the USD value of bitcoin.

[0]: but also too quickly, hence all the breaches and 8-figure heists

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…

Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.

Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#269
post #89
post #24

While it is true that adoption remained relatively low, the reason why they abandoned it is that the IMF made it a condition for the Salvadorian government to be able to receive a 1.4B loan.

Why did they need the loan so bad they had to change their currency?

They didn't, the IMF just offers better terms than the free market. And they are still doing their Bitcoin thing, this was just a small concession they were willing to make.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#270
post #256
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. No liberal capitalist economy has ever had a famine. By contrast, most communist economies have created major famines, and history's largest famines have all been created by communist economies, outdoing even colonialism in their death tolls. These are well-known historical facts.

To save some time, can you define the True Scotsman here? Would the US in the 1920s count as a liberal capitalistic country for example? England in the 1860s?

Yes, and yes, which is one reason that, as it turns out, neither the US in the 01920s nor England in the 01860s experienced the famines that affected some other parts of the world at the same time. (In the 01920s Russia was experiencing its first famine that could reasonably be attributed to communism, and in the 01860s Sweden and Finland were experiencing their last famines before their transitions to capitalism.) But not, for example, Ireland in the 01840s and 01850s; that was neither, being colonialist and agricultural.

Nobody starved to death in "famines" like the so-called Lancashire Cotton Famine. By contrast, in the Finnish famine starting the next year, almost 10% of the population of Finland died. As it turns out, that was the last famine in Finland because it became capitalist over the following decades.

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