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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

#281

Post by n4r9 »

upsidesinclude wrote: post #245
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…

You might be right. The important thing is that the person must accept the responsibility of owning all aspects of their wealth. No one can remove it from you, but you can make the mistake of giving it away. Then you bear the responsibility for losing it. That's not a very big trade off for some people.

Yeah, I think most people find consumer protection regulations very reassuring. It's natural that they're reluctant to transition to a system that does not (and arguably cannot) have any.

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

#282

Post by spywaregorilla »

simonh wrote: post #248
spywaregorilla wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a separate concern if you're arguing the government should not be able to print its own currency.

I didn’t say any such thing and I don’t see how that’s relevant as remittances from the US are generally in Dollars, not local currency.

Sure, whatever. I didn't mean you specifically. My point is merely that crypto enthusiasts and radical individiaulists often praise the concept of the government not being able to inflate their money with printing. Which, yeah, has downsides. But there's also downsides to your government going broke. Like your society falling apart, which increases the cost of local goods, and then bam, suddenly you've got inflation anyway even if the value of the coin remains the same on an FX level.

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

#283

Post by WHATDOESIT »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #259
WHATDOESIT wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a great point, yeah I guess this is generating sell pressure on BTC.

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

#284

Post by osigurdson »

prottog wrote: post #268
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…

> simply holds a constant value in an inflation indexed manner Gold and currencies backed by gold come very close to this, with historical evidence to back it up. The purchasing power of gold -- that is, its convertibility to goods and services you might wish to consume -- have remained remarkably stable over time. Countries stopped issuing currencies backed by gold for a few different reasons, but its ability to hol…

Yes, true. Some economists suggest that the adherence to the gold standard prolonged the great depression. I suppose in some sense the entire economy is a kind of game where the goal (should be at least) to maximize the benefit to all participants. Having a stably valued token (fiat currency, crypto, gold backed, etc.) is a decision variable, not the objective function.

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

#286

Post by pmarreck »

yellowapple wrote: post #262
pmarreck wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationally, I understand what you're saying, speaking as someone who was intrigued by Bitcoin in 2012 and possibly made a little money off it while I was interested in it. Humanistically, I gotta say, perceptions matter. I left crypto because it just started "tasting gross", regardless of the technological interest I had. Clearly, I wasn't in a minority with that.

The Internet tastes pretty gross these days, too, what with the dominant business model being surveillance-driven marketing.

I hear you, but these excellent YouTube recommendations and Google App stories tuned so precisely to my interests wouldn't even be remotely as good unless I permitted myself to be data-surveilled. I can't tell you how much I've learned via these (whether informational or entertaining). (Note: I pay for YouTube, because it is an excellent service.)

As penance for this, I will cite Martin Fowler's excellent essay on why privacy is necessary for at least some: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

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

#287

Post by mrb »

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 and speculation»

Crytocurrencies have many valid use cases. For one, they are the only system that allows sending money truly anywhere in the world, to anyone, anytime, and near-instantly. No other system accomplishes this. My most poignant example was being able to send money to a then-homeless unbanked friend, on a sunday, and he even converted it to cash in hands within 1 hour as he was near a bitcoin ATM. In such an emergency, no other system would have worked. We briefly considered Western Union but he was banned from them due to previous financial issues. So the permissionless aspect of Bitcoin was another benefit.

It's a little puzzling that you were an early adopter, and yet did not appreciate the qualities. Perhaps you think crypto isn't useful to you personally, therefore it has no use cases for anyone else.

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

#288

Post by yellowapple »

Yizahi wrote: post #274
yellowapple wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

> First - that's a big if

That ain't an "if" at all. The actual identifying information on, say, a vehicle title or land deed takes up maybe a couple hundred bytes at most (if not far less), whereas most NFT-capable blockchains allow transaction metadata on the scale of multiple kilobytes.

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

Nearly (if not entirely) all of the actually-private data (namely: the owner's PII) is redundant under a title-as-NFT system, since ownership is asserted by wallet/token custody rather than being baked into the document.

Besides, encryption is a thing that exists.

> Third - ok, even you admit that not everything will fit on-chain.

I admit no such thing. What I actually said is that you can break up large data into smaller chunks such that it can fit on-chain even if it somehow blows out the chain's transaction metadata ceiling.

Regardless:

> Then who will store the rest of the data?

Have you heard of IPFS?

> 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?

All of these things can be (and, in the case of lost keys, have been) addressed with smart contracts; the blockchain can programmatically define conditions under which the NFT can be transferred, e.g. with consent from multiple parties. Such programs can also represent multi-person ownership; in a world where blockchain computation can handle the governance of large organizations, something like a marriage or an estate is a readily solvable problem.

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

#289

Post by yellowapple »

undreren wrote: post #270
yellowapple wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Governments can also violate all your other rights as well. But this completely irrelevant to the post I responded to.

It's absolutely relevant. You replied with one way a government can violate your rights and the importance of mitigating that violation. I replied with another way a government can violate your rights and the importance of mitigating that violation.

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

#290

Post by px43 »

smcl wrote: post #131
px43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For millions of people, crypto-currencies are the most convenient way to buy lots of things. I've been buying things regularly with cryptocurrencies since 2011. Domain names, video games, hosting, consumer electronics, clothing, airfare, etc. 2017 marked a pivotal point where Bitcoin specifically abandoned catering to the brick and mortar and e-commerce use cases, and started focusing on large scale financial service…

Well that's kind of a bad comparison, since Yen isn't my local currency and yet it has been useful to me when I was visiting Japan. I could buy it for a reasonable price in my current country, in basically any airport or bureau de change around the world. I could easily withdraw Yen from an ATM when in Japan, could buy things anywhere in the country with Yen and then switch back the couple-thousand I couldn't spend a…

> I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs.

Eh, not that hard really. Expedia started accepting Bitcoin in 2014.

https://www.expedia.com/Checkout/BitcoinTermsAndConditions

> "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc

Yeah fuck those people. I've been in the space since 2009 and I've never once recommended to any friends or family to invest in cryptocurrencies, and in my experience, the vast majority of people in the space are the same way. The "get rich quick" types who treat all of life like one big MLM have always been reviled, but none of that is unique to cryptocurrencies. Shady hucksters and con men have always existed, and always will.

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