Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 299 posts

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

#221

Post by el-salvador »

edwnj wrote: post #173
croon wrote: post #11

It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. People who got rich from Bitcoin weren't savvy, they won the lottery. It's not a sound investment decision based on outcome. Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand. El Salvador gambled which is stupid. Whether they won or lost at the lottery is inconsequenti…

The bet being made by El Salvador is to get the immense benefits of being an early adopter at the cost of short term volatility and risk of bitcoin failing. Regardless of your opinion on this, you have to at least wait till the proposition plays out before passing judgement. You have to see if they can withstand the short term volatility and whether bitcoin succeeds or not. Calling the experiment failure before the r…

> The bet being made by El Salvador is to get the immense benefits of being an early adopter at the cost of short term volatility and risk of bitcoin failing.

Salvadoran here.

It's hard to see the benefits if there is no transparency on the process.

If we could even have a dashboard and an official website were we could have access to audited reports about the results of this bet, and see how its value varies over time. Then I might agree.

Maybe just a graph like the one found Norway's Sovereign Fund website

https://www.nbim.no/

In reality we just don't. Public information is limited or contradictory. The few public information available includes a tweet about the president buying bitcoin from his phone while not wearing clothes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/26/el-salvador-...

As far as I know, the trust that holds El Salvador bitcoin doesn't have a public website. And the state wallet's website doesn't publish an address or phone number.

The only time I've seen their address is a receipt from a veterinary hospital run by the same state company operating the wallet, in which every procedure costs only US $0.25 because they are subsidized by "bitcoin profits"

El Salvador is a strange country sometimes.

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

#222

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

cowmix wrote: post #118
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to wake up one day and internet and anything related to it just doesn’t exist. Man that’d be a great day. Remove grifters, acquire actual progress. I wonder if there were people in the 80s that said that.

Not really. There are (and always will be) people who see no good in the Internet. I played a small part in its growth in the early 90s and even I have pangs of regret over what it has become. AND there was a lot of grift and lawlessness in the early Internet -- that is what paid the bills at first. However, at the time I was able to articulate all the ways moving X, Y and Z to the Internet would make things better -…

> In the end, the Internet was judged by its exponential growth and adoption. There was a mad rush of, arguably, useful activity going on... for years. Everything I wished for and pushed for back in the day has come true -- monkey paw curse and all. Bitcoin's use has actually gone down afaict, the market value of it is the only metric people care about.

Very very well put. Bitcoin’s use as measured by total transactions has gone down. However, the total amount of cryptocurrency transactions across all chains is still growing exponentially.

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

#223

Post by splitstud »

pessimizer wrote: post #211
donatj wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could be the guy where it's only raining above his house, but the people you are having this conversation with also live in the world and disagree with your figures as much as the statistics do.

No post body was provided.

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

#224

Post by the_gastropod »

sp332 wrote: post #166
Zanfa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the fact that you’re implying a 100% USD inflation over the past year, you’d only have 25% of the purchasing power if you “invested” in BTC per the GPs example.

"Inflation" is an average of several things. Actual inflation doesn't have to be even across all items. Groceries went up more than other things. Edit: some examples https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/su... Retail egg prices went up 38% from July 2021 to July 2022.

Yes. And eggs are the highest increase on that list, at 38%—still a far cry from 100%. Comparatively, fresh fruits are down 0.8%, and fresh veggies up only 0.8%.

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

#225

Post by mrguyorama »

VMG wrote: post #54
hackerlight wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. A lot of the risk can be hedged by custodians, so I don't agree. The reason it should fail for transactions is because Bitcoin sucks for transactions. Few people will prefer slow, irreversible and expensive transactions.

Those that need unstoppable transactions are willing to pay the 10'000 satoshi fee on a transaction with arbitrary amount.

Which users actually need and want irreversible transactions. What's the utility of a system that doesn't let you combat fraud?

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

#226

Post by the_gastropod »

koonsolo wrote: post #70
croon wrote: post #11

It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. People who got rich from Bitcoin weren't savvy, they won the lottery. It's not a sound investment decision based on outcome. Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand. El Salvador gambled which is stupid. Whether they won or lost at the lottery is inconsequenti…

I agree with you on the El Salvador part, but not on the investment part. > Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand. Investing in bitcoin had a limited downside (lose 100%), but a very high upside (reaches it's initial goals). For me, the potential gains outweighed the low probability. I consider myself very lucky that I made some money (wasn't crazy to put all my money in there). But for me, w…

Boy do I have the investment for you! Give me your life savings, and I'll give you 50% equity in my Evil Empire. I plan on taking over the planet by 2028. What an upside! Only risk is losing 100%—that's practically nothing in comparison!

Or I guess you could buy lottery tickets. Probably a slightly less insane way to "invest" your money.

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

#227

Post by dragontamer »

nightski wrote: post #215
dragontamer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USD is hugely up vs Yen and Euro. You buy anything from overseas recently? USD is hugely strong. USD is up vs the stock market, vs the bond market, vs the overseas bond market, vs overseas stocks. USD is also up vs Bitcoin. EDIT: Feel free to look at gold, silver, and other 'inflation hedges' while you're at it. The main thing going up is commodities (oil and food), which is certainly important. But there's more to t…

Inflation is basically the exact definition of the change in USD's value relative to goods & services. Unless you are arguing we currently don't have any inflation, which would be a tough sell :) Also this last CPI report oil & gas pulled inflation down whereas just about everything else pulled it up. Food is hot, but a lot of other things are as well including non-commodity service based industries.

> In fact, holding Cash/USD has been basically one of the best performing things in my entire portfolio this year (after oil/energy)

This is what I'm arguing. Do you deny it?

------

In a bear market, you don't have to outrun the bear to get ahead. You only have to outrun your friends.

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

#228

Post by mrguyorama »

donatj wrote: post #178
UncleMeat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot think of a single individual item that I buy at the grocery store that has doubled, let alone more than doubled.

Cereal and butter. A box of cereal is $7+ now, whereas it was $4 not long ago. A pack of butter was $2.50 and now close to $5.

Meanwhile pork and chicken are roughly the same as they've always been where I am, at least ignoring sale pricing.

Hell, I got 3.5 pounds of steak tips for $20 about a month ago.

My food costs have absolutely gone up, but it's MUCH closer to the "10 percent" figures quoted as inflation than anything close to what you have said. Where do you live and shop?

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

#229

Post by Supermancho »

Bud wrote: post #212
donatj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cereal and butter. A box of cereal is $7+ now, whereas it was $4 not long ago. A pack of butter was $2.50 and now close to $5.

Butter actually wasn't $2.50 at any point in the recent past. This is easy to track. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FS1101 So of the two items you cherry-picked to support an assertion that groceries have more than doubled, one is up...around 30-35%. In fact, there doesn't appear to be a single food item in this list that has doubled in the past year. Eggs are the closest. https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-a…

Well butter prices have gone up almost 100% -

https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/dywabutter_cme.pdf

https://www.globaldairytrade.info/en/product-results/butter/

But that's not the whole story. Prices are not primarily set by wholesale costs for many goods.

I think cereal has only gone up 30%, although there have been other events that influenced Kellogs pricing (notice how the Poptarts boxes have changed slightly) and then there has been the opportunity to steal away some extra profit - https://www.wxyz.com/news/now-cereal-prices-are-on-the-rise-... (search for "Mills").

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

#230

Post by Supermancho »

mrguyorama wrote: post #228
donatj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cereal and butter. A box of cereal is $7+ now, whereas it was $4 not long ago. A pack of butter was $2.50 and now close to $5.

Meanwhile pork and chicken are roughly the same as they've always been where I am, at least ignoring sale pricing. Hell, I got 3.5 pounds of steak tips for $20 about a month ago. My food costs have absolutely gone up, but it's MUCH closer to the "10 percent" figures quoted as inflation than anything close to what you have said. Where do you live and shop?

> I got 3.5 pounds of steak tips for $20 about a month ago.

A lot of cattle was recently liquidated (made into meat products, this year) as grazing fields have been drying up and, due to climate change, meat pipelines have had to start making MAJOR changes.

Post reply on HN