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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#311

Post by cozzyd »

georgeecollins wrote: post #129
ks2048 wrote: post #33

Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily? I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.

It doesn't have to be "magic" that causes it to go up forever. People need a way to put large amounts of money in places that are difficult for governments to get to and /or easy to move across jurisdictional borders. Think: money launderers, people that are worried their corrupt government will seize their assets, people hiding money from someone they owe like a spouse in a divorce. These all seem to me to be reason…

Money laundering, tax evasion, and alimony avoidance. Yes there is a demand for those I suppose...

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#312

Post by mindcandy »

aksss wrote: post #225
mlcrypto wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive success actually for anyone holding. Did you forget the price is $100k?

What does that mean? USD value decreased that much and bitcoin proved itself as an asset with tangible value (like gold?), or did value of bitcoin itself rise? I’m not a currency guy, so I don’t pretend to know crap, it’s a real question, not rhetorical.

Compared to the dollar over the past five years…

The dollar down vs itself by 20ish percent.

The median home price is up 30ish percent.

Oil is up 45ish percent.

Gold and the SP500 are each up 80ish percent.

Bitcoin is up 1000ish percent.

If you snooze through the day-by-day, season-by-season noise, the volatility of Bitcoin is a fun and relaxing rocket to ride. You just have to ignore all discussion focused on time frames of less than four years.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#313

Post by favorited »

kragen wrote: post #242
do_not_redeem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

El Salvador can't issue fiat. They use US dollars. Only the US Federal Reserve can issue USD.

They could . Ecuador does in fact mint its own US-dollar coins, and El Salvador could dedollarize.

Ecuador mints their own centavo coins, but they are not legal tender outside of Ecuador. They've never released their own $1 coin into general circulation – their ubiquitous Sacagawea dollars are minted in the US.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#314

Post by olalonde »

georgeecollins wrote: post #105
ptero wrote: post #17

That's heavy editorializing: El Salvador keeps buying the Bitcoin for its strategic reserve. Businesses and citizens can keep using it. But for getting an IMF loan, IMF (which, to put it mildly, doesn't like Bitcoin) required the end to Bitcoin legal tender status. Now the businesses are free to accept it or not instead of being required to accept it. That's all. The government plans to keep buying and using it.

There seems to be two concepts that are getting conflated. One concept is that BTC is a good investment. Historically that is undeniable. The other concept is that it is a good medium of exchange. I think that is not so true because 1) its neither cheap nor easy to buy a lot of things with it 2) a thing that goes up in value is not a good medium of exchange because people don't want to spend it, they want to hoard it…

You're also conflating two distinct concepts: "Bitcoin the currency" and "Bitcoin the payment network."

The currency itself can be used independently of its base-layer network, which is intentionally slow and costly (functioning primarily as a settlement layer). This separation is enabled by off-chain or layer 2 systems, such as the Lightning Network or custodial platforms. These solutions retain Bitcoin's monetary benefits - like a predictable money supply, off/on ramping through the base layer - while enabling fast, cheap transactions. The tradeoff is that you must trust an intermediary, but this mirrors the same compromise inherent to digital USD payment systems (Venmo, credit cards, PayPal, etc.).

In fact, USD lacks a true "base layer" altogether. The closest equivalent would be the Federal Reserve Bank’s ledger, but accounts there are restricted to large financial institutions, not individuals.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#316

Post by esafak »

carlosjobim wrote: post #201
EA-3167 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is... a strange and jarring thing to read. My kneejerk response was that yes, they are innovating and experimenting with oppressive and corrupt governance, but that is ultimately uncharitable. A more balanced response is that while you may personally think of Bitcoin as progressive (I can't imagine why) you certainly can't claim that Bukele's El Salvador is progressive. You may like the gang crackdown, you may a…

The word progressive has a real meaning besides the popular figure-of-speech of calling leftist policies "progressive". Progress in anything, including politics, can move in a direction you like or in a direction you don't like. It's still progress.

No, it does not. Progress is positive. The word you are thinking of is change. Change can take you in any direction, even though the left also likes that word.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#317

Post by acdha »

aydyn wrote: post #284
mystified5016 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USD doesn't frequently lose all or nearly all value as we see from cryptocoins. My $10 today will be worth $10 tomorrow barring nuclear war or an apocalypse.

Sure but the USD has two order of magnitude more total value, and probably more than that in day to day usage. So there's an implicit question there which apparently you and everyone else missed.

Why do you think the USD has so many orders of magnitude usage? Nobody missed the question, that was the point: for currencies, stability is what makes them useful. You don’t have an incentive to hoard dollars hoping they’ll go up in value, so you spend them and boost the economy. Other countries use dollars because they have the same benefit: I can write a contract with you saying what we’ll pay over the next year and be confident that neither of us is going to be widely inconvenienced by the kind of swings Bitcoin has.

Remember that guy who spent 100BTC on a pizza? It’s a funny story but that’s why nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#318

Post by zombiwoof »

portaouflop wrote: post #188

IMF gave them 1.4 billion to abandon the “experiment”: > The IMF made this a condition for a loan of 1.4 billion US dollars (1.35 billion euros). In December of last year, the IMF reached an agreement with President Nayib Bukele’s government on the loan of the stated amount to strengthen the country’s “fiscal sustainability” and mitigate the “risks associated with Bitcoin,” as it was described. —- I dislike cryptocur…

Facts help bolster an argument

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#319

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Kindra wrote: post #268
kylebenzle wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.

Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?

100% this.

Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin.

The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#320

Post by ekianjo »

markasoftware wrote: post #285
Kindra wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?

The post you're replying to is about Bitcoin being "used", not specifically "used for everyday transactions". Bitcoin has so far been a decent asset to hold as a store of value if you don't want to or can't store your money in the traditional financial system. Lots of everyday people in countries with high inflation or strict controls or how people can store money hold Bitcoin (or perhaps more commonly, stablecoins)…

BTC cash has lower fees I believe, I wonder if it could actually work as a currency for day to day payments.
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