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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

#181

Post by solveit »

georgeecollins wrote: post #148
hailwren wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even so, this scheme only makes a little sense. A better approach might have been for the government to have set up a USD-based remittance program of its own. This is just not true. Crypto as foreign remittance has been proven and is working quite well in Argentina. What you really don't want as a layperson in Latin America, is for really any third party -- but especially government third parties, to have control o…

That's a depressing statement about Argentina and Bitcoin. I would be much more interested if Bitcoin were useful for legal transactions in countries with stable currencies and banking. Bitcoin enthusiasts can be so anti-government that they seem to think ever government will turn into a basket case like Argentina. Perhaps every government gets into trouble eventually. But you could wait a couple lifetimes for it in…

Bitcoin as currency-of-last-resort makes quite some sense to me. More than any other usage for Bitcoin I've seen people selling, anyway.

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

#182

Post by yamtaddle »

UncleMeat wrote: post #174
yamtaddle wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Weird. Eggs by the dozen (along with onions, one of the most volatile staples at the grocery store) are up only like 75% for me. Admittedly that's a lot and more than I had expected when I went and checked but I'm still seeing very different numbers.

I'm not sure other eggs are up as much as those large-flat Costco ones (60 eggs? Something like that). I have a feeling they were losing money on them before, they were so cheap.

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

#183

Post by donatj »

pessimizer wrote: post #93
donatj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently? I went from living very comfortably to living paycheck-to-paycheck in about 6 months. Holding my value in USD has become a significant risk.

If 8% inflation has put you paycheck to paycheck, living "very comfortably" was already living far beyond your means.

The 8% figure doesn’t match real life. My electric bill doubled, my natural gas bill doubled, my municipal bill doubled, my groceries doubled.Everything that makes up the vast majority of my expenditures had doubled.

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

#185

Post by frankenst1 »

mtrycz2 wrote: post #85
frankenst1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).

Since we're on a tech inclined site, you'll be happy to hear that an RPi4 can process 256MB blocks in well less than two minutes. Current 32MB size limit on BCH in 8 seconds. Check for yourself. Bitcoin Cash (the og big block chain) is alive and kicking, and getting stable updates (both features and performance), and also has optional (affordable) coin shuffle). Lightning Network is a security and usability nightmare…

Since LN's inception, liquidity and transaction count on the LN have roughly doubled with every year.

In comparison, BCH has lost 80% of its transaction volume in the last year alone. Its blocksize is now 100KB on average and it now processes fewer transactions than LN. It also regularly hard-forks, either because of leadership cults (Ver, Wright, Sechet, ...) or because of scheduled hard-forks every 6 months which kick off all users who haven't updated. It's the opposite of stable and the market apparently does not share its determination in sacrificing decentralization for adoption.

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

#186

Post by MrMan »

smcl wrote: post #77
WHATDOESIT wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you actually buying while Forex trading? (I'd really like to know. To me, BTC trading and Forex trading sound exactly the same.)

I mean on some level if you're doing this kind of trading then yeah BTC/ETH/etc trading is similar to trading real currencies. I think the difference is that the real currencies have a well-known utility at the moment - they're a means of exchange for goods and services. If you're selling EUR to someone, the chances are they're using that EUR to pay for these in the eurozone. If you're buying USD, you're also likely…

well if you extend the analogy between crypto coins and FX, a long-only strategy makes as little sense in crypto as FX. Why would I hold dollars or yen long-term, instead of investing in assets which are productive like equites or bonds.

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

#187

Post by benj111 »

WHATDOESIT wrote: post #69
benj111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't do Forex trading but you are buying a currency backed by a government. My understanding is it's closely linked to interest rates.

So you're buying into trust of that government. With BTC you're buying into trust of the technology and other network participants. Is it really so different? I don't trust governments so much - my local currency is currently facing 25% YoY inflation. I bought Bitcoin.

I wouldn't say trust. But an entire nation is required to accept it so there is a market for it. Plus with interest rates nations are paying you to hold it.

I don't do Forex trading so I'm not particularly defending it. The currency I hold is the one that has utility to me. It's the one I'm paid in, the one I pay taxes in. I don't particularly want it jumping up or down 100s of %. I want it to be stable.

If bitcoin is more stable than your local currency go for it, (although if inflation is 'only' 25% it still doesn't seem to meet that bar). But that says more about your currency than the bitcoin and it still doesn't make it an investment. Your case would seem to be better served by holding USD though.

My first post pointed out it wasn't a very good investment. You seem to be buying it as a store of value, but it isn't very good at that either. So all were left with is a distrust of government. But the cure is worse than the disease.

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

#188

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

prottog wrote: post #179
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we think like this why wouldn't I invest 1% of my portfolio in lottery tickets? At worst lose 1%, at best x1,000,000 upside?

You could consider lottery tickets as an OTM option expiring in a week with those payoffs, I suppose. If you spread 1% of your portfolio over a year and buy lottery tickets every week, you're effectively losing 1% per year with a very small chance of becoming very rich. There are probably better places to put your 1% on. ;-)

> There are probably better places to put your 1% on. ;-)

I totally agree, but the argument being made is that "the potential upsides outweigh the low probability". That's not investing, that's gambling.

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

#189

Post by koonsolo »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #160
koonsolo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it stays the same if you have an investment portfolio and only invest max 5% in high risk assets. Assume you invest 1% of your portfolio in Bitcoin. What is your downside? 1%. Not that high, is it? What is your upside? Maybe x100, so double your entire portfolio. Right now, you came late to the game, so don't expect a x100. The risk is probably still the same, but the upside way lower. But when Bitcoin was still y…

If we think like this why wouldn't I invest 1% of my portfolio in lottery tickets? At worst lose 1%, at best x1,000,000 upside?

The reward/risk ratio of lottery tickets is very well known. And it's obviously not in your favor. So it's basically a no brainer not to invest in them.

Things like startups for example also have a very high risk rate, but also potential high payouts. There it actually makes sense since the ratio is way better.

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

#190

Post by mrb »

jl6 wrote: post #123
theplumber wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

As an early Bitcoin adopter, I wouldn't say so. I have never seen anyone among the people I knew in the Bitcoin community in the last 12 years who believed it would "make tradfi obsolete".

For example, I expect Bitcoin to likely remain an alternative system, used only for a minority of transactions. And this view didn't conflict with my desire to buy in when I did.

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