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One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

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Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#121

Post by lake_vincent »

moomoo11 wrote: post #108

I want to wake up one day and cryptocurrency and anything related to it just doesn’t exist. Man that’d be a great day. Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.

What is more likely is that you would wake up in a world where Bitcoin may not exist, but is completely dominated by crypto nonetheless. Within a generation or two, I predict that all asset ownership will be crypto-backed. Property. Automobiles. Artwork. Securities. And of course, currency. Fiat itself will become a cryptocurrency once more millennials are in charge.

I reserve judgement as to whether or not this will be a net benefit for society. I suspect not, but our present ignorance is far too great to make such a prediction - I just think it's gonna happen whether we want it to or not, so get used to the idea of crypto-everything.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#122

Post by pdntspa »

moomoo11 wrote: post #108

I want to wake up one day and cryptocurrency and anything related to it just doesn’t exist. Man that’d be a great day. Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.

The grifters will go back to pushing day-trading schemes

Crypto can keep them, it's nice to not have to deal with the noise

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#123

Post by jl6 »

theplumber wrote: post #47
afterburner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than a lottery for some. It rewarded incorrect thinking on how the financial industry works. Speculative spikes can happen for a lot of reasons, but that Bitcoin would replace all currencies (as early advocates would have had you believe) was not one of those reasons.

>> but that Bitcoin would replace all currencies (as early advocates would have had you believe) was not one of those reasons. Bitcoin was not bought because people believed it will replace all currencies. They bought bitcoin to get rich fast and cash out BEFORE the expected crash.

A lot of the early enthusiasm absolutely was from cypherpunk futurists who genuinely did want/expect it to make traditional finance obsolete.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#124

Post by yamtaddle »

UncleMeat wrote: post #73
donatj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite literally what happened. My groceries cost over twice as much.

I cannot think of a single individual item that I buy at the grocery store that has doubled, let alone more than doubled.

IIRC the giant flats of Costco eggs went up to 3-4x their former price over the last year or so. Still a great deal, they're just not "holy shit that's practically free!" like before.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#125

Post by n4r9 »

upsidesinclude wrote: post #68
n4r9 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My best guess at why the average person is hesitant to use bitcoin as a primary currency is: where do I go when it goes wrong? If the system holding my money is hacked, or I get scammed in some way, where is my legal recourse? Legal recourse is typically something provided by a state. But state regulation nullifies a lot of what bitcoin advocates claim is the advantage of cryptocurrency. I'm not up to scratch on the…

See my other comment. El S. is in a pretty strange place because they don't have their own currency. They have no control over their economy in that regard, so adopting a separate currency which frees them from singular dollar dependence is quite useful. Nullifies what claims exactly?

> Nullifies what claims exactly?

Bitcoin seems to be intended as a decentralised payment system that bypasses any third party institutions. My gut feeling is that: in order for a state to provide legal recourse, bitcoin addresses need to be linked to a centralised personal/business identity that can be tracked down and sued or prosecuted if necessary. For Bitcoin to feel safe for the normal person, it would have to introduce centralisation and third parties. My gut may be wrong, of course.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#126

Post by lbriner »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #95

This was implemented poorly (and bitcoin was a poor choice), but it's not crazy to want a currency that is decoupled from the US government. Especially in Central America where the US government has a pretty shady track record.

That's the thing. No-one wondered why they might want Crypto, the question was always "Why Bitcoin"?

There are many deep subtle questions about Economics, even with stablecoins but the choice of Bitcoin was way off base, the only possible reason to use it was because it was the only one most people had heard of.

Bitcoin is totally nonsensical for low-value high volume transactions and by the time the money gets paid to the seller for already bought goods, they could be making a loss. At least inflation in normal currency is only (usually) a few percent per year.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#127

Post by wsc981 »

lake_vincent wrote: post #121
moomoo11 wrote: post #108

I want to wake up one day and cryptocurrency and anything related to it just doesn’t exist. Man that’d be a great day. Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.

What is more likely is that you would wake up in a world where Bitcoin may not exist, but is completely dominated by crypto nonetheless. Within a generation or two, I predict that all asset ownership will be crypto-backed. Property. Automobiles. Artwork. Securities. And of course, currency. Fiat itself will become a cryptocurrency once more millennials are in charge. I reserve judgement as to whether or not this will…

Crypto in the form of CBDCs will very likely be a loss. One head honcho at the Bank of International Settlements was quite clear that they want to fully control how people spend money. And at that point it’s not really your money anymore anyways …

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#128

Post by codyb »

welshwelsh wrote: post #89
amarant wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you didn't sell at 60k you're not lucky at all. If you're still sitting there, hodling the ball, you're one of the suckers who paid the lunch for those who did get lucky. You're the opposite of lucky.

Only if you bought around 60k. I bought in 2015 when Bitcoin was about $250, so still looking good on a 10 year timescale.

Yes, because people who bought at 20,000 are holding your ball for you... and you're holding the ball for people who bought at 10 dollars...

Or am I missing something?

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#129

Post by el-salvador »

jinzo wrote: post #61
simple-thoughts wrote: post #36

Prediction: El Salvador will look genius in the next Bitcoin cycle. Other emerging market central banks will proceed to copy their model creating the next cycle’s peak. Once they stop buying, the market will crash again creating either a global depression or a bailout of the btc economy by USG, causing a repeat of the bank bailout that spawned btc in the first place.

They invested US$100 million (and currently that's around US$50 million). The next bond payment (2023 note that they are trying to buy back now) is due in January and that alone is US$800 million. So, their investment should yield really high returns for it to even make a decent dent into the first bond. From all the fanfare around them, I was sure they had to invest more. But after looking up the numbers, this looks…

> They invested US$100 million (and currently that's around US$50 million). We are a small country, for comparison the largest public hospital budget is about US$60 million per year.

> The next bond payment (2023 note that they are trying to buy back now) There are two bonds which they are buying. The 2023 one at 91 cents per dollar, and the 2025 one at 51 cents per dollar.

> this looks like a publicity stunt more than any serious investment.

El Salvador has a very good PR team. So many announcements have their own publicitiy students. Teven produce different material targeting different foreign countries. It's always interesting to see what each to see what PR message each country gets.

For example: Targeting those who didn't agree on vaccine mandates in English Speaking Countries (Australia/Canada/UK):

https://twitter.com/CanAlbertaHuman/status/14784727600660725...

https://twitter.com/LowCard_Hunger/status/148358166523034010...

Targeting those who wanted vaccines in neighboring countries (Honduras):

https://twitter.com/radioamericahn/status/140378336359768474...

https://twitter.com/gotvhonduras/status/1402268608068268041

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#130

Post by thedebuglife »

I value the insight of many that post here, so I would like to ask: isn't there any valuable application for blockchain tech? I realize BTC is imperfect, but blockchain itself is just a technology.

Being pretty young, everyone I know is involved in crypto in one way or another. I'm personally waiting on the sidelines, but there should be some beneficial middle ground between going all-in and completely discarding the tech.

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