581–590 of 930 posts
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> I dislike cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy Is this really the general sentiment on HN?
It should be. It’s dumb as hell. Bitcoin and blockchain have no real use.
Just wow.
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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…
Or because Bircoin more than doubled in Price since El Salvador started buying?
El Salvador will not sell its bitcoins and keep on adding them, maybe now as strategic reserve.
Meanwhile Tether is moving to El Salvador.
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When most people hear daily usage, they think groceries, bills and paycheck, not day trading on an exchange, defi or centralized. In this regard, crypto currency is not really a currency that people can use for their daily lives without worry and risk from volatility
yes it is, just use stables. frankly it is a much more convenient way to move money if the other person has it as well e: and i’m no crypto obsessive really, i don’t think it was usable even 3 years ago but it’s pretty handy now, can easily send $20 in usdc on base or use it to purchase carbon offsets or use it on election/sports betting or use it to purchase deepseek r1 credits…
It's interesting and nice to see how progressive and creative El Salvador has been. Some failures are perfectly understandable when one is willing to try new things. Their approach to crime is another thing that comes to mind that was lambasted and ridiculed by the "international community" and "experts". Yet in the space of a single decade they went from murder capital of the world to safer than New Zealand (in term…
They just offered to accept any criminal of any nationality (including American citizens) from the USA for a fee. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/politics/el-salvador-p... It's creative but hard to see as progressive, importing the idea of a for profit prison system from the USA.
Some people called Obama progressive and he definitely helped destroy Libya and Syria, ordered the extrajudicial execution of a US citizen under presidential immunity, droned poor brown people living on the other side of the planet, let Citi group pick his cabinet, etc. Nevertheless, the progressive things that Obama did do were still progressive.
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It should be. It’s dumb as hell. Bitcoin and blockchain have no real use.
There are probably a billion bitcoiners (direct or indirect owners) and you basically state that you're smarter than all of them. Just wow.
IMF forced them to drop, but if they want to use crypto as legal tender, why use BTC which has high transaction fees? Why not something with low or zero fees and efficient chain? There is million of crypto out there and most open source, so govt could even launch their own coin on top of existing chains.
Seriously though, the reason is that they can do digital currency without crypto just fine.
For example there are many popular payment operators in Africa who provide money transfers and micro-payments on phones. M-PESA launched in 2007 and has tens of millions of users:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
These successes don’t usually get reported because they lack the exciting novelty of crypto, even though they are much more popular and usable. They are actual free market solutions, not coin casinos built around libertarian dogma. And for that reason lots of people don’t want to know.
Structurally, Bitcoin is a lousy idea for a currency as it is intrinsically deflationary (i.e., even without the speculative inflating of the cost of a Bitcoin, the structure of the coin is such that coins become increasingly scarce and expensive as time goes by). You do not want this in your currency. The ideal is a low-level of inflation which provides an incentive to spend sooner rather than later. With a deflatio…
These are the typical statements you hear repeated as gospel from the economists. > With a deflationary currency, the incentive is to put off purchases as long as possible as your currency will buy more tomorrow than it does today. What I hear from this is that people think twice before making a purchase, that is, they use their money more wisely. Seems like a bonus to me. Regardless of this, people will still need t…
I'll nibble at the bait regardless:
Your comment of spending patterns is missing the forest for the trees. A modern, capitalist infused, economy works like a big cardiovascular system, or like an engine. That is to say, it's happiest when blood/oil is pumping through it. Therefore, you can compare to a certain extent the different states an economy can be in to its cardiovascular counterpart.
When an economy is struggling with deflation, you can imagine this as the heart pumping slowly. Slower pumps mean less blood going everywhere, means less performance. The less money circulates, the smaller its multiplying effect, the harder it is for suppliers to stay afloat, prices fall.
The opposite of this would be someone walking around with their heart rate through the roof nonstop. Too high, too much blood, too much pressure, dangerous. When money is flowing too quickly through an economy, its effects are magnified, and in a sense, you can think of it as harder for the consumer now, prices rise.
To aid the visualization, step into the shoes of a dollar for a moment, and imagine its journey in these different scenarios. It comes into someone's account from a paycheck, it stays for a while, goes to the candy store, sits there, goes to a supplier of the candy store, etc. Now multiply that journey countless times. See if you can spot the effect that more or less tendency to spend can have on these journeys.
So you see now, it's a pendulum. A delicate balance that must be struck. And there you have the job of the federal reserve and other central banks like it. They are in charge of modulating the accelerator of an economy and making sure that we're neither going too fast nor too slow. Right in the middle is where you get the most stable and efficient economies.
Bitcoin is unsuitable as a currency because it belongs to the same family as other tried and failed systems of _hard currency_, think gold, but now its worse. Due to its decentralized nature, it will never (by design) be controlled by a central bank. And so it will be at the whim of all the things fixed supply currencies are at the whim of. If you want examples of why this is bad, just take a look at basically anything before 1970's.
If you want a more thought out and perhaps entertaining debrief on this, I encourage you to check out this blog post by Matt Ranger:
https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m...