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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

#271

Post by sizzle »

mrb wrote: post #190
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.

As an early Bitcoin adopter, I wouldn't say so. I have never seen anyone among the people I knew in the Bitcoin community in the last 12 years who believed it would "make tradfi obsolete". For example, I expect Bitcoin to likely remain an alternative system, used only for a minority of transactions. And this view didn't conflict with my desire to buy in when I did.

Wow 12 years in the game, did you make F U money?

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

#272

Post by scotty79 »

smcl wrote: post #80
scotty79 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it Every 4 years it looks like that. And yet the next greed fueled ascension comes around like a clock. Each next one smaller than the last one. Next one will come around 2025 but this time it's going to be just few hundred percent.

Eh there might be another bump. But as long as it's a space for scammers, pump-and-dump schemes, shitcoins and bullshitters it's just not for me. A pretty ridiculous amount of money has been sunk into making cryptocurrencies look like a big thing, instead of actually solving the problems that prevented people from actually using them. That makes me think that deep down the cryptocurrency people aren't that serious ab…

So you are opting out of Bitcoin because other cryptocurrencies exist?

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

#273

Post by scotty79 »

ericmcer wrote: post #112
scotty79 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it Every 4 years it looks like that. And yet the next greed fueled ascension comes around like a clock. Each next one smaller than the last one. Next one will come around 2025 but this time it's going to be just few hundred percent.

My Coworker said this exact thing to me in 2019, that now was the time to buy because not many were talking about crypto and many had written it off, but that it worked in 4 year spikes. Wish I had listened to him then haha.

Best times to buy bitcoin was in 2011, 2015, 2019, 2022 ... roughly every 4 years. Exactly at the time HN thinks bitcoin is dead and burried.

And best times to sell (if you needed to sell) was in 2013, 2017, 2021 ... so I think the next time will be around 2025.

Every cycle swings less (in term of percentage change) so the next one will be just few hundred percent (troth to peak) and following ones even smaller till bitcoin will become yet another random walk asset like stocks.

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

#274

Post by Yizahi »

yellowapple wrote: post #261
Yizahi wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Plaintext doesn't take up all that much space relatively-speaking; it'd be entirely feasible to store all the data on an automotive title (for example) directly on-chain. Also, there's no reason why the property and conditions have to be stored together; they could readily exist as separate artifacts sharing some ID or reference.

First - that's a big if. Only super bare and short, zero formatting plaintext, will fit inside NFT (as they exist today). I highly doubt people would want to work with such data, degrading their UX dramatically.

Second - do you realise that title contains private information which will be forever exposed on-chain?

Third - ok, even you admit that not everything will fit on-chain. Then who will store the rest of the data? Centralised entity? Which will have its internal security, bookkeeping, staff and so on?

Why do we need NFTs then, if all the work will be done by a centralised entity anyway?

Fourth - in the hypothetical case when we have titles and NFTs linked to them, there are several interesting questions - what happens when owner of the NFT forgets his private keys? What happen if the owner dies? What happens when the court judges declare that the ownership is incorrect? How are marriages handled, where today multiple people can own the same property?

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

#275

Post by frankenst1 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #250
frankenst1 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized. That is literally the purpose of building second layers. We don't need to keep on-chain records of every microtransaction and coffee purchase in an immutable, ever-growing blockchain synchronized across thousands of nodes across the globe. > If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network. Sure I can. It is ca…

> Sure I can. It is called a submarine swap. You can call it whatever you want, someone still has to sync with the main chain, where all the utility is. You can get together with your friend and give each other IOUs all day every day, it doesn't somehow change the fact that bitcoin's throughput is severely crippled to be the speed of a dialup modem. Have you ever stopped to think that other cryptocurrencies don't hav…

> Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.

Bitcoin SV did not care about these things and is dead because of it. Its blocks are ~200MB spammed with mostly non-payment related data. Its blockchain has grown to over 6 TB, the global number of nodes verifying the chain is down to 20 and it has been delisted by many exchanges and block explorers.

Bitcoin and Lightning in comparison have ~25,000 nodes.

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

#276

Post by ploppyploppy »

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…

Price is one thing.

Its utility as a decentralised banking system for those who have no access to banking in poorer regions of the world is a clear benefit and has achieved what it wanted for the country.

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

#277

Post by spiralx »

n4r9 wrote: post #125
upsidesinclude wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my other comment. El S. is in a pretty strange place because they don't have their own currency. They have no control over their economy in that regard, so adopting a separate currency which frees them from singular dollar dependence is quite useful. Nullifies what claims exactly?

> Nullifies what claims exactly? Bitcoin seems to be intended as a decentralised payment system that bypasses any third party institutions. My gut feeling is that: in order for a state to provide legal recourse, bitcoin addresses need to be linked to a centralised personal/business identity that can be tracked down and sued or prosecuted if necessary. For Bitcoin to feel safe for the normal person, it would have to i…

Ironically the Chivo wallet is a centralised system that only touches the wider BTC network when transactions are made to a non-Chivo address.

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

#278

Post by croon »

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…

No, I specifically called it a failure regardless of results, because results of surviving a base jump without a parachute doesn't affect the merit of the decision to jump.

See: Survivorship bias.

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

#279

Post by spiralx »

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…

Estonia uses a blockchain to act as an immutable way to store timestamped hashes of government data for security and verification purposes - they started building this a year before the Bitcoin whitepaper was released in fact. That's the only valuable use for blockchains I've seen.

https://e-estonia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020mar-nochanges-f...

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

#280

Post by n4r9 »

spiralx wrote: post #277
n4r9 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nullifies what claims exactly? Bitcoin seems to be intended as a decentralised payment system that bypasses any third party institutions. My gut feeling is that: in order for a state to provide legal recourse, bitcoin addresses need to be linked to a centralised personal/business identity that can be tracked down and sued or prosecuted if necessary. For Bitcoin to feel safe for the normal person, it would have to i…

Ironically the Chivo wallet is a centralised system that only touches the wider BTC network when transactions are made to a non-Chivo address.

Thank you for the info, I didn't know about Chivo. This may well be the government's attempt to address the issue of legal recourse. Interesting though that it still was barely used, at least partly because of security issues:

> Though around half of the Salvadorans surveyed have downloaded Chivo to date, with 40% of those downloads happening in September 2021, around 61% of those have abandoned it after withdrawing the $30 dollar sign-up incentive, the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Only 1.6% of all remittances were received in bitcoins via digital wallets in February 2022, according to El Salvador’s Central Bank.

> Chivo download numbers have been negligible in 2022, suggesting that the push has run out of steam. Some of those who have stuck with the application are using it for transactions unrelated to Bitcoin. The median active user does not send or receive a single Bitcoin payment a month nor make any Chivo ATM withdrawals, the survey found.

https://restofworld.org/2022/el-salvador-chivo-bitcoin-walle...

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