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El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

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271–280 of 421 posts

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#271
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But bitcoin is more authoritarian-controlled than the US dollar. The US is democracy, whereas the Bitcoin development team is not.

Bitcoin devs do not have control of the network. Anyone can fork bitcoin.

What do you mean they don't have control of the network? The bitcoin network is by definition the network that runs the bitcoin software developed by the bitcoin dev team.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on to that, it's been used pretty nicely in the El Zonte beach town [1]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...

According to the article, someone donated "six-figure" amounts of Bitcoin to the town each year on the condition that they learn how to use Bitcoin: > Beneficiaries of the digital currency had to learn how to use the Bitcoin itself, creating a Bitcoin economy. If you give a relatively poor town the option to take free money as long as they learn how to use Bitcoin, of course they're going to learn how to use Bitcoin.…

> The real test is whether Bitcoin makes sense in an otherwise functioning economy where people aren't given free Bitcoin and they have the option to use a credit card that comes with a lot of consumer protections and zero (or even negative) fees.

Why don't they have this option today? These people are unbanked and it's good that someone is offering a service. It's pretty customary to have an upfront incentive to acquire the customer. I got a $10 Uber credit when I signed up and even a few hundred dollar bonus when I opened my brokerage account. But I guess I'm not from a "relatively poor town" so its not manipulation.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .. millions of transactions per second, which is what El Salvador will be using? Why would that be what El Salvador is using? That is such a weird notion, and one of the reasons Bitcoin is often incorrectly called unscalable. How many financial transactions do you think an average person does per day ? I don't know but probably not much more than one, maybe even less. If you handle special B2B cases like high frequ…

You think the average person does less than one financial transaction per day? O_o I mean, sure, not everyone is out getting a coffee every morning, but that strikes me as roughly an order of magnitude below reality. Let’s say, shopping three times a week, with 5 transactions per shopping trip; that’s already an average of 2 transactions a day, but worse, since it’s clustered in small time intervals. How do possibly…

Over the last three months, I've made on average slightly more than two transactions per week, most of which is due to buying food every 3 or 4 days. Everything else is a rounding error.

Now I won't claim my consumption pattern is typical, but it certainly shows that 0-1 transaction per day is possible. (What are the five shops you visit three times a week?)

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#274
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what country you live in. A few transactions like these every day would amount to $20-30 per month. Whereas you could use cash and pay no fees.

> A few transactions like these every day... You don't do "a few of these" every day. It's for moving significant amounts of money, where security starts to matter. Lightning network is for small transactions. You don't need your daily purchase of a coffee to be on the Bitcoin blockchain for the rest of history. > Whereas you could use cash and pay no fees. Somebody still has to spend time and money managing all that…

> Lightning network is for small transactions.

That's why I said a few transactions every day on average, as in 2 or 3, which seems a conservative estimate.

> Somebody still has to spend time and money managing all that cash.

I don't know how you manage your cash, I manage it myself, and I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed". Especially in a third-world country, it seems unimaginable.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#275
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin devs do not have control of the network. Anyone can fork bitcoin.

What do you mean they don't have control of the network? The bitcoin network is by definition the network that runs the bitcoin software developed by the bitcoin dev team.

no, the devs can't unilaterally make decisions on how the network works. There are decentralized nodes (very low-barrier to entry) that run the code; the nodes must actually run that code, and devs have no control over it. Then there are miners, not quite as decentralized because the barriers to entry are much higher here; they have to mine on that chain, which is also a way of "running" it. So the devs have to interact with two decentralized, in effect anarchist (in the political sense) networks that have to all consent to their changes. This is why changes are very rare (no push updates every other day like any other forsaken software!), and when they happen, they come with huge debates in the networks (check the blocksize wars).

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strike is using lightning where the fees are barely a few satoshis (much smaller than cents) most of the time. This isn't the Bitcoin of 2015, there has been lots of new development, lightning is here and is being used with growing adoption (1ml.com), there are other changes coming to improve the base layer itself (taproot, eltoo, etc).

I still don't understand how the lightning network works and maintains the important blockchain feature of bitcoin.

Essentially it nets off contra positions so they don't have to hit the chain in a gross basis, but only on a net basis.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When that article was written the transaction fees were around $1.50-$2.00 USD which is already a lot for meals and snacks. Now that the average transaction fees are anywhere from $7 - $60 I doubt people are buying much with bitcoin's dialup throughput. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Strike is using lightning where the fees are barely a few satoshis (much smaller than cents) most of the time. This isn't the Bitcoin of 2015, there has been lots of new development, lightning is here and is being used with growing adoption (1ml.com), there are other changes coming to improve the base layer itself (taproot, eltoo, etc).

To open a LN channel you need an on-chain transaction. Same for closing a channel. Currently a Bitcoin transaction is around 7 USD. So you need 14 USD to participate, assuming the transaction cost does not change. 14 USD is more than a daily income for the average citizen, most will be below 10 USD.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#278
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few transactions like these every day... You don't do "a few of these" every day. It's for moving significant amounts of money, where security starts to matter. Lightning network is for small transactions. You don't need your daily purchase of a coffee to be on the Bitcoin blockchain for the rest of history. > Whereas you could use cash and pay no fees. Somebody still has to spend time and money managing all that…

> Lightning network is for small transactions. That's why I said a few transactions every day on average, as in 2 or 3, which seems a conservative estimate. > Somebody still has to spend time and money managing all that cash. I don't know how you manage your cash, I manage it myself, and I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed". Especially in a third-world country, it seems unim…

They mean not being robbed.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on to that, it's been used pretty nicely in the El Zonte beach town [1]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...

How a large a "cut" they take from every transaction is the question here. As for cash,there's no cut taken by any middle man. And when the central government or bank is involved in pushing a legal currency -- there shouldn't be any cut.

You know damn well that banks and credit card institutions take cuts of transactions. Why this aversion to Bitcoin on HN, even with LN?

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on to that, it's been used pretty nicely in the El Zonte beach town [1]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...

According to the article, someone donated "six-figure" amounts of Bitcoin to the town each year on the condition that they learn how to use Bitcoin: > Beneficiaries of the digital currency had to learn how to use the Bitcoin itself, creating a Bitcoin economy. If you give a relatively poor town the option to take free money as long as they learn how to use Bitcoin, of course they're going to learn how to use Bitcoin.…

Apparently there is a blockchain based hearth stone clone.

Someone listed a card for 3.6 ETH two years ago [0]. In USD: $324 at $90 per ETH. Of course today the price of ETH has risen but the value of the card did not. It's not worth $10k. It's still worth $324 assuming the initial price was correct to begin with. The real price therefore is 0.12 ETH and those 0.12 ETH would be the salary of the creator of the NFT if you were a "freelancer" i.e. your income denominated in ETH goes down over time. Your best bet isn't to keep making NFTs. It's to make them as early as possible, get as many ETH as possible and then just sit on them and never do anything again.

[0] https://opensea.io/assets/0x67cbbb366a51fff9ad869d027e496ba4...

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