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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

#231

Post by CyberDildonics »

frankenst1 wrote: post #81
mtrycz2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a failure because BTC has pivoted away from the Bitcoin whitepaper (p2p ecash), limited its blocksize and has taken the path of this strange "digital store of value" (lol). BTC's activity rose gradually up to 2017, and then topped off at 1MB and even dropped. [1] If Bitcoin's momentum hadn't been dissolved, it wouldn't require people to be forced by State to accept it. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/s…

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, ...).

That's not growth, bitcoin's throughput is still less than a 56k modem from 25 years ago.

Being able to send and receive from anyone is growth, lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.

If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.

It's unnecessary nonsense because bitcoin is pointlessly crippled. Every other cryptocurrency has plenty of throughput and can be used decentralized.

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

#232

Post by sparkie »

jollybean wrote: post #29
can16358p wrote: post #2

Many people buy Bitcoin to "hodl", not to use, giving it some gold-like characteristic. If there was some crypto without any incentives of hodling long term, I'm sure the adoption would be higher. People don't spend Bitcoin the same way they don't spend gold in daily life: to own it as a long-term value reserve.

"If there was some crypto without any incentives of hodling long term, " The opposite. Cryptos that are anchored to USD have no appeal. They're less useful than USD, and, there's no 'get rich quick' aspect. So what's the point. The Ponzi Mania is what drives people into BTC and to talk about it incessantly on the Internet etc.. Without the mania, it's not going to spread. An institutionalized crypto, like one by the…

The use of "stablecoins" is for crypto arbitrage. Exchanging to USD via traditional means is just too slow to take any risks.

There was an early alt-coin, http://freico.in/, which had a demurrage fee for holding, which was intended to incentivize spending over saving. A terrible idea if you ask me.

Long-term saving is the biggest selling-point for Bitcoin. If the value of savings went down by design, it would have never got to where it is.

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

#233

Post by Yizahi »

lake_vincent wrote: post #191
Yizahi wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please describe in your own words how an asset can be "crypto backed", and exactly what operations/interactions are improved by this?

I mean, it is not that hard to imagine, right? A car title becomes an NFT. Whoever owns the NFT owns the car. Same with a house. Or a horse. I'm not a crypto expert, but that is a relatively trivial use case for NFTs. As for how this scales? I have no idea. I'm just speculating that it's gonna happen somehow . I mean, hell, look at this post - a nation adopted Bitcoin. You think that's the last time a government will…

Ok, lets go with your example. Car title. Or a house title.

Just where exactly the title itself is stored? I would assume it's a at least moderately long plaintext file, describing property and conditions. Maybe some authenticity attributes, like digital signatures of multiple parties. Where do you think is this artifact located? Inside the NFT?

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

#234

Post by madacol »

thedebuglife wrote: post #130

I value the insight of many that post here, so I would like to ask: isn't there any valuable application for blockchain tech? I realize BTC is imperfect, but blockchain itself is just a technology. Being pretty young, everyone I know is involved in crypto in one way or another. I'm personally waiting on the sidelines, but there should be some beneficial middle ground between going all-in and completely discarding the…

Well, money is the biggest use-case of it all. If you don't care about inflation (solved via decentralization), then there's the use-case of verifyably programmable money (ethereum)

Another one that I find fascinating is immutability, things like https://opentimestamps.org/ (uses bitcoin's blockchain), it allows you to proof that X piece of information existed prior to time Y.

I know of 2 different paths of assumptions you need to verify that proof:

1. Somewhat trusting bitcoin block's timestamps and the immutability that proof of work provides to the chain of blocks

2. Having a higher bound estimate of your attacker's ability to generate proof of work, and then sum all the available proof of work (it is sequentially chained in the blockchain from the block's proof, till the latest block produced), and compute how much time the attacker needed to spend to fake that proof of work, and that's your proof of the minimum time that must have passed since X was conceived

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

#235

Post by throw10920 »

JeremyNT wrote: post #216
jl6 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the early enthusiasm absolutely was from cypherpunk futurists who genuinely did want/expect it to make traditional finance obsolete.

This is pretty amusing to me, as somebody who did buy into the early hype - now over a decade ago. I actually got really excited about bitcoin, even mining way back when. It seemed like the possibilities were endless! That excitement disappeared pretty quickly once I came to the (in hindsight, obvious) realization that its only valid use cases were illicit transactions and speculation. I donated whatever I had and mo…

> its only valid use cases were illicit transactions

What makes this argument different than the "I don't have anything to hide" anti-privacy argument?

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

#236

Post by VMG »

mrguyorama wrote: post #225
VMG wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

people targeted by law enforcement or secret police need unstoppable transactions

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

#237

Post by osigurdson »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #103
osigurdson wrote: post #48

What I don't like about this article is it is almost entirely focused on price. If bitcoin would have went up, it would have been a wise move according to the premise of the article. I think a longer timescale is needed. I'd like to see an analysis of the situation, assuming that the value goes neither up or down, but simply holds a constant value in an inflation indexed manner. Would it still be a bad idea in that s…

> I'd like to see an analysis of the situation, assuming that the value goes neither up or down, but simply holds a constant value in an inflation indexed manner. Would it still be a bad idea in that situation? Why? BTC has zero history of doing this.

Without this type of analysis, the entire discussion is based on the current price and nothing else. Therefore if the price was up significantly we would have to conclude he was a genius. For now, we can conclude that he is not. However, if we are being intellectually honest, our opinion needs to be a function of the current price.

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

#238

Post by Yizahi »

pjkundert wrote: post #147
moomoo11 wrote: post #108

I want to wake up one day and cryptocurrency and anything related to it just doesn’t exist. Man that’d be a great day. Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.

Ya, back to where globalist bankster elites control every aspect of our lives. Ah, the good old days... ;)

It's clearly better when instead of bankster elites we would be controlled by some shady scammers sitting in the non-extradition offshore. Truly a revolution in finance.

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

#239

Post by hajile »

dragontamer wrote: post #142
Auracle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That all depends on the timeframe you’re looking at. The Bitcoin I bought (not nearly enough of) at under $80 is doing a lot better than any cash I still have from around then. A year or two from now Bitcoin very well might be back above it’s all time high.

When people are complaining about the declining purchasing power of USD, they are mostly talking about since November 2021, because that's when inflation started to really kick in. Its ironically, also when BTC really began to collapse from its $60,000 high. So it really demonstrates how much the BTC was benefiting from low-interest rate / inflationary policies.

Inflation numbers for December of 2021 were 6.8% CPI and 9.6% for wholesale (way higher when you look at goods only rather than services).

CPI was nasty for most of June 2020 to June 2021. It's just that fewer publications were picking up the story yet.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_07132021.pdf

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

#240

Post by undreren »

throw10920 wrote: post #235
JeremyNT wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty amusing to me, as somebody who did buy into the early hype - now over a decade ago. I actually got really excited about bitcoin, even mining way back when. It seemed like the possibilities were endless! That excitement disappeared pretty quickly once I came to the (in hindsight, obvious) realization that its only valid use cases were illicit transactions and speculation. I donated whatever I had and mo…

> its only valid use cases were illicit transactions What makes this argument different than the "I don't have anything to hide" anti-privacy argument?

The “only valid use cases” of privacy is not to hide illegal or criminal activity.

Crypto currency is a wasteful, destructive, expensive and innefficient technology that has few benefits except facilitating crimes like tax evasion, money laundering, financing terrorism and purchasing drugs.

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