Ok, let's talk in 10 years :)
One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
251–260 of 299 posts
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#252This was implemented poorly (and bitcoin was a poor choice), but it's not crazy to want a currency that is decoupled from the US government. Especially in Central America where the US government has a pretty shady track record.
This isn't a problem though, countries issue their own currencies all the time. The problem is when you need to run a trade deficit, you need to buy more stuff than you sell internationally. It drives down the value of your currency. But crypto doesn't solve that. And borrowing against the national debt to buy risky crypto assets (which is what El Salvador did) makes that problem worse, not better. They will default on this debt.
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#253Prediction: El Salvador will look genius in the next Bitcoin cycle. Other emerging market central banks will proceed to copy their model creating the next cycle’s peak. Once they stop buying, the market will crash again creating either a global depression or a bailout of the btc economy by USG, causing a repeat of the bank bailout that spawned btc in the first place.
Let's be clear about this, unless El Salvador is in a debt crisis. They won't own any crypto by the next BTC cycle because they'll have gone bankrupt, sold off any crypto assets they've got, taken significant bailout money from places like the IMF. They don't have the luxury of sitting on BTC and riding the wave, they are bankrupt. They have $100m of BTC and they need to pay $800m by Jan 2023. And their debt is trading at something like 30 cents on the dollar because no one believes they can pay.
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#254After so many cycles, Bitcoin has become one of the most respectable pyramid schemes available to the general public (only behind real estate speculation maybe). I think we'll see another even worse cycle unfortunately within the next 10 years.
Real estate has at least one thing going for it: you can live in a house.
Yes, it's not called "imaginary estate", but even practical things can be speculated.
I'm sure I would pay $500 per month for internet or drinking water for instance, but in general this type of rent-seeking behavior is not good for the economy.
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#255In what multiverse is achieving 20% adoption among customers and sellers in only a year a "failure"? Also, no shit the IMF is going to rattle off dire-sounding warnings; the IMF has a vested interest in keeping countries like El Salvador dependent on the legacy financial system.
It's way too early to declare El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment a failure (or, for that matter, a success). Adopting a new currency (let alone an entire alternative financial system) doesn't happen overnight.
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The “only valid use cases” of privacy is not to hide illegal or criminal activity. What are the others, in the specific context of this conversation (which is privacy from the government, not from random other citizens)?
Governments could easily use private data to blackmail or silence you, even if you’ve done nothing illegal. This is perhaps the primary reason that the right of privacy even exists.
Governments could also easily freeze bank accounts, even if you've done nothing illegal.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin directly mitigate (if not outright prevent) that risk.
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#257Earlier 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?
A system with a middleman capable of reversing transactions enables fraud. See also: the folks behind Flipper Zero being permanently robbed of more than a million USD thanks to PayPal's whims (as the latest of a long list of high-profile cases of PayPal taking vendors' money and running).
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#258The policy only ever made a little sense. What El Salvador desperately wants is a currency it can inflate to pay for the stuff it can not afford. In this regard, it is no different than any other country. What it had was a currency it does not print (US dollar) and for which there is an ongoing international shortage. What El Salvador got with Bitcoin was yet another currency it does not print and for which there is…
If you have a choice, it's great to be a country that has a currency that the country itself can print (reserve currency).
Second best is a currency that no country can print.
Third best is a currency that another country prints (since that country can easily devalue your holdings).
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Differences: 1. No one needs btc for education tourism etc. So there is no underlying demand that the general btc holder can middleman onto 2. You aren't supposed to hodl any kind of forex pair hoping it goes up forever. Also I forgot to stress that forex is trading and not investment
These people I see around here need to go to a BTC ATM to have cash for the coffee stand right next to it. What's so different? The scale, OK, but anything else? Actually, people are buying land/houses and cars with BTC here, also the largest local web shop (a large EU seller too) - the local Amazon let's say - accepts it, and they claim it's used for a small but not insignificant chunk of the sales.
So most of those places instantly convert the btc into usd. Prices themselves are listed in USD and you have to pay some markup for USD conversion too. It's sell pressure on btc so bad in any case
Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
#260This was implemented poorly (and bitcoin was a poor choice), but it's not crazy to want a currency that is decoupled from the US government. Especially in Central America where the US government has a pretty shady track record.
That's the thing. No-one wondered why they might want Crypto, the question was always "Why Bitcoin"? There are many deep subtle questions about Economics, even with stablecoins but the choice of Bitcoin was way off base, the only possible reason to use it was because it was the only one most people had heard of. Bitcoin is totally nonsensical for low-value high volume transactions and by the time the money gets paid…
> No-one wondered why they might want Crypto, the question was always "Why Bitcoin"?
That question has an obvious answer: because it's the oldest and biggest cryptocurrency. Not letting perfect be the enemy of adequate (let alone good) is a perfectly reasonable choice.