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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

#51

Post by drekipus »

mattmanser wrote: post #43
smcl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your optimism, but I can't get on board. It would be naive to deny the growth of cryptocurrencies over the last few years, but it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it (due in no small part to a few many shitcoins, rugpulls, scams, BAYC, and a couple of defunct exchanges). I'm sure c…

Unfortunately I don't think the public will stay turned against it. Pyramid and MLM schemes exist and thrive today despite widespread knowledge of them and how they work. So I think shitcoins will have their day again, they'll just have new branding.

Finally, my time to jump on the bandwagon of wealth distribution

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

#52

Post by benj111 »

donatj wrote: post #44
ceejayoz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine you had half as much USD for your groceries, because you decided to put it in BTC a year ago instead.

Quite literally what happened. My groceries cost over twice as much.

It isn't literally what happened because that would be equivalent to your groceries costing 4 times as much.

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

#53

Post by benj111 »

Kathula wrote: post #26
wikfwikf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have been much luckier if your worldview had allowed you to sell at $60k and buy back at $20k.

I had no conviction that 60k would be the top. But I have a conviction that it'll be surpassed eventually.

And what objective metrics are you using to back up your conviction that bitcoin is worth X?

Many people have conviction in their belief in God. That doesn't make the existence of God any more sound.

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

#54

Post by VMG »

hackerlight wrote: post #25
croon wrote: post #11

It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. People who got rich from Bitcoin weren't savvy, they won the lottery. It's not a sound investment decision based on outcome. Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand. El Salvador gambled which is stupid. Whether they won or lost at the lottery is inconsequenti…

> It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. A lot of the risk can be hedged by custodians, so I don't agree. The reason it should fail for transactions is because Bitcoin sucks for transactions. Few people will prefer slow, irreversible and expensive transactions.

Those that need unstoppable transactions are willing to pay the 10'000 satoshi fee on a transaction with arbitrary amount.

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

#55

Post by redox99 »

gjulianm wrote: post #24
eimrine wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the system holding my money is hacked We the hodlers believe that Bitcoin can be hacked only by hacking cryptografic hash-functions, which will lead to collapse all the banks, all passwords on all websites, maybe some data structures like hash-maps. > or I get scammed in some way, where is my legal recourse? How will you get scammed if you have a backup which you promise to yourself to not even introduce to comp…

I mean, if being secure requires an average person having an airgapped computer holding the wallet keys, it's not going to see much adoption. Also you can't really use it as a currency if you do that.

> having an airgapped computer holding the wallet keys

That's basically a hardware wallet (not 100% "airgapped" but the same idea). And yes you obviously you can use it as a currency that way.

Still I agree that crypto is too complex for the average person and I wouldn't trust my mom to not lose it or get scammed.

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

#56

Post by WHATDOESIT »

benj111 wrote: post #50
strangescript wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if all publicly traded markets are ponzi-schemes on some level, but with better regulation.

On some level yes. If you're day trading. But you are actually buying a slice of a company and its future earnings. With bitcoin what are you actually buying?

What are you actually buying while Forex trading?

(I'd really like to know. To me, BTC trading and Forex trading sound exactly the same.)

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

#57

Post by plebianRube »

hackerlight wrote: post #25
croon wrote: post #11

It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. People who got rich from Bitcoin weren't savvy, they won the lottery. It's not a sound investment decision based on outcome. Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand. El Salvador gambled which is stupid. Whether they won or lost at the lottery is inconsequenti…

> It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. A lot of the risk can be hedged by custodians, so I don't agree. The reason it should fail for transactions is because Bitcoin sucks for transactions. Few people will prefer slow, irreversible and expensive transactions.

Lightning is popular because few prefer slow transactions.

El Salvador primarily uses lightning network, same network Strike uses for instant cross border payments.

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

#58

Post by Zanfa »

donatj wrote: post #44
ceejayoz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine you had half as much USD for your groceries, because you decided to put it in BTC a year ago instead.

Quite literally what happened. My groceries cost over twice as much.

Ignoring the fact that you’re implying a 100% USD inflation over the past year, you’d only have 25% of the purchasing power if you “invested” in BTC per the GPs example.

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

#59

Post by plebianRube »

benj111 wrote: post #53
Kathula wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no conviction that 60k would be the top. But I have a conviction that it'll be surpassed eventually.

And what objective metrics are you using to back up your conviction that bitcoin is worth X? Many people have conviction in their belief in God. That doesn't make the existence of God any more sound.

I may only buy when Fidelity and Blackrock say it is safe for retail, if at all.

Until then, I will let institutions take the risk and I will stick with my index fund.

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

#60

Post by redox99 »

jollybean wrote: post #29
can16358p wrote: post #2

Many people buy Bitcoin to "hodl", not to use, giving it some gold-like characteristic. If there was some crypto without any incentives of hodling long term, I'm sure the adoption would be higher. People don't spend Bitcoin the same way they don't spend gold in daily life: to own it as a long-term value reserve.

"If there was some crypto without any incentives of hodling long term, " The opposite. Cryptos that are anchored to USD have no appeal. They're less useful than USD, and, there's no 'get rich quick' aspect. So what's the point. The Ponzi Mania is what drives people into BTC and to talk about it incessantly on the Internet etc.. Without the mania, it's not going to spread. An institutionalized crypto, like one by the…

There's about 150B in stablecoins[1]. You can argue that some of that is fake, not backed. But even if 75% of that were fake it's still a huge amount of money. So it's clear that cryptos that are anchored to USD do have appeal.

The appeal however is not from people wanting to use them to buy their coffe. The appeal is DeFi.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/view/stablecoin/

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