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Yeah, the all so powerful IMF that can be thwarted by the incredibly difficult task of…checks notes…. not taking loans from them… The IMF (or its donor nations) aren’t forcing anyone to take loans from them. Countries do that because the IMF offers much cheaper rates they can get anywhere else and is willing to forgive those loans far more easily than any other entity. In return it expects certain good governance cha…
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If you need to go to the IMF for a loan of ~3% of your GDP to mitigate the risks associated with Bitcoin, well, that's a pretty good sign that adopting Bitcoin as legal tender was a pretty disastrous failure.
The loan was not to mitigate the risk of the Bitcoin. They needed the loan for reasons. The IMF deemed the high involvement in Bitcoin risky for the loan. The IMF text has a "meanwhile": https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/12/18/pr-24485-el-...
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It is more rare than gold and getting more rare every 4 years. What is the current supply of gold and what will it be in 2050?
There is an infinite supply of computer algorithms. Gold is an element.
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It’s being “used” as a speculative asset. That’s not a firm foundation to run a governmental monetary system on. Maybe there are other cryptocurrencies better suited to the task, but BTC isn’t
Governmental monetary systems are usually founded on hopes and prayers (and military might).
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.
But largely that's been abandoned for the "store of value"/"number go up" speculative use-case which is easily 99.99% of the point of Bitcoin today.
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> 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.
There are loans and there are "loans". This isn't El Salvador issuing bonds on the market, it is politics that comes with political conditions. That means they negotiated it and that means they got something in exchange for any leverage they could find.
I think you need to take a pause and read what you wrote because there's some serious cognitive dissonance in your claims.
The IMF is a fund put together and ran by the majority of countries in the world as a lender of last resort. It serves as the world's insurance policy on stability. So when a country like El Salvador knocks on their doors, it's a kin to stating the world they are in trouble and they desperately need a hand. The IMF then provides help, but requires as a tradeoff that the country cleans up their act and actually corrects it's course as to mitigate or eliminate the root causes of their instability. For example, countries that are hugely indebted have to comply with demands to lower their sovereign debt down to manageable levels.
Looking at El Salvador, their populist and ill-advised policy to adopt Bitcoin as a currency was a fantastic failure with a tradeoff of being a huge risk factor. Even the most firebrand crypto bro is forced to acknowledge that crypto currencies like Bitcoin have a number of traits that renders them unusable as money, among which the most popular one is the core reason driving it's popularity: volatility. It's to no surprise that one of the basic requirements for stability is to not use a highly volatile and uncontrollable asset as the nation's currency.
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The people who are seen to be the experts and authorities in social theory and practice in their ivory towers in the UN and academia cling to their outdated and falsified ideas of what works and what doesn't and refuse to change or accept new things. Firstly, they are adamant that "tough on crime" policies do not work, they were adamant that Buekele's reforms would not work. Now sure there are probably ways they may…
OK so you didn't need to say all that. Saying you meant conservative in the sense that it's the opposite of radical, rather than conservative as in right-wing politics, would have sufficed. Anyway, Bukele's treatment of the gang situation in El Salvadore can simultaneously be a flagrant violation of human rights while also being an effective measure to curtail untenable levels of gang violence. I'm glad El Salvadore…
I'll take that as a "thank you" :)
> Saying you meant conservative in the sense that it's the opposite of radical, rather than conservative as in right-wing politics, would have sufficed.
Yes I did, I did try to say that in the comment you replied to but on re-reading it could have been clearer and was probably a bit snarky.
> Anyway, Bukele's treatment of the gang situation in El Salvadore can simultaneously be a flagrant violation of human rights while also being an effective measure to curtail untenable levels of gang violence.
It can be that, but the previous government's treatment of the gang situation in El Salvadore be a flagrant violation of human rights of all the citizens who had been affected by crime and violence. The suffering endured by those people wasn't humane. That's the problem, right? I can see it's not a black and white situation, can you? Can you name a single "progressive" policy that has zero downsides, costs, unintended consequences, etc? No, on social scales and government policy, everything is a big mess of chaotic cause and effect and good and bad and statistical outcomes, so picking a narrow class of human rights for one class of people in a whole society and say "those are getting worse therefore it can't be progressive" is really reductionist and not even true because in the same way you can probably rule out anything being progressive.
I'm not going to respond to your points one by one because yet again I add the disclaimer that I think it is terrible things got so bad they came to such measures, and maybe not all measures were exactly right. But what is clear is that it is a bold and brave social reform that went against status quo and has been extraordinarily successful in restoring and defending human rights for many, and in many ways improving society for the better, for a huge majority of citizens. Safe to call it progressive, but really call it whatever you like I guess, but a flagrant violation of human rights I think lacks some understanding or nuance of the reality of the situation there.
> The government, she assured, will continue buying bitcoin and having reserves in this cryptocurrency Sounds like the term "Failed Experiment" is the writer's assertion and not the government official position.
That's probably why OP chose a highly editorialized "Tico Times" article as the source for this. What's even funnier is it's a Costa Rican newspaper. So one Central American country publishes an article smearing another Central American country, and then HN sees the bias-confirming headline and tries to glean some economic lesson from it. Classic.
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Mostly because transferring BTC is very expensive. Every time I’ve done it I’m shocked at the fees that sites like Bitbuy requires. So if you’re going to do it then it has to be for a good reason.
This is fascinating to me because we were told 15 years ago (ish) that one of the main things that made crypto special (besides it being guaranteed finite unlike fiat) was that unlike say, Visa, it would be economic to use, even for small transactions, because The Big Banks wouldn't take their ~3% cut of every transaction. We all assumed that cut was determined by greed, but if Bitcoin is expensive to transact in now…
There are cryptocurrencies that follow the original idea but they're not as popular because they haven't increased in proce as much as Bitcoin.