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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

#191

Post by lowkey »

jollybean wrote: post #188
lowkey wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the argument was simply that NATO powers went to war over false pretenses in Libya just like they did in Iraq (Where WMD?) and so many countries before. I am Canadian and I remember when we would send peacekeepers to stabilize a country under the name of the UN. In this case the UN authorized a nofly zone. Western powers took that as their opportunity to bomb Libya into the stone age and before the NATO-backe…

Because that's a conspiracy theory. You've offered no evidence of 'false pretenses' and not illustrated any rational benefit for Western powers. Just the opposite - SNC Lavalin (Montreal) and others lost lucrative contracts. And this "As such the US, Canada, France, UK, and Italy all have the blood of slaves on their hands in Libya" - is completely ridiculous. It's reddit-rhetoric, essentially to blame one 3rd party…

What is a Jamahiriya? [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamahiriya_(disambiguation)

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#192

Post by anticodon »

dmitriid wrote: post #164
akiselev wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More military spending than the rest of the world's superpowers and their vassal states combined... Costs nothing!

1.5 trillion in trade with EU, China and Japan alone. But yeah, sure. The dollar is a worthless piece of paper that has nothing behind it except the military.

USA has a huge and constantly increasing trade deficit, meaning that it buy more goods and resources than it produces itself. It's an unequal trade that greatly benefits US and makes all the other world poorer with each batch of printed money.

Industry output percent in the USA GDP is small and becoming smaller with every year, while US consumes about order of magnitude more energy per capita than even EU countries.

This is why US needs most expensive army in the world and the need to rig elections, organize coups and revolutions in almost every other country.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#193

Post by lowkey »

tsimionescu wrote: post #187
lowkey wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

El Salvador is using Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin for virtually free, instant payments without fractional reserves. Instead of using debt or fractional reserves, Lightning allows 100% reserve asset-backed exchanges. > the dollar was once based on gold. We've moved on from that after realizing that doesn't work. Citation needed. My understanding is that governments moved off the gold standard because they could…

The world moved on from the gold standard briefly at the start of WWI, but then returned. Then, during the Great Depression, the need to better control their currency and do large financial transactions for which they simply didn't have enough gold spurred most countries to move away definitively from it. This spurred recovery from the Great Depression and allowed huge investments in needed work. All of a sudden, it…

My understanding is that the only defect of a gold standard for countries was that they couldn't easily debase their currencies, which historically has been the easiest way to fund wars. Currency debasement hurts the citizens, particularly savers so the individuals never benefit from currency debasement.

For dishonest governments who wish to spend without limit but don't want to raise taxes, fiat currencies allow debasement which benefits dishonest politicians. It does not benefit the people - ever.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#194

Post by errantmind »

bawolff wrote: post #186
errantmind wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but most other countries already have their own fiat currency. In the unlikely event this actually succedes,i still don't see why it would threaten US as global reserve currency or otherwise make a difference.

It threatens the US as a global reserve currency because everyone knows the US can inflate away the value of the dollar at will.

Decentralized trust is the exact reason why some digital currency, like bitcoin, may eventually replace the dollar as a reserve currency. That is the game theory aspect, in relation to the US dollar

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#195

Post by errantmind »

tsimionescu wrote: post #174
errantmind wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dollar was once backed by gold, so not the best comparison. Also, I don't see a way to make fractional Bitcoin reserve banking work in practice. You can't simply issue Bitcoin you don't have.

It's very simple: you have a banking app that shows you an amount in bitcoin. If you want to send someone else money, you get their own bank account number, and ask your bank to wire that person 1 bitcoin. Your bank talks to their bank and tells them that they are now owed 1 bitcoin. At no point does this bitcoin have to live in the BTC wallet of you, your bank, your friend's bank, or your friend. In fact, this BTC c…

This only works if people don't insist on custody of their bitcoin. Also, as was already mentioned, lightning network solves scaling problems while preserving users' custody

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#196

Post by errantmind »

beefield wrote: post #166
errantmind wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dollar was once backed by gold, so not the best comparison. Also, I don't see a way to make fractional Bitcoin reserve banking work in practice. You can't simply issue Bitcoin you don't have.

You do not need to issue any new bitcoin. What you need is a trustworthy entity that borrows your bitcoin and gives you an IOU slip, which you can then use as a means to pay other people. That slip, stating that whoever owns the slip is entitled to one bitcoin from the trustworthy entity, is from economical point of view as good as bitcoin. And if people want to increase the amount of those slips, there is nothing in…

As I mentioned elsewhere, this only works if people don't insist on custody of their bitcoin, and a lot of people (although not a majority) would.

Also, do you have some strong historical evidence fractional reserve banking is good economically over long periods (100+ years)?

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#197

Post by byzantinegene »

chroem- wrote: post #107
dmitriid wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solves a lot of problems in peer to peer computing. Can you list ten of these problems if there are a lot of them?

Sure: - consensus - distributed computation - statefulness - peer to peer identity - peer to peer reputation of nodes - resistance against many classic failure modes (e.g. Sybil attacks) - peer to peer source of truth (e.g. Namecoin/DNScoin) - verifiable code execution (smart contracts) - immutability/ tamper proof - and (obviously) peer to peer payments Granted, some of these overlap with each other, but the point s…

Excuse me? The only concept blockchain introduced was a distributed ledger. Most of those advantages you listed were already present in distributed computing way before blockchain paper was out, it's what blockchain was based on, not what it brought about. Distributed databases like Cassandra were using those even before bitcoin, please educate yourself before spreading misinformation.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#198

Post by ephbit »

tsimionescu wrote: post #48
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?"

The debt based system will not go away if we ever move the entire economy to bitcoin (laughable as that idea is). You'll have fractional bitcoin reserve banking with absolutely no difference compared to today. In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit is a major limitation that relegates it to being digital gold, not a digital dollar.

Let's say we had a situation where everything was backed by bitcoin (as a reserve currency).

Governmental budgets are one of the most obvious ways in which political decisions manifest themselves and become relevant for everyday life.

Do I get this right? You think that governmental budgets would look absolutely no different in such a bitcoinized world compared to how they look in the current centralbank issued money world?

You don't think the fact that central banks mostly support governmental debt shapes these budgets in a non trivial way?

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