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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

ticotimes.net

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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#531

Post by sitkack »

sitkack wrote: post #491
addicted wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Read a book!

Seriously this is the most BS flag I have ever gotten. I am ashamed of you hacker news points having people.

The IMF is the pinnacle of western imperialism.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#532

Post by codebolt »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #519
computerdork wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, i really dislike bitcoin, but have to admit, it has been a very profitable investment for a lot of people (and still hasn't completely crashed like expected)... ... although as a form of currency (as opposed to an investment) for El Salvador, it looks like it's a failure

The risk that IMF would be concerned about is that the value of their holdings could go to 0 overnight by a wallet hack, data loss, an unscrupulous government employee, or the world running out of greater fools.

Tether collapse is still the big one.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#533

Post by roenxi »

motorest wrote: post #497
roenxi wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

>_> Cheeky FYI, but cognitive dissonance is the "mental disturbance people feel when they realize their cognitions and actions are inconsistent or contradictory" [0]. While I'm certainly not above that, in this case I don't think I even made and defended enough claims here for them to be contradictory in principle and you don't seem to be arguing that. Consider going with the more straightforward "I disagree!" or "That isn't correct!".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#535

Post by taurknaut »

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…

1.35 billion dollars is an awfully small amount to purchase the promise of not developing a sovereign currency. By a couple orders of magnitude.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#537

Post by refulgentis »

pajko wrote: post #464
dragonwriter wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

[flagged]

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#538

Post by DonHopkins »

kylebenzle wrote: post #207
stephen_g wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…

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

[flagged]

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#540

Post by chowchowchow »

liontwist wrote: post #516
chowchowchow wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than money, yes. More than precious bitcoin? The argument simply is that exchange should be frictionless and deflationary currency will slow the velocity of money. I guess you agree this will lead to reduced prosperity and economic activity, though you call it frivolous purchases. Your comment about preferences doesn’t play into it; this is about mechanics of exchange, and a precious asset is an inefficient medi…

> More than precious bitcoin? I’m advocating for stable currency. Not bitcoin. > you agree this will lead to reduced prosperity I agree that it will reduce the velocity of money and maybe “GDP”. But not prosperity, individuals being able to save wealth into the future is a better life outcome than more goods changing hands. > and a precious asset is an inefficient medium for commerce You are conflating liquidity with…

> You are conflating liquidity with deflation. To be a currency it has to be liquid, we agree. We also agree btc is not as liquid as cash. But deflation or stability is orthogonal from liquidity.

I’m not; you have a limited view of what inefficiency means. The currency can be liquid and still inefficient for exchange due to other kinds of overhead such as opportunity cost of spending the currency itself.

The economy is not money but a frictionless (opportunity cost wise NOT liquidity wise as you keep trying to divert to) currency is better for facilitating exchange and access to goods and services.

I think a perfectly stable currency could be OK too but that would require incredible management on the monetary side to maintain that equilibrium. And absent being able to hit that bullseye it’s been proven, as much as things like this can be, that a stable little bit of inflation with a fiat currency is much stabler and leads to more prosperity than a currency bound by finite resources external to the economy.

Isn’t it enough that you can buy gold or whatever or bitcoin with your depreciating dollars? Why the fixation on it being a currency?

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