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World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

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Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#151

Post by sgift »

desine wrote: post #146
Kiro wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are your friends? Not even my most educated friends would be able to provide an answer at all.

Mostly crazy people. edit: but it's sad how little attention people pay. Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not just free education - salaried education. Free electricity. Free farmland and equipment. He did plenty of wrong in his life, but he also did some…

> FWIW Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Not that I want to disregard Gadaffis warning here, but the UN itself predicted that this will happen and asked the countries to please provide more money to help the people in the camps or they will move on to Europe. No one listened, people moved on. This was not some kind of secret knowledge, more a type of "it's not yet a problem, ignore it"

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#152

Post by leppr »

desine wrote: post #111
tsimionescu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any construction project generates significant greenhouse gas - concrete and its production are major GHG generators, and disturbing the soil, displacing living plants also tends to generate emissions. Building a new power plant in addition to all your existing ones will never reduce GHG emissions, regardless of how clean the new one is. We need to start tearing down old power plants and reducing consumption overall,…

Fair enough but I can't see that as more harmful than any other energy production. El Salvador still does not generate enough power to serve all it's citizens, so they will be building more power plants regardless. Hopefully they can balance bitcoin mining in the off-peak hours, and not create new plants solely to support bitcoin mining. But I fail to see how geothermal's environmental impact is problematic.

The point is Bitcoin in an imaginary ideal scenario is at best neutral, not positive.

Bootstrapping energy production in remote places could have a few nice side effects sure, it just doesn't help its environmental impact.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#153

Post by errantmind »

qiqitori wrote: post #88
adrianN wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty much the opposite of a bitcoin fan, but I think if you replaced "bitcoin" with "dollars" in your comment you would see that it sounds a bit weird. I bet most dollars have been involved in shady business at some point during their life. With bitcoin you have a better chance at figuring this fact out I guess. Regarding quantum computers: Quantum computers are not known to be exponentially faster at hashing t…

That is true. On the other hand, while I'm (unfortunately for this discussion) not an expert in money laundering laws, the police tend to confiscate money that is known to have been laundered (or even before they know for sure apparently). Since Bitcoins are trackable, tumbled bitcoins should be "confiscated" (by marking them as illegal for use in @countries in some kind of database) and then, if the previous owner p…

Best of luck enforcing that. Just like cash, most people are not going to care if someone pays them with laundered BTC, and will ignore the law. Even if they do manage to get enforcement in place years down the road, that kind of activity will not happen with BTC. People who value privacy in their transactions already use Monero, which is superior to BTC in that respect

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#154

Post by erulabs »

squabble wrote: post #148
erulabs wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically yes, a “transaction” is on-network - but one can trade wallets (eg: trading paper keys or “Physical bitcoins”). The definition of the word “transaction” is the important bit here.

You can give me the private key to a wallet, but if I'm not connected to the network to see how much money it controls, that's not much good. Even if I trust you temporarily, at some point a network connection is required. Otherwise, it doesn't have anything to do with BTC. Edit: Additionally, as someone else pointed out, you could have kept your own copy of the key and could empty the wallet before me.

Some physical Bitcoin products solve that too - but I agree completely with you here. That’s why I made it clear that it’s only -technically- possible, but not remotely practical.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#155

Post by desine »

lxdesk wrote: post #147
desine wrote: post #19

They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems. I have a litmus test I use when discussing global financial politics with friends - "What were the main factors you think lead to Ghaddafi's killing?"

You don't even have to look to geopolitical analogies. It's an everyday thing, all the way down to basic "exclusive club" gatekeeping. There's a longstanding tendency across financial systems historically to use the law to bar access to the "real" products for various reasons that happen to favor the incumbent elite. Instead, if you get any access, it's the version mediated by a middleman of some kind. There is often…

This is a great comment. Great examples of gatekeeping. I think you're right on the breakdown of "trust me" models. I also see a problem with fundamental value in the crypto space.

And I switched from a mild crypto believer to a metal stacker a couple of years ago.

I think one of the next big avalanches will be some more issues with crypto exchanges. There's a lot of people in the crypto space without the technical knowledge to properly secure their assets. I was one of the people who got burned by Mt. Gox. It wasn't everything, I had multiple wallets under my own control, but it was enough to hurt. And that wasn't a one time event.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#156

Post by errantmind »

myle wrote: post #59

The comments on Bitcoin threads make me realize how much people are happy to bend the truth (e.g. energy consumption) to justify what pays them (or they think it pays them. Bitcoin started with no connection to real money. Still the connection is quite flaky. Essentially people are buying pieces of the output of a program without any government/majority backing that has any worth. Then, they try to justify it, becaus…

One reason: a central bank like the FED can't fuck it up. That is enough of a reason to give it value. Even if it was banned by Fincen, it wouldn't stop all countries from using it. That one reason is just too strong. Think about it, if you are some other country that isn't the USA, would you trust the USA not to inflate away the value of your foreign reserves? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies solve this game theory type problem

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#157

Post by jollybean »

desine wrote: post #123
bawolff wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you presented the theory with no evidence that it happened. Your argument is basically that the united states could have done it, had motive to do it, and has a history of doing underhanded things in the past. Even if for the sake of argument i grant all of those things, its still not any more plausible than the official story. If you don't want people to call it a conspiracy theory, get some actual evidence…

The point is not to determine the actual reason(s) - us plebs will likely never know. The point is to examine the possibility that sometimes alternative explanations to the official narrative could be plausible. Which loops back to how this all started and my original comment, that there's a narrative of electrical power usage and transparency issues - which are real. But there's other plausible explanations - politi…

It's perfectly reasonable to bring up the fact that Gaddaffi, Saddam and all sorts of other characters suggest moving on form the petro dollar.

It's not covered by mainstream news, because it's not really a news item.

It's also reasonable to suggest that this will catch the ire of the US and their diplomatic corps, but it's really not an important thing.

It's 'conspiratorial' to suggest that this was in any way a primary reason for killing Gaddafi.

Gaddafi was already getting increased investment from many Western firms, and the US was literally looking to pass his public image to the extent that he provided reparations for Lockerbee and stopped acting crazy. Everyone was keen on 'being normal and making money'.

But the Arab Spring happened, and he made public statements that went to far, people feared the worst and that was the straw that broke the camels back.

The decision to intervene was barely a consensus, nobody really wanted to do it, Obama was super reluctant.

If Gaddafi were to have made a different public statement about his intentions, and were to have signalled in some way that he was unwilling to commit to blood or something ... he would have suppressed the insurrection and probably be still ruler today.

Qatari special forces that ended up killing him were only able to act because of the various forms of American cover and intel. support and of course the chaos of the war with him on the run.

The petrodollar is an important part of American foreign policy and they will get 'really mad' if people try to move away from it, but that's a far cry from the conspiracy stories.

Also, BTC is a giant distraction from reality, it serves to fuel hype and headlines as much as anything.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#158

Post by errantmind »

bawolff wrote: post #68
justinzollars wrote: post #8

The US uses the dollar as a weapon and it controls the world bank. So it makes sense that they won't help to de-dollarize the world.

One random (small) country adopting bitcoin doesn't do that. Ongoing geopolitical events on the other hand (e.g. rise of china, changing energy geopolitics) probably do a lot more to reduce usa's influence

I wouldn't discount it so fast. One country attempting this doesn't mean much but one success story? If they can make it work other countries will follow. Then game theory takes over

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#159

Post by errantmind »

delaaxe wrote: post #42
sildur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, they don't want to lose their part of the pie.

They're not gonna lose their part of the pie by proposing all crypto services themselves, instead of seeing all that capital flee to exchanges

They are a little late for that. The genie is out of the bottle

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#160

Post by elevenoh »

rvense wrote: post #39
elevenoh wrote: post #6

>"While the government did approach us for assistance on Bitcoin, this is not something the World Bank can support given the environmental and transparency shortcomings," they added. Environmental as the #1 concern? Bitcoin's enegery:market-cap ratio - a proxy for energy vs. value to humans - is >300x better than an airline & 60x better than JP Morgan & 20x better than google's. https://twitter.com/Okcoin/status/1403…

> Bitcoin's enegery:market-cap ratio - a proxy for energy vs. value to humans - is >300x better than an airline & 60x better than JP Morgan & 20x better than google's. Market cap is not, to me, any kind proxy for "value to humans". The utility of Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat is obviously unrelated to the number coins or their price.

So say this while offering zero other alternative.

How else would you place a value on a company or product's explicit worth to humans?

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