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Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#221

Post by Speednet »

acdha wrote: post #203
Speednet wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy mackerel, you're actually going to twist my statement and say it's anti-semitic. What a jerk you are. I am being kind to you; what I'm thinking is quite worse.

Well, here's your chance to explain exactly what you did mean and why you used a poorly-defined term with a lot of baggage in attempt to attack the forum rather than engaging intellectually with the content. The innocent definition of the term isn't a pejorative and certainly doesn't have a meaning which would say it's okay to ignore something just because it ran in Foreign Policy. Also, while you may have had purely…

You have issues. Seek help.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#222

Post by acdha »

Speednet wrote: post #221
acdha wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here's your chance to explain exactly what you did mean and why you used a poorly-defined term with a lot of baggage in attempt to attack the forum rather than engaging intellectually with the content. The innocent definition of the term isn't a pejorative and certainly doesn't have a meaning which would say it's okay to ignore something just because it ran in Foreign Policy. Also, while you may have had purely…

You have issues. Seek help.

You know, you might find it less unsuccessful to engage with the intellectual content rather than distracting from it.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#223

Post by dnautics »

CPLX wrote: post #132
dnautics wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point the equities market is also gambling. FTFY "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverish…

> Technically he was talking about short term high inflation, but there is no mechanistic reason why this would be false for long-term low inflation I was with you until this point. There are absolutely reasons why there is a difference. Time is directional and irreversible and human life is exceedingly finite. Thus there will always be a higher value placed on money you get today versus money you get in the future.…

> Thus there will always be a higher value placed on money you get today versus money you get in the future

Yeah, that SHOULD be the case because "money you get in the future" should be subject to existential risk. If you want to artificially "mobilize money" then you are going to get all sorts of fucked up things like environmental destruction in the service of thoughtless consumption ("spending on crappy shit from china is good for the economy!!1"), ponzi schemes, incentivised malinvestment, and cheating labor out of their wages:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

"it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."

Think about it this way: If we did not inflate the money, increased productivity (e.g. through technological efficiency gains) would result in everyone reaping the benefits, capitalism would be a rising tide that lifts all boats. Instead, we funnel those societal gains to the most privileged in our society, i.e. bankers and people who are good at writing government grants and good at getting awarded contracts.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#224

Post by davidgerard »

dlubarov wrote: post #212
davidgerard wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

trouble is the interface to actual money - the only coins that have any depth of dollar liquidity are BTC and ETH, both of which are proof-of-work. Even if your low-fee shitcoin just happens to have a USD pair, it's startlingly unlikely to have enough depth not to have massive slippage on trades; so functionally, buyers have to go via BTC or ETH. This is also the fallacy of non-PoW NFT chains.

Looking at SOL/USDT on Binance.com [1] as an example, it looks like there are typically orders for a few thousand USDT within a 1 cent spread (0.006% of the price), or orders for a few hundred thousand USDT within a 25 cent spread (0.15% of the price). Most of us aren't trading millions at a time, and these spreads seem fairly insignificant compared to fees extracted by banks, credit card networks, etc, so is this re…

that's why I said actual money, not USDT - which is absolutely not actual money.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#225

Post by davidgerard »

el-salvador wrote: post #213
davidgerard wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they're doing is not actually using the USDP in any manner. The USDP sits in Novi's account in Coinbase Custody. The USDP in the Novi app is just accounting entries in their system. wrote this up here: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/02/facebooks-no... I'd be amazed if the new Novi-in-WhatsApp thing didn't work the same way. It's the best possible way to use the blockchain: say "blockchain" in the p…

Hi David! Thank you for sharing that link. I'm a reader of yours and never imagined you replying one of my comments. By the way thank you for the coverage in English you do about my country which summarizes many of the things that are happening here. And specially for reporting about the political context in which all of these is happening. As this is something not covered much by other news outlets. I was curious ab…

thank you! As literally just some guy with a news blog, I'm humbled by Salvadoran readers telling me that my coverage is useful to them. Obviously, I depend heavily on Salvadoran contacts telling me interesting things, and checking my stuff before it goes live - they checked this Foreign Policy article especially :-)

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#226

Post by throw0101a »

lowkey wrote: post #107
eqmvii wrote: post #26

I’m exhausted by cryptocurrency. There’s a kernel of neat tech innovation and a reasonable argument about monetary policy obliterated by an avalanche of greed, hype, fraud, and magical thinking.

I’m exhausted by the fiat money scam 2% annual inflation over a 40 year career amounts to 40% less earnings. Inflation is theft. Bitcoin fixes this. No one has ever explained a better solution to inflation than Bitcoin. Fiat money printing is a scam that lets politicians spend more money without directly raising taxes. Bitcoin is honest sound money with a fixed inflation policy forever that cannot be manipulated by a…

> 2% annual inflation over a 40 year career amounts to 40% less earnings. Inflation is theft. Bitcoin fixes this.

Try living with deflation. To paraphrase Churchill: an inflationary regime is the worst monetary system, except for all the others that have been tried.

> Bitcoin is honest sound money with a fixed inflation policy forever that cannot be manipulated by any central actors.

Not being able to manipulate the money system is bad thing, as the Great Depression showed. Bitcoin is basically a digital form of gold, which was moved away from for good reasons:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

* https://archive.md/FWKcL

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#227

Post by davidgerard »

GracefullyBlind wrote: post #205
nkuttler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9% of the population of an entire country wanting bitcoin sounds like a decent win to me. It's not clear to me where that optimistic number comes from though.

Wait this is far from a decent win! In such a fragmented societies as the ones from Latin America, I wouldn't be surprised if this <9% is actually part of the population that benefits from this the most

This is why I'm disappointed that Chivo seems to be a wasted opportunity - there's a lot of businesses in El Salvador that would really like a widely-accepted form of electronic money, and would like Chivo to actually work reliably, which it absolutely doesn't. I think a lot of them are the ones in that 9%, because they want electronic money that much.

In a country where only 30% of the population have bank accounts - and that's with a national ID card, and you can get a basic bank account for the asking with your ID - a government-backed electronic payment system that was reliable and trustworthy could have been a game-changer.

Instead, they got a dysfunctional system written by political cronies and plagued with fraud.

It is possible they'll fix Chivo. But that's the bit I talked about as a failure, 'cos it is. When your system is so bad that people start setting fire to stuff in the streets, I'd be hard put to call that a success.

(The headline was written by the editor, but I'd agree that bitcoin has failed with the populace. Anyone asserting "it's early days yet!" has to account for what's happened so far, and explain why this volatile nonsense would work as actual currency, and not just for the few local Chivo bitcoin day-traders.)

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#228

Post by dlubarov »

davidgerard wrote: post #224
dlubarov wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at SOL/USDT on Binance.com [1] as an example, it looks like there are typically orders for a few thousand USDT within a 1 cent spread (0.006% of the price), or orders for a few hundred thousand USDT within a 25 cent spread (0.15% of the price). Most of us aren't trading millions at a time, and these spreads seem fairly insignificant compared to fees extracted by banks, credit card networks, etc, so is this re…

that's why I said actual money, not USDT - which is absolutely not actual money.

If you don't want USDT, you can trade SOL/BUSD instead. The order book may be a little thinner, but not a big deal if you're not moving millions.

While you might claim that BUSD isn't real money, you can just immediately withdraw it as fiat in your bank account, as long as Binance remains solvent.

Or if you're still uncomfortable with BUSD for whatever reason, just trade e.g. SOL/USD on Coinbase.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#229

Post by randomhodler84 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #171
randomhodler84 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That site is very wrong. Their historical data is wrong too. It’s all the same value!! It’s about 100x off reality. It’s been known since 2020 that it is fiction. Bitcoinfees.net appears to be correct (1-2 sats/vB). https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ Also shows vast majority in last 24 hours paid I notice that earn is also reporting way way too high numbers. The fact is you can send 1sat/vbyte right now and it wi…

Not everyone uses lightning. I suppose that's what you're insinuating?

No, we are talking onchain. Lightning would be practically nothing. Fractions of a cent.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#230

Post by senectus1 »

hiq wrote: post #123
lowkey wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m exhausted by the fiat money scam 2% annual inflation over a 40 year career amounts to 40% less earnings. Inflation is theft. Bitcoin fixes this. No one has ever explained a better solution to inflation than Bitcoin. Fiat money printing is a scam that lets politicians spend more money without directly raising taxes. Bitcoin is honest sound money with a fixed inflation policy forever that cannot be manipulated by a…

> Bitcoin fixes this. No one has ever explained a better solution to inflation than Bitcoin. Does anyone seriously claim that Bitcoin is currently solving inflation? I've heard some claims that it will eventually be the case, but claiming it is already a "solution to inflation" sounds like a stretch even for bitcoin supporters. Bitcoin was apparently at 30kUSD some time in July this year after reaching 60kUSD in June…

if you could wave your magic wand and suddenly BTC was the only currency possible to be used? Yeah that sort of fixes inflation.

But the world isn't a computer simulation on a desktop PC and that scenario doesn't and wont ever exist.

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