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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#651

Post by jokethrowaway »

reedjosh wrote: post #375
jokethrowaway wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for getting the government out - but cash or gold is way easier to use. If you have a political problem, you need to solve it politically. You can't hack it with a technical solution or politicians and their rich friends will just find a way to use it against you (like it's happening with btc, enjoy limitless tracking and the rich elite profiting from btc as much (if not more) than you) or ban it (like it hap…

> you need to solve it politically. And what do you do when politics are fully captured by corporate and oligarchical interests? The majority of bitcoiners see no way out of our current political system. The dollar underpins the US hegemony. Bitcoin wouldn't be necessary if the government would allow alternative currencies, but until bitcoin, it had squashed numerous attempts at alternatives. So to say that we need t…

I have a feeling Monero et similia will be banned together with encrypted messaging (encryption = terrorist). We lose more freedom every year at the hands of governments, I don't see why this trend is bound to improve.

I think what you do is you flee the country and move somewhere smaller where you have greater freedom and a greater chance at influencing politics.

My granddad was putting bombs in nazi buildings, but I don't think it really helped. We needed the USA to come over and kill the bad guys.

I don't know who will come to save us this time.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#652

Post by fredfoobar »

rllearneratwork wrote: post #647
fredfoobar wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ETH is not deflationary and it is a good candidate to be used as currency. I'm guessing you're opposing EIP1559 then

I am fine with EIP1559. If ETH becomes deflationary, it would still have other uses and something else can fill in the "currency" use. Intuitively (have no idea how to do this), it would be interesting to have Country's coin supply grow (approx.) with its GPD/productivity.

What happens when eth switches to PoS? everyone will be incentivized to hoard and stake to become a validator, what will incentivize spending?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#653

Post by aixi »

kragen wrote: post #599
sorbits wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point where I live here in Argentina Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter? And in the case of El Salvador, I think Western Union is popular for remittance because people without a bank account can get cash. Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a…

> Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter? The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't. I looked into TransferWise a couple of months ago when someone else asked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657391 I can't get an Argentine bank account, and you need a bank account to use either Tra…

>The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't. I looked into TransferWise a couple of months ago when someone else asked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657391

Dude, just call a spade a spade and say what you really mean: You are using bitcoin to perform tax evasion in your country because you think taxes and the economy there are unfair.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#654

Post by minsc__and__boo »

Growling_owl wrote: post #622
minsc__and__boo wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same argument Facebook made for giving free internet to facebook.com but charging for every other website There are hidden costs to economically disrupting developing economies even if it's "for the poor people". For facebook, it was decimating any local ISP growth by snatching their market. For this, there could be any other number of normal payment systems that are squashed even as this BTC patron moves…

> For facebook, it was decimating any local ISP growth by snatching their market When the hated big guys move, there is always the suspect that somehow, somewhere, somebody else could have done it better, or with less externalities or with less publicity or with less branding or in a way that it's local. It's not the act itself which troubles people. People will always find a way to hate on Zuckerberg, Bezos, Brin or…

If we dismiss all corporate criticism as just another inevitability, then corporations will run unchecked without any criticism. I'm also not sure what Netscape has to do with decimating a developing country's economic infrastructure either.

It's well known that free models, like those of Tom's Shoes, hurt developing economies more than they aid them, so much that even Tom's eventually switched their model.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/one-one-business...

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#655

Post by RivieraKid »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #409
RivieraKid wrote: post #212

Bitcoin will never be able to beat official currencies in developed countries in this important metric - short term inflation risk. People tend to forget this but no other asset is safer in the short-term than the dollar, euro, etc. Why? Because no other asset has a powerful central entity whose job is to prevent loss of value above the 2% inflation target.

Beat at what?

In short-term inflation risk.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#656

Post by RivieraKid »

psychlops wrote: post #509
RivieraKid wrote: post #212

Bitcoin will never be able to beat official currencies in developed countries in this important metric - short term inflation risk. People tend to forget this but no other asset is safer in the short-term than the dollar, euro, etc. Why? Because no other asset has a powerful central entity whose job is to prevent loss of value above the 2% inflation target.

Their job is to push the worth of their currency inexorably toward zero.

No, their job is to maintain inflation as close to 2% as possible.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#657

Post by ddtaylor »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #460
ddtaylor wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LN requires opening and closing channels, each of which have to be done as a regular Bitcoin transaction. The value proposition of LN is that repeated transactions with the same entity (or some subset of) can be done without high fees, but considering almost nobody is currently using LN that doesn't change things right now.

LN now has routing, so you can open a single channel with a well-connected node and transact with everyone. They will charge you a fee for this, but it is on the order of 1/100th as much as a regular bitcoin transaction.

Routing in LN has a bit of a problem where sometimes it can't find a route though. My understanding is that it's an NP complete problem and it's approximation in practice leads to the dreaded "unable to find route" problem.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#658

Post by kragen »

aixi wrote: post #653
kragen wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter? The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't. I looked into TransferWise a couple of months ago when someone else asked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657391 I can't get an Argentine bank account, and you need a bank account to use either Tra…

>The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't. I looked into TransferWise a couple of months ago when someone else asked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657391 Dude, just call a spade a spade and say what you really mean: You are using bitcoin to perform tax evasion in your country because you think taxes and the economy there are unfair.

Nope, although the fake currency transfer rates that are the big obstacle here are structurally similar in their economic impact to prohibitively-high export tariffs, they aren't actually taxes; they don't go to the Treasury but to the Central Bank, and so they don't pay for social services but rather to subsidize imports, further hollowing out the Argentine economy and destroying our competitiveness. But the evidence suggests that, even if I'm willing to take the 38% haircut, TransferWise and PayPal simply don't work. They just don't have service here.

Argentina does have a little bit of income tax, which I'm not allowed to pay (I tried, but the tax office turned me away because they don't accept income taxes from illegal immigrants), but most of the tax revenue here comes from the VAT, which I pay just like everyone else, because it's included in the price of everything. Exports of information technology services, which is what I do, are exempt from VAT. In fact, when I had a company here, before I was an illegal immigrant, I had to pay a lot of extra VAT that was supposed to get refunded, but it never was, because following that aspect of the law is too inconvenient to the government. (Because all my revenue came from exports, you see.) One accountant suggested that I bill a friend's domestic company for fake services in order to get the refund. I refused.

(This may throw some light on why TransferWise and PayPal have opted out of doing business here.)

I understand that if you've lived in a country all your life with a more or less reasonable government, all of this sounds ridiculously implausible. Government economic policy optimized to destroy domestic industry at the expense of imports? Tax offices refusing to accept taxes? Tax offices breaking the law by refusing to refund VAT? Accountants recommending fraudulent invoices as standard business practice in order to work around the tax office breaking the law? And before I moved to Argentina, it would have sounded ridiculously implausible to me too. Maybe I would have assumed that people were only interested in Bitcoin for tax evasion, if it had existed then! Hopefully I wouldn't have been such a fool as to accuse random people on the internet of crimes as a result of my misconceptions, but I probably would have done that, too.

Anyway, that's the way things really are.

Dude.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#659

Post by ddtaylor »

anonporridge wrote: post #611
ddtaylor wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LN doesn't reduce on-chain Bitcoin transaction fees, but instead attempts to move most of the transactions off-chain. With LN you would open a channel using an on-chain transaction, conduct any number of off-chain transactions in that channel, then "settle" the channel by closing with another on-chain transaction. There basically are two different views currently on the future scalability and funding model of the net…

> I don't really see this working since to compete with block subsidy rewards you would need very costly transactions. This seems to suggest that miners dictate the reward they get, rather than miners are forced to adapt to the reward they are offered. There's no required amount of energy used for mining and miners are offered 0 guarantee of reward. Mining difficulty automatically increases and decreases depending on…

> This seems to suggest that miners dictate the reward they get, rather than miners are forced to adapt to the reward they are offered.

Miners don't dictate the reward they get. The subsidy is the "block reward" that started at 50 BTC and halves every 4 years, which is currently at 6.25 BTC - it will be halved again in a few years to 3.125, etc. Blocks are as full as they can be right now and rarely get to the 1.0 BTC mark, so basically if you want the transaction fee market to pay for blocks without increasing the size you'll need to pay close to 6X to 10X higher fees than the current price.

> There's no required amount of energy used for mining

This is true and actually the difficulty can decrease, but none of that changes how many transactions can actually fit into a block.

> Mining difficulty automatically increases and decreases depending on how profitably miners can operate.

Mostly accurate. Mining difficulty decreases if a block took too long to mine. There are lots of scenarios where mining difficulty could get easier - most of which don't seem plausible right now though.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#660

Post by minsc__and__boo »

rllearneratwork wrote: post #602
minsc__and__boo wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a monero folk and think it has no real world application outside of criminal dealings. Monero is being used as a currency though which is relevant because bitcoin used to be used as a currency too before the first bubble/speculators got a hold of it. It's critical to any conversation with claims about bitcoin being a great currency (it's not)

I am of an opinion that deflationary crypto (like Bitcoin) can not be used as currency. It should absolutely be used as a store of value (kind of like gold) and as a way to transfer value. ETH is not deflationary and it is a good candidate to be used as currency.

Eventually. Probably.

The characteristics that make Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency right now isn't is deflationary printing, it's that it's unregulated, uncontrolled, and subject to tragedy of the commons (as is seen with the multiple rejected block size increases).

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