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El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

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351–360 of 421 posts

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#351
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My understanding is that you start by doing an actual BTC transaction of, say X USD, for which you pay the fee, and then you can "spend" up to X-fee USD in the lightning network. People who receive payment from you can opt for getting a BTC transaction from your stash or use it to do other payments. The base idea is that it uses the BTC network as a dispute settlement fallback. "It works but is expensive, let's just…

So it's like withdrawing money from the bank as cash to use. I get that, but after I promise the money to bunch of people how does the system prevent me from double spending or just redepositing my money to my account?

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#352
post #342
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of: Bitcoin doesn’t allow transactions without knowing the key but that isn’t true for exchanges and the public ledger makes it easy to block transactions using that address. If everyone subject to US jurisdiction or treaty agreements blocks transactions traceable back to tainted addresses, the value plummets.

So far no such attack on Bitcoin's fungibility has materialized; it's plausible that the outcome would be that Bitcoin would become useless to everyone subject to US jurisdiction or treaty agreements. So it seems unlikely to happen without a major war, because that plausible outcome would result in enormous capital losses for many people who are influential in the US. Another plausible result is countries withdrawing…

You’re leaving out the possibility which matches what we’ve seen historically: the major players decide that the money from criminals and rogue states isn’t enough to give up on legitimate business and just block those specific transactions. Someone can have a ton of Bitcoin and simply choose not to accept transactions from the smaller set of addresses on a watchlist.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#353
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. This has been happening since 2008 with no serious repercussions.

My car's "check engine" light has been on for a while now, but it still runs with no serious repercussions, guess I can ignore it. You see how that logic would be flawed?

Maybe it's just the light that's broken.

The loose monetary policy might cause higher than desired inflation and the Fed might lose control of it. But we said that in 2008 and it didn't happen. We might be wrong again.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#354
post #352
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far no such attack on Bitcoin's fungibility has materialized; it's plausible that the outcome would be that Bitcoin would become useless to everyone subject to US jurisdiction or treaty agreements. So it seems unlikely to happen without a major war, because that plausible outcome would result in enormous capital losses for many people who are influential in the US. Another plausible result is countries withdrawing…

You’re leaving out the possibility which matches what we’ve seen historically: the major players decide that the money from criminals and rogue states isn’t enough to give up on legitimate business and just block those specific transactions. Someone can have a ton of Bitcoin and simply choose not to accept transactions from the smaller set of addresses on a watchlist.

Oh, that's not a possibility. The part you don't understand is that in Bitcoin you can't tell which transactions are people giving money to themselves and which ones are actually giving money to other people. So if Coinbase wanted to block transactions from, say, medical marijuana dispensaries ("criminals") they couldn't just block transactions directly from the dispensaries' known addresses; they'd have to block transactions that drew coins indirectly from the dispensaries as well. That would mean that your transactions could get blocked by Coinbase even if you weren't a dispensary, but because you had sold services to a dispensary in the past, or to someone who had sold services to a dispensary.

To avoid this risk, you'd have to somehow get access to Coinbase's blacklist of dispensary addresses—maybe they'd publish it—and blacklist them yourself. Pretty quickly you'd find you couldn't accept coins from anyone who used a mixer or any offshore exchanges, because all of them would receive tainted dispensary coins sooner or later. You'd probably find that a lot of the Bitcoin you thought you already had was tainted, too, or would become tainted later as new addresses were added to the blacklist.

(Also, presumably any published address would become tainted pretty quickly; anyone could buy some tainted millibitcoins and send them to it, and people in the tainted economy would have an incentive to get as many Bitcoin owners as possible on their side of the fence. So everybody who accepts donations by publishing a Bitcoin address would get their donations tainted: camgirls, libgen, sci-hub mirrors, Electrum server operators.)

So basically this kind of attack on fungibility would destroy most of the value of Bitcoin for anyone who was participating in the attack. "Simply choose not to accept transactions from the smaller set of addresses" isn't a coherent alternative.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#355
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why I said a few transactions every day on average, as in 2 or 3, which seems a conservative estimate. Lightning network has virtually no fees. You were replying to someone who managed to get a "real" Bitcoin blockchain transaction through for less than a dollar. > I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed" I was thinking of the people managing cash registers.

Okay I didn't know that the LN has no fees. How does this network sustain itself economically?

It has virtually no fees, often just one satoshi (less than 1/10th of a cent).

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#356
post #347
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a wrong understanding of how LN works. You are conflating inbound and outbound liquidity. To receive 1 btc a merchant does not have to open a 1 btc channel. Another node has to open a channel with him. He can buy 1 btc of incoming liquidity for a few cents. Some nodes offer incoming liquidity for free (it costs them almost nothing to keep their btc in a channel for a while). And your super simple setup is co…

> He can buy 1 btc of incoming liquidity for a few cents. I’m very interested. Where can I buy this?

https://lnbig.com/#/ for example, or just search for "How to get inbound liquidity on LN"

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#357
post #354
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re leaving out the possibility which matches what we’ve seen historically: the major players decide that the money from criminals and rogue states isn’t enough to give up on legitimate business and just block those specific transactions. Someone can have a ton of Bitcoin and simply choose not to accept transactions from the smaller set of addresses on a watchlist.

Oh, that's not a possibility. The part you don't understand is that in Bitcoin you can't tell which transactions are people giving money to themselves and which ones are actually giving money to other people. So if Coinbase wanted to block transactions from, say, medical marijuana dispensaries ("criminals") they couldn't just block transactions directly from the dispensaries' known addresses; they'd have to block tra…

Not only do I understand it, that was my point which you missed: from the perspective of the people in the regulatory system, that’s a feature — putting Iran on the blacklist and go after everyone who works with them is a feature, not a bug, and Bitcoin makes that so much easier than the traditional banking system that it’ll have a stronger deterrent effect because it not makes it easier to block now but also provides full retroactive punishment for anyone identified later. Normally you’d only catch people with what they had recently done, not a full immutable ledger of every transaction they ever made.

I suspect this is also why there’s no concerted campaign against it: Bitcoin just hasn’t been a barrier to prosecution.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#358
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Channel factories will be able to open and close many channels at once, so if you open 100 channels in a single transaction, well then you can divide the onchain cost by 100.

Channel factories only work as long as all participants of the factory want their Bitcoin inside the LN. As soon as any party wants their Bitcoin in their Bitcoin wallet, the factory needs to close all channels. This makes is unusable in the real world as people can and will not commit their whole networth into static channels that need settlement of 100 or so unknown parties until they can send it anywhere else. All…

You can splice out bitcoin from a channel without closing the channel. The channel balance can go almost all outwards (some is kept to be able to pay transaction fees). In the channel factory scenario, one participant can receive bitcoin on chain without closing the whole factory. However, they will have to pay the transaction fee which could be prohibitively expensive.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine what would happen if a government in a place like the Middle East or parts of Africa collapsed. The Zimbabweans that lost all of their savings to hyperinflation were literally counting the days until Mugabe's government collapsed.

Technically it collapsed the moment land was forcibly repossessed because from that day on Zimbabwe could no longer feed itself. The government merely managed to survive longer than it should.

Indeed. http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#360
post #102
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the currency is in a bank that deals with the US it could be seized. Bitcoin doesn't allow this.

Kind of: Bitcoin doesn’t allow transactions without knowing the key but that isn’t true for exchanges and the public ledger makes it easy to block transactions using that address. If everyone subject to US jurisdiction or treaty agreements blocks transactions traceable back to tainted addresses, the value plummets.

When receiving a payment over lightning, there's no way to tell which node or which channel the funds originated from.
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