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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#131

Post by georgeecollins »

dmix wrote: post #21
epolanski wrote: post #11

Nobody wants to spend it anyway, just hoard or sell it to the next sucker willing to shell more $. Among all the crypto shills I know I'm probably the only one who has used it for trade (0.25ish Bitcoins for a computer on caseking.de in late 2017 and few goodies on local bitcoin in the same year).

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.

Still cheap compared to most forms of money laundering.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#132

Post by readthenotes1 »

a1371 wrote: post #22
Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #2

> The government, she assured, will continue buying bitcoin and having reserves in this cryptocurrency Sounds like the term "Failed Experiment" is the writer's assertion and not the government official position.

Imagine you have 6,050 bitcoins but they didn't work out for you the way that you hoped. The most reasonable thing to do is to still advertise a bullish position because otherwise you are devaluing your own asset. There is a strong sentiment around bitcoin in El Salvador and it can make them money; but the experiment around it being a legal tender, well, failed.

They only doubled and tripled in value. Gotta wonder what you think they expected

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#133

Post by chrisco255 »

bawolff wrote: post #116
Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair demand by the IMF. Presumably they require their loan to be repaid in fiat because of their internal charter. If Bitcoin adoption eventually removes El Salvador's ability to issue fiat, their loan can't be repaid.

That's not really how that works. IMF can demand their loan be repaid in whatever currency they want. Its totally normal for international loans to be denominated in a currency other than the recipient's legal tender, particularly for high risk countries (although that is usually bad for the recipient)

In particular El Salvador doesn't even have its own legal tender and haven't for a long time. They use the US dollar.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#135

Post by epolanski »

desumeku wrote: post #67
xp84 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are blockchains other than Bitcoin which have no or almost no fees for transactions. Bitcoin could have low TX fees, but its core developers have deliberately kept the maximum block size at 1 megabyte and have refused to increase it.

And the community "decided" to follow the core developers who controlled the narrative on r/bitcoin, bitcointalk and various exchanges when Bitcoin was forked, with the first chain (Core) remaining "Bitcoin" and the other fork then being labeled "Cash".

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#136

Post by bawolff »

twothreeone wrote: post #45

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…

Its not like IMF had a gun to their head. They could have refused the loan.

At the end of the day they abandoned the policy because they believe it will help the economy to abandon it (indirectly via the loan). I certainly wouldn't call that a success.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#137

Post by wmf »

sporkydistance wrote: post #58
ks2048 wrote: post #33

Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily? I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.

Why would anyone spend a single BTC/sat. if they know it could be worth 10x more in a few weeks/years?

Sell enough at the top to last you until the next top.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#138

Post by jgord »

zmgsabst wrote: post #88
ks2048 wrote: post #33

Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily? I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.

Around the time of SegWit, the “digital gold” camp won over the “digital money” camp — who moved on to ETH, SOL, etc.

Many of us in the BC is digital money camp argued the case that more transactions and a lower transaction fee could be most easily implemented, within the spirit of the founders intent, if we simply increased the size of the transaction buffer, mitigating an obvious bottleneck.

We argued against the complexity of SegWit and Lightning Network.

I think greed and politics won rather than engineering or economics good sense - people didnt want cheaper transactions, it now costs around $15 USD per BTC transaction.

Despite the proliferation of alt-coins using essentially the same code-base, with shorter block-times and larger buffers.. and more programmability - ultimately proof-of-stake might be a better implementation of the block minting process, than proof-of-work.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#139

Post by 7j67j67j76j6 »

LAMike wrote: post #119
ks2048 wrote: post #33

Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily? I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.

[flagged]

Yeah the rest of us can continue geeking out over layered network protocol design and technologies like Lightning or Liquid. There is so much going on under the hood but it is so much easier to take the piss and learn nothing. That is no surprise, with the current state of the world.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#140

Post by wmf »

rsanek wrote: post #89
josu wrote: 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?

Because they're broke.
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