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Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

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Re: Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

#61

Post by firekvz »

justboxing wrote: post #59
firekvz wrote: post #45

Venezuelan here. This won't work. Our problems go way beyond having a way to store our wealth It's literally impossible to do bitcoin transactions in normal circunstances because this is not San Francisco and your regular store doesn't even have internet access, we have one of the worts internet acess in the world [1]. Then there is the problem created by the violence/crime[2]. I myself have to leave my phone at home…

What happened to the 160 TONNES of Gold that Chavez repatriated in 2011? Where did that go?? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-15900885

Noone really knows but i guess they are slowly doing this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-economy/venezue...

Re: Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

#62

Post by dang »

freejulian wrote: post #49
MadSudaca wrote: post #40

There are far better cryptocurrencies to do this than BTC. Today, an actual venezuelan, part of the team working on a cryptocurrency called Nano, twitted that he paid for his meal with it. This would have never been possible with BTC, why? Mainly because the meal's cost was .5 NANO, which currently amounts to ~5 USD, that would have been the cost of the transaction fee alone for BTC, or even more. Nano is feeless and…

> , part of the team working on a cryptocurrency called Nano Please, stop shilling.

That breaks the site guidelines, which we'd appreciate it if you'd read and follow when commenting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you're genuinely concerned about astroturfing or shilling on HN, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. One thing we'd do is look for a pattern of such behavior. At first glance, I'm not seeing that here, and the Venezuelan connection seems specific enough not to be forced.

Re: Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

#63

Post by gjjnn »

freejulian wrote: post #19
deftnerd wrote: post #13

The author seems to be ignorant of some real facts related to Bitcoin availability. Lightning Network going live on Mainnet was against the advice of the LN developers who feel that it's not ready for prime-time usage and admit that the network cannot scale very large without some core difficulties being solved. Additionally, the transaction fees have dropped not because of the introduction of LN or batched transacti…

> Enough retailers have stopped accepting Bitcoin that there are fewer transactions That's one theory. Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped. A quick look at historical mempool stats: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y Makes it look far more likely certain people with an agenda were spamming the network.

Why they were able to spam?

Can it happen again? It's a very serious attack.

What if genuine (non-spam) on-chain transaction demand increases 10x?

Would it be harder to spam if block size limit increased from 1MB to 32MB or 1GB?

Re: Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

#64

Post by CryptoPunk »

freejulian wrote: post #19
deftnerd wrote: post #13

The author seems to be ignorant of some real facts related to Bitcoin availability. Lightning Network going live on Mainnet was against the advice of the LN developers who feel that it's not ready for prime-time usage and admit that the network cannot scale very large without some core difficulties being solved. Additionally, the transaction fees have dropped not because of the introduction of LN or batched transacti…

> Enough retailers have stopped accepting Bitcoin that there are fewer transactions That's one theory. Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped. A quick look at historical mempool stats: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y Makes it look far more likely certain people with an agenda were spamming the network.

>>Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped.

It would be extremely expensive to spam the mempool that extensively. It's totally implausible that some party was spamming it for the length of time that Bitcoin was suffering from extraordinarily high fees (e.g. >$10 per transaction).

Re: Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

#65

Post by CryptoPunk »

The LN network has major limitations that don't allow it to be a full substitute for on-chain transactions.

Let's look at how it affects savers for example. LN channels have a maximum debit-delta capacity established by their BTC collateral. When one party is receiving BTC much more often than they're sending it, the LN channel reaches capacity, and a new LN transaction has to be created with its own collateral.

Any party that saves any portion of their revenue will quickly see their LN channels filled, and new ones required.

This essentially means that low-income savers, like what you would expect to see in Venezuela, will see their income eaten up by transaction fees for continual LN channel setup transactions.

The author should have looked to Bitcoin Cash, which will permit low-cost on-chain transactions at large scale usage levels, or Ethereum. Ethereum is processing 4X as many transactions, representing several times as much USD value, as Bitcoin per day. Its transaction fees are much lower and it has a comprehensive on-chain scaling plan that it is pursuing.

Re: Leveraging Bitcoin to Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation

#66

Post by sova »

firekvz wrote: post #54
MadSudaca wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could choose between bolivares and some valuable cryptocurrency, what would you choose?

Obviously I would pick any crypto or any other currency everytime over VEF but thats just wealth storage. It doesn't fix our economics problems, it doesn't fix our social problems. And thats what this post was about, the guy intends to fix our economy or "Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation" by just giving away free bitcoins. P.S: Me (and every other venezuelan) would gladly take the free bitcoin. But it will just make…

It pains me to hear that the situation is so dire in your country. Are there any plans to bring internet to the masses?
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