421–430 of 930 posts
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.
Didn’t we learn back in the 1500s that asset-backed currencies are unsustainable? Bitcoin will never, ever be able to take the place of a fiat currency because it carries with it many of the same problems as Spanish silver the conquistadors were traveling all the way to SOUTH AMERICA to mine half a millennium ago. It was essentially a very difficult proof of work. The only real advantage bitcoin has is that it’s easy…
So the modern version of traversing the world for silver would be energy used to mine? Like hypothetically the US building tons of nuclear power plants to "win" at mining? Of course that wouldn't add to the supply of bitcoin (harder than silver), so I'm not convinced your analogy stands. I don't know much about 16th century history, so I'm not trying to be too snarky. You might think about the long game where no more…
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If I could convince someone to give me 1.x billion to change my behaviour, I would consider that behaviour a massive success without much further thought. It isn't a huge amount of money at the scale of a national economy but >$1 billion for nothing is a win. Although of course it is unknowable how much of that money was bribe and how much El Salvador would have gotten without additional leverage.
> If I could convince someone to give me 1.x billion to change my behaviour I think you need to refresh your understanding of the difference between a loan and a gift; it wasn't an incentive to change the behavior, it was a loan to deal with the problems caused by the behavior.
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Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.
The article says "92% of Salvadorans did not use bitcoin in their transactions in 2024". Which means that 8% did use it in their transactions.
It says a lot about the popularity of Bitcoin, no?
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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 b…
That’s a lot of words for “it cannot be used in everyday financial transactions”.
However, “Bitcoin the currency” and “USD the currency” work perfectly for daily use if you route them through trusted intermediaries (Strike, Cash App, PayPal, etc.). These third parties abstract away the base layer and offer fast, cheap, and reversible transactions.
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…
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> to mitigate the risks associated with Bitcoin Was that the goal of the loan? How did you come to this conclusion?
Its literally stated. in those words, in the upthread excerpt that describes them receiving the loan.
2. That statement refers to government holding bitcoin as reserves. Which has little relation to use of Bitcoin in the country as legal tender.
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It is highly divisible though, there’s 2.1e15 satoshi and 2.3e14 cents in the world (re google). It can lose 90% of itself before being unable to replace cents. Also, the network can just agree to change the protocol to fix this issue, should it arise. Countries do redenominations all the time.
I think the fundamental appeal of Bitcoin is the lack of ability to change the protocol based on any external factors at all. Otherwise it's just fiat all over again
It's just a question about updating the source code.
The fundamental appeal of bitcoin is the lack of ability to change the protocol without buy-in from a sufficient fraction of the community.
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Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.
The article says "92% of Salvadorans did not use bitcoin in their transactions in 2024". Which means that 8% did use it in their transactions.
The government literally give (almost) everybody $30 in btc to promote this, 8% is too low