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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

#291

Post by CyberDildonics »

frankenst1 wrote: post #275
CyberDildonics wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Anyone can spin up as many nodes as they want.

Your example is bizarre since it is a nonsense fork made by a scammer. Even so it does actually work and keeps running even though all the people that sold you a second layer said throughput above a 56k modem was impossible. The spam could easily be prevented by a minimum fee. Even $0.10 per transaction would be $120,000 an hour paid by spammer and going to miners.

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

#292

Post by theplumber »

jl6 wrote: post #123
theplumber wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> but that Bitcoin would replace all currencies (as early advocates would have had you believe) was not one of those reasons. Bitcoin was not bought because people believed it will replace all currencies. They bought bitcoin to get rich fast and cash out BEFORE the expected crash.

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

>> A lot of the early enthusiasm

These people were minning not buying bitcoin.

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

#293

Post by Yizahi »

yellowapple wrote: post #288
Yizahi wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are using word "smart contract" like it's some magic spell. You can't make a contract with external inputs, from outside the blockchain. Or more precisely, you can't make a reliable "sc" with such inputs. And no, those people claiming to "solve" oracle problem didn't solve anything.

You can't have "smart contracts" applied to the real world without centralised entities controlling them. Therefore they are mostly redundant and unnecessary.

Regarding the size of the title - I admit I don't know much about that area, but I know enough to doubt your claim that majority or even any titles can be reduced under the kilobyte. Splitting info into multiple tokens will only make things even worse.

Also this doesn't address the issue that UX of centralised entity working with such system will be atrocious. You postulate that there will be no centralised entity, but imho that's pure fiction.

And lastly - IPFS will never be adopted for anything important because it doesn't have safety guarantees. Not even with those services promising guarantees for some regular payment. Because subscription can run out, that service may close or anything else can happen, IPFS still can't guarantee file safety. That's a nice toy, but nothing more in the current implementation.

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

#294

Post by edwnj »

croon wrote: post #278
edwnj wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here’s a proposition: - Gold got dethroned from its 5k year rule as the global store of value because of globalisation & speed of commerce. FDR ban & dollar being taken off the gold standard sealed its fate. - Gold is replaced by the fiat currency of the global economic & military hegemon. - Central banking & MMT is deeply corrupt & dysfunctional to the core. - Digital alternatives were attempted but failed because of the double spend problem which in turn required private centralisation - Satoshi invented bitcoin which solves double spend problem. Through the invention of Proof of Work and the use of supply limit, Satoshi puts bitcoin up as a contender for global store of value. - A decade later, Bitcoin is in the zeitgeist. 100s billion in market cap. Best investors in the world are hedging for/against bitcoin (Paul Tudor Jones). Countries are banning/integrating bitcoin. - Basically the bet is on.

Now we have a game theoretic situation where the early adopters take the most risk but are going to reap the most benefits.

To call this a "base jump without parachute" is asinine and completely unwarranted. There is a clear bet going on with the smartest people in the world on both sides.

Some believe the “rulers” of the current system will never allow this to happen therefore we will get CBDC’s instead. Others believe, the collapse of the current debt passed system is inevitable therefore bitcoin is a lifeboat.

Either way, china isn’t using the same technology invented by satoshi (without the PoS & decentralisation) for no reason. The US isn’t thinking about thinking about creating a FedCoin for no reason. India isn’t building one for no reason.

The race is on. Its a bet. There is risks on both side but its definitely not a one sided thing to say the least.

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

#295

Post by edwnj »

croon wrote: post #278
edwnj wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also those are not just the 2 bets btw. El Salvador still supports the dollar.

There are those who envision a world full of privacy coins, CBDC's, bitcoin, company coins etc..

In this world, bitcoin will be the ruler of rulers. As in, Bitcoin will reward disciplined countries and punish undisciplined countries. Just like gold did in the past.

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

#296

Post by edwnj »

el-salvador wrote: post #221
edwnj wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Salvadoran here. It's hard to see the benefits if there is no transparency on the process. If we could even have a dashboard and an official website were we could have access to audited reports about the results of this bet, and see how its value varies over ti…

I 100% agree with you.

El Salvadors adoption could have definitely been handled in a more transparent and self sovereign manner. I really wasn't big fan of forcing companies to accept it..

But then again, you never get everything you want. I guess the best we could do is praise them for the good and provide feedback when they miss the mark..

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

#297

Post by kranke155 »

thinkloop wrote: post #137
kranke155 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

Are you asking how do lighting STAKERS make money if lightning transactions are so cheap? Right now they don't, people are doing it to bootstrap the network. But in the future, they will be able to make it on volume. Staking is nearly costless. There were 369 billion purchase transactions for goods and services worldwide in 2018 [1]. At a penny per, that's a lot of scratch. [1] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number…

This rests on the amazing assumption that Bitcoin will replace all currency everywhere somehow.

This is why I can’t get Bitcoiners - their assumptions are always over the top “we will take 100% of gold’s value” “nations will dissolve because of Bitcoin” or something of that order.

Compare that to ETH - people will build decentralised applications and ETH will be the currency in those applications. Stakers get a fee.

Simple.

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

#298

Post by kranke155 »

Yizahi wrote: post #138
kranke155 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

More info about LN: https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network

Seems like what I expected. Core Dev team of Bitcoin has corrupted that project completely. It’s a shame that Hal Finney/Nakamoto went away so early.

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

#299

Post by spreeker »

asah wrote: post #38
spreeker wrote: post #33

FIAT has proven time and time again to fail. Dollar world trade is unfair and benefits the USA unfairly. I would prefer a neutral crypto currency to be the new world reserve instead of a competing currency like the YUAN. Government should not have the power to print money out of thin air. The technology of blockchains is improving, for the example lightning network should make it very well possible. Just like with th…

Plus, fiat is too new to tell - it's only been 5,000 years! /s

And has failed every single time! Always ended in hyper inflation and reinvented over and over again..
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