Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 145 posts

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#101

Post by nly »

timdaub wrote: post #94
nly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is the assumption that deems BTC's intrinsic value zero and land's value more than zero? For me the easiest way to determine if something has intrinsic value is ask yourself what would happen if you owned all of it (and couldn't be forced to give it up). If you owned all the Bitcoin in the world, we wouldn't accept its use, and would just create another currency with identical properties. If you owned…

That's a rather theoretical argument. If you were the sole owner of the world's land, then people would probably resort to kill or capture you to redistribute the land.

It's a thought experiment. Imagine you're trying to prove the relationship between your personal savings rate, and the date at which you can retire.

- If I save 100% of my money now, I can retire now (because clearly I don't need money to live).

- If I save 0% of my money now, I will never be able to retire (because I'll have none when I forfeit my income).

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#102

Post by el-salvador »

Hamuko wrote: post #93
el-salvador wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* US $30 a month for 20/30Mbps in cities. * Wireless data can be spotty in rural areas due to many hills and mountains. We would need an MVNO for rural areas coverage, as it wouldn't be cost effective for the four mobile networks to place a tower in every rural corner. * Wireless coverage in cities was limited/overloaded for about 5 years due to lack of new frequencies. This was a regulatory issue fixed about 2 years…

Doesn't sound great. I assume that cash is still king, especially in rural areas?

The informal system (50% of the workforce) is mostly cash based, while those who have 'formal' jobs get paid in bank accounts which usually include debit cards.

Payment in food stalls and small businnesses is mostly cash.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#103

Post by timdaub »

nly wrote: post #101
timdaub wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather theoretical argument. If you were the sole owner of the world's land, then people would probably resort to kill or capture you to redistribute the land.

It's a thought experiment. Imagine you're trying to prove the relationship between your personal savings rate, and the date at which you can retire. - If I save 100% of my money now, I can retire now (because clearly I don't need money to live). - If I save 0% of my money now, I will never be able to retire (because I'll have none when I forfeit my income).

Again, I think this is a rather theorerical argument.

Retirement is not solely coupled to the amount of money you have. I personally have aspirations and enough money to not having to work for a few years. And still I work lots of hours to achieve certain goals that have nothing to do with increasing my money.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#104

Post by sschueller »

FreeTrade wrote: post #18

Sigh. Bitcoin BTC, at 3 transactions per second, doesn't have the capacity to support El Salvador's economy. Even if Lightning worked (it doesn't), BTC doesn't have enough capacity to open channels for users at a reasonable cost. Salvadorians will end up forced to use proprietary payment networks denominated in BTC. BTC is not cash anymore, it won't work as such. There are other cryptos that could work, we'll have to…

If BTC is legal tender, why wouldn't BCH also be?

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#105

Post by whiskyant »

FreeTrade wrote: post #18

Sigh. Bitcoin BTC, at 3 transactions per second, doesn't have the capacity to support El Salvador's economy. Even if Lightning worked (it doesn't), BTC doesn't have enough capacity to open channels for users at a reasonable cost. Salvadorians will end up forced to use proprietary payment networks denominated in BTC. BTC is not cash anymore, it won't work as such. There are other cryptos that could work, we'll have to…

So why doesn't Lightning work exactly? Jack Mallers who convinced El Savador's president to make Bitcoin legal tender works on Lightning app.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#106

Post by pinkybanana »

BreakfastB0b wrote: post #55
dangero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget Lightning— Did you know you can transfer Bitcoin from one user to another on Coinbase with zero transaction fees instantly? Any exchange can do the same. Centralized layer two scales just fine for many use cases and is working today.

This is the dumbest thing I've ever read. So you designed a system that sacrifices everything to achieve trustlessness, and then you immediately reintroduce a centralised trusted entity. You can't make this shit up. I'm so glad I left the crypto community in 2014, it's become completely deranged.

It is not dumb. Custodians are useful, very useful actually. With Bitcoin you can use custodians, but you can also host your bitcoins yourself if you want. The opportunity to do latter is the most important and makes Bitcoin valuable. However majority people in majority of cases prefer to use custodians, and there is nothign wrong with that.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#107

Post by whiskyant »

justblaze23 wrote: post #61
FreeTrade wrote: post #18

Sigh. Bitcoin BTC, at 3 transactions per second, doesn't have the capacity to support El Salvador's economy. Even if Lightning worked (it doesn't), BTC doesn't have enough capacity to open channels for users at a reasonable cost. Salvadorians will end up forced to use proprietary payment networks denominated in BTC. BTC is not cash anymore, it won't work as such. There are other cryptos that could work, we'll have to…

Yes. Unfortunately Bitcoin is not the ideal solution here. What would be the ideal solution is something like nano.org, fast transaction settlement, no fees and good UX through their community wallets. Alternatives like XLM, SOL, ATOM could also be an option.

Too bad all those solutions aren't truly decentralized.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#108

Post by occamrazor »

darkwater wrote: post #53
pinkybanana wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as BTC transfers between custodians are possible, that should be quite small problem. There might be winner in terms of liquidity and volume, but because anyone can quite easily fire up custodian service, there should be also plenty of competition.

So we have basically invented... banks, but with bitcoins?

Yes. Financial institutions are useful for fiat and non-fiat currencies, in fact they were born long before fiat currency.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#109

Post by whiskyant »

nly wrote: post #52
timdaub wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intrinsic value argument is a funny one. What's the idea behind it? Assume you have asset X but then one key assmption fails. Now, is asset X still valuable considering the failed assumption? For land, you can say that even in the case that society collapses it is still valuable. Or is it? What exactly is the assumption that deems BTC's intrinsic value zero and land's value more than zero?

> What exactly is the assumption that deems BTC's intrinsic value zero and land's value more than zero? For me the easiest way to determine if something has intrinsic value is ask yourself what would happen if you owned all of it (and couldn't be forced to give it up). If you owned all the Bitcoin in the world, we wouldn't accept its use, and would just create another currency with identical properties. If you owned…

If one person owned all the land in the world, we also wouldn't accept it.

Re: Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador

#110

Post by whiskyant »

tmlag wrote: post #70
mrtksn wrote: post #4

The strictly limited amount of BTC makes this into a land grab. First comers are entitled to the services of the real economy due to their virtue of being first(or lucky to be on the right place at the right tweet). Musk is right on this one: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1401251430015582209?s=21 Unlike fiat money, BTC is not an accounting tool for value exchange. Unlike actual land, it doesn’t have any intrins…

And unlike land you can start BTC2, BTC3 and so forth if people are no longer content to pay the early adopters and want their own pyramid scheme.

People have created btc2, btc3, times a thousand. Look at all the altcoins out there. Yet all the clones of bitcoin are worthless because it's a direct copy of the protocol or with minor alterations (it's akin to trying to convince people to use a different protocol than TCP for the internet, and to use your version of it instead).

Those clones have almost no one mining with it, thus limited hashing power, thus no ability to secure transactions on the network. The amount of hashing power + number of nodes makes the protocol decentralized and secure, and thus far only Bitcoin has that and none of the clones.

There's a bunch of people that have little to no knowledge about the space coming in and buying new coins believing it will make them rich, but they're usually clueless about the underlying technology.

Post reply on HN