Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

ticotimes.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 930 posts

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#761

Post by EA-3167 »

csomar wrote: post #377
archagon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s all well and good until innocent people get caught in the net. How many thousands of young people are worth incarcerating indefinitely and without legal recourse for the benefit of society at large? Would you throw your own child into the pit if it meant that the happiness and safety of your town was ensured? In the extreme, why not just make every crime carry a death penalty? Would that society be perfect by…

> How many thousands of young people are worth incarcerating indefinitely and without legal recourse for the benefit of society at large? You can actually do the math for that. If the number of innocent people harmed by the gangs is more than the number of innocent people caught in the legal cross-fire then it is worth it.

That assumes a lot, most importantly that the harm is limited to "innocent person in prison" rather than, "Government has the power to throw anyone it wants into prison, effectively disappearing them." The history of these sort of measures is a history of a slide into something worse than whatever was being solved in the first place.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#762

Post by troupo »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #752
troupo wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are many reasons someone might spend money today Yes, because that's the value of money . Bitcoin isn't money. It's a speculative asset precisely because people are hoping its value will only go up.

I'm speaking from experience. I literally spent Bitcoin last week that I would rather have held, because I needed the money.

And yet, en masse Bitcoin is used as speculative investment, not money.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#763

Post by el-salvador »

p_j_w wrote: post #51
ptero wrote: post #17

That's heavy editorializing: El Salvador keeps buying the Bitcoin for its strategic reserve. Businesses and citizens can keep using it. But for getting an IMF loan, IMF (which, to put it mildly, doesn't like Bitcoin) required the end to Bitcoin legal tender status. Now the businesses are free to accept it or not instead of being required to accept it. That's all. The government plans to keep buying and using it.

>Now the businesses are free to accept it or not instead of being required to accept it. That's all. Right, so it's no longer legal tender.

Day to day there won't be much change, as bitcoin acceptance wasn't really enforced.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#764

Post by portaouflop »

tim333 wrote: post #750
patrickaljord wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dislike cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy Is this really the general sentiment on HN?

It probably is the general sentiment. Though I quite like them - it's like a new art form almost.

It’s definitely interesting to follow! Like in this ancient Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times”

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#765

Post by EFreethought »

dmichulke wrote: post #581
wordofx wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot (if not most) bitcoiners think they are smarter than all the non-bitcoiners.

Do you object to that?

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#766

Post by twodave »

hackernudes wrote: post #485
twodave wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the money supply needs to increase at or near the pace of the economy or we end up with a currency shortage, and bitcoin being harder to mine would prove that point faster than silver ever did.

Thanks for clarifying! Although I don't think I agree. Wouldn't a currency shortage be another way to say deflation? If your economy is producing more value than your currency represents, then your currency is more valuable. I have also heard people say deflationary currencies inevitably lead to a catastrophic spiral where liquidity dries up because no one wants to spend (or loan) today what can be more valuable tomo…

Yes, I mean, all the options are bad. So let’s start there :)

First, if your money supply is the actual asset (and not just backed by it) then it’s even worse, since fluctuations in overall supply of that asset can cause very large valuation changes of the money you own. E.g. if we find a silver deposit 4x bigger than all the silver we already have, then suddenly all the coins people are carrying around are worth 1/5 their previous value. So it makes the currency unattractive to hold. On the other hand, if you run out of coins then as your economy or even just population grows then everything has to get cheaper because there’s only the same amount of coins to buy more stuff. And that encourages hoarding. These two things together make for financial disaster because nothing can really be relied on. And, this wasn’t as much of a problem before countries like the UK industrialized, which led to population explosions across the major powers.

Then again after WW2, when globalized markets became a thing, we saw another wave of industrialization and accompanying population growth, to the point that even asset-backed paper currency became problematic. There’s just not enough gold on the planet to back every other economic output. There’s only about 400 million pounds of the stuff worldwide. Assuming you could even get ahold of it all, you could only use it to back about $200 billion. Between 1950 and 1971 global trade expanded by a trillion dollars. And the global population nearly doubled. And we couldn’t just say “gold is worth more now”. There were treaties in place that defined the price of gold as $35 per ounce (which led to countries like France to try and destabilize our currency by buying up a bunch of our gold, but that’s another story).

But in a fiat system by adopting the currency you add your economic output to the overall system and your currency stability is now tied up in that economic output, so—your output goes down, your people’s belief in your ability to pay also goes down. This works super well in a rapidly-growing economy. There’s always more! More money-printing, more economic output, more debt… but the problem with this is—what happens in a world where things stop growing all the time? We have a few small examples and they aren’t pretty (Greece, COVID, and coming soon—China).

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#767

Post by ptero »

agumonkey wrote: post #698
int_19h wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

We need to be clear about the features of money we are talking about (and there are many):

For money to work as a convenient way for people or companies to settle transactions, long-term inflation or deflation does not matter. If A wants cement and has mangoes, B wants pants and has mangoes and C wants mangoes and can do tooth fillings they just need something universally accepted to convert what they have into. And, a bit later, buy what they want. Most money satisfy this, but usually people want more features.

For money to also be a store of value it should maintain its purchasing power. This allows an individual to, say, pay for an education of a child when the child grows up: I can save in today's money and be fairly confident that when the time comes to pay it will cover the (future) cost. This feature is what people tend to refer to as "digital gold" as gold generally maintains its purchasing power over very long times.

For money to enable governments to stimulate society in different ways, money should be deflationary. Easy long term store of value makes people less responsive to short-term government stimuli. Without deflationary money a government cannot print extra money when it overspends or if not enough players want to lend to that government.

The last two tend to cause eternal strife between individualists (who want small government that does not do things people did not explicitly ask for) and progressivists (who want to push the society along the path they see as the best one).

There are more features of money (highly recommend reading "Broken Money" by Lyn Alden)

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#768

Post by whimsicalism »

verdverm wrote: post #584
whimsicalism wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was emailing rent to my roommate 6+ years ago for zero fees with GPay, it's hard to see it being easier than that.

well, it is. for instance, for my rent rebalancing i have to pay more than $2500 and gpay doesn’t allow that. the fees would be fractional cents.

in fact short of wiring i have not found any service allowing me to send more than that in a day and certainly not with instant deposit

gpay takes 1-5 days to appear in account, i can spend the money i transfer here immediately

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#769

Post by uni_rule »

tim333 wrote: post #747
stephen_g wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…

>President Nayib Bukele’s government has accumulated 5,900 BTC, achieving profits of $333.59 million from an initial $269.74 million investment, fuelled by Bitcoin’s recent surge past $100,000. (dec 2024) I wish I could have a $333m failure like that. (edit - see also his approval rating - 91% https://x.com/stats_feed/status/1875573928250179666 )

If the only thing it can accomplish is being traded back and forth for "hard" currencies such as the US Dollar than it's no more useful than the Soviet Ruble. It's not even useful as an actual anonymous currency, it's not even anonymous without a considerable amount of legwork.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#770

Post by el-salvador »

josu wrote: post #269
rsanek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they need the loan so bad they had to change their currency?

They didn't, the IMF just offers better terms than the free market. And they are still doing their Bitcoin thing, this was just a small concession they were willing to make.

El Salvador has had limited or very expensive access to the bond market for the past years. I thinkneed it, otherwise they wouldn't have made a law to loan money from El Salvador's pension funds with 0% interest.
Post reply on HN