They can buy 100 Lummis-es and 100 El Salvadors and bitcoin still won't have a use case outside of fraud and more suckers = number go up
El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
551–560 of 930 posts
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about? Their Bitcoin holdings more than doubled in value.
Would that not be a bad thing when using it as legal tender? Deflation tends to be disastrous for the economy.
Exactly, too many people confuse investment (store of value) part of a currency with fungibility (medium of exchange) and debt (standard of deferred payment). Being good at one or even two of these things doesn't necessarily make it good at all three, good currencies balance all three to a greater or lesser degree.
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why would the people who are getting richer and richer by hoarding btc and not engaging in anything productive ever agree to that? > Countries do redenominations all the time That’s not really the same, in several fundamental ways.
They don't need to increase the supply of bitcoin, the nodes can simply be updated to recognize that a satoshi is also divisible by a billion.
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#554Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing they have in exchange is millions of citizens that the entire globe doesn’t want to see starve to death and the US in particular doesn’t want to deal with mass amounts of illegal migrants when their economy collapses.
I don't think current US leadership thinks more then 5 days in advance or cares about people dying.
US Leadership is focused on getting us to Mars, all of that takes long-term planning. Sure, a few of us will die in the process, but come on, a flag on Mars! There is a Planet B!
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#556Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#557Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IMF are tough guys, countries do not want to owe them, but usually don't have better options. They don't give "loans" and impose rather strict policies on everything. https://actionaid.org/publications/2023/fifty-years-failure-...
The IMF are an arm of the US "diplomatic" apparatus. The charitable interpretation of how they operate looks like this: 1) A country is doing something the US doesn't like. 2) The country is in some trouble of their own making. 3) The IMF will come and bail them out if they would be inclined to start doing the things the US likes instead of the things it doesn't like. The uncharitable interpretation of "2)" is "the c…
So your claim is that US administration through the IMF is forcing El Salvador to drop Bitcoin as a national currency. The same US administration that proposed creating a "national digital asset stockpile"??!? (per https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/23/trump-signs-executive-order-... )
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
What do you mean, I use bitcoin and the lightning network all the time for small payments.
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#560An overview of a subset of the myriad issues that contribute to bitcoin being a very bad currency: https://github.com/theborakompanioni/bitcoin-spring-boot-sta...
That's an interesting link but it's more about trivia than an argument against bitcoin. If you want to have a serious conversation I'm here for you: Bitcoin is slow, not user friendly (utxo model vs account model), wastes energy, and is barely programmable (scripting language is extremely limited)