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-...
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…
> IMF gave them 1.4 billion to abandon the “experiment”
No, that is not what the quote says. It says it was a condition on a loan.
There is a huge difference between unsolicitedly saying “hey, I’ll give you money for you to stop betting on horses” or being asked for money and replying “OK, but if I do lend you the money you have to promise me you won’t spend it on horse betting; I want it back”.
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.
I mean, what I'm about is really the same, just the other way round. Countries usually erase zeroes after hyperinflation adds them, cryptocoins can just add extra zeroes due to deflation. No change in value, just higher granularity. The rest left me puzzled, can you elaborate? Why should the money holder do anything productive? Why getting richer and richer becomes something bad when we go crypto?
> Why should the money holder do anything productive? Why getting richer and richer becomes something bad when we go crypto?
This question works better the other way round. Why should people that do all the work and take all the investment risks to make the riches get continually decreasing returns on their efforts whilst the people that sit and HODL get continually increasing returns on doing nothing?
Yes I am certain that not everything El Salvador does is progressive, even before reading this link. 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…
El Salvador is a gang-infested shithole because US interventionists backed those who would later lead gangs to stop a left-wing revolution. The Salvadoran government often targeted civilians, and massacred peaceful protestors. Then after the civil war, the same US-backed mercenaries and soldiers who had engaged in massacres and violence came back home, they employed the same terror techniques to build up the gangs an…
> El Salvador is a gang-infested shithole
Far less so now, because they refused to listen to the dogma preached from these experts and institutions (significantly coming from those associated with or funded by the US), about how they should run their country.
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…
> nice to see how progressive and creative El Salvador has been Alright so let's have a look at these progressive/creative approaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_El_Salvador (a) Mass arrests of anyone who merely had a gang tattoo, (b) Jailing of children, (c) Security cameras everywhere, (d) Inhumane treatment of prisoners. Trashing human rights is always effective but hardly creative nor progressive.
> Trashing human rights is always effective
Hardly. What made Bukele's presidency impressive is that many other governments had tried the "mano dura" approach before, but he was the first one to make it work, and nobody is sure why. There's evidence even he didn't expect it to work that well.
The word progressive has a real meaning besides the popular figure-of-speech of calling leftist policies "progressive". Progress in anything, including politics, can move in a direction you like or in a direction you don't like. It's still progress.
No, it does not. Progress is positive. The word you are thinking of is change. Change can take you in any direction, even though the left also likes that word.
Progress is positive as in forward, which is not exclusive for any political leaning.
Makes me wonder why the BTC original design tilted toward deflationary, since allegedly, 'satoshi' was trying to create currency, not speculation. Was it a two phase idea ? Attract people for 80 years as investment then when it's stable, use them as stupid coins ?
A lot of people on libertarian right genuinely believe that deflationary money is desirable. BTC is often referred to as "digital gold" for a reason.
can you explain their reasoning ? just curious (i'm a newb)
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…
Did they use it daily? If the answer is no, then it's a failure of the currency itself.
> Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. This. Bitcoin proponents often claim that eventually everyone will use Bitcoin for payments ("Finally no more governments or central banks!") and that's why it will increase in value, so everyone should invest in BTC. But this argument is fundamentally flawed: A currency, in order for it to work (in order for people to be able to trust it), needs…
In fairness, markets can operate quite well with almost nobody in them being able to argue why. Gold has remarkable staying power but it is rare to find gold proponents who can explain why convincingly. A lot of the arguments for where the value comes from are bunk. If I hear one more person explaining that jewellery matters I'll ... go peacefully about my day I suppose. Still holds its value though, the economy does…
I would argue that, in the case of gold (as well as many fiat currencies) the value is tightly coupled to the trust people put into the asset, and the other way around. "Gold has always been valuable and quite stable, so it won't lose all of its value over night." (and similarly for USD, EUR, …)