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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#881

Post by motorest »

yesfitz wrote: post #864
motorest wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The IMF gave them 1.4 billion dollars to mitigate the risk of bitcoin to the IMF. You need to be functionally illiterate to draw that take from the announcement. Read the thing, be informed. https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/12/18/pr-24485-el-...

Lenders of money want to get their money back. They try to minimize the number of factors that threaten getting their money back. Those factors are called "risks". El Salvador wants to borrow money. The IMF is willing to lend it, but sees El Salvador's Bitcoin policies as a risk to getting their money back. From the IMF's perspective it is a risk to El Salvador's economy and therefore the repayment of the IMF's loan.…

Your reply addresses nothing in my comment. The truth of the matter is that El Salvador reached out to the IMF for funding to address a number of issues listed in the announcement, and the adoption of Bitcoin as a national currency is one of many many topics covered by the deal. Spinning this as "the IMF paid off El Salvador to shut down Bitcoin" is, again, a take born out of functional illiteracy.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#882

Post by motorest »

tankenmate wrote: post #552
hagbarth wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that not be a bad thing when using it as legal tender? Deflation tends to be disastrous for the economy.

Exactly, too many people confuse investment (store of value) part of a currency with fungibility (medium of exchange) and debt (standard of deferred payment). Being good at one or even two of these things doesn't necessarily make it good at all three, good currencies balance all three to a greater or lesser degree.

> Exactly, too many people confuse investment (store of value) (...)

The "store of value" trait of money has nothing to do with the investment angle. It literally means value you store. It's the assurance that it retains it's value so to allow you to use it in the future to purchase something just like you could do today.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#883

Post by motorest »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #754
llamaimperative wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL I have $1,000. I believe that tomorrow, my $1,000 will be worth $2,000. Why would I ever spend my money? Hence, economy freezes. This is so plainly obvious to everyone except crypto zealots I literally gasped seeing your comment.

Not arguing too hard but people do have to spend some money to live regardless… it could be said people are less careful with their money when they feel like it’s losing value, so they spend more and save less. Yes it results in more spending but on what?

> Not arguing too hard but people do have to spend some money to live regardless…

This isn't about a decision to buy bread and milk for your breakfast. It's about the decision on whether you invest in a grocery store vs let your money sit in a bank. If doing nothing is more profitable than doing something then society as a whole will gravitate towards generating no economic activity. This has disastrous consequences because the majority of people in a society do not have the luxury of having investments to live off their dividends.

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#884

Post by karlgkk »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #629
karlgkk wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s being “used” as a speculative asset. That’s not a firm foundation to run a governmental monetary system on. Maybe there are other cryptocurrencies better suited to the task, but BTC isn’t

Everything is a speculative asset. Your marriage is a speculative asset that your wife doesn't cheat on you in future and actually loves you. S&P is a speculative asset that it will perform like it has been performing in last 30 years. USD is a speculative asset on US not going bankrupt. Your career is speculative asset that you don't get fired tomorrow and you can find another job if you do get fired. Bitcoin is a s…

> Your marriage is a speculative asset

I’m guessing that you had a divorce /and/ that I know the reason why she left you

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#885

Post by JALTU »

el-salvador wrote: post #746
pajko wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

> They needed the loan for reasons. One of them being that El Salvador lost affordable access to the international bond market for a good part of the past years due to higher country investment risk, there were multiple reasons for that that are too long for one comment. Some for the consequences have been: The government switched to funding their bonds locally, including a good chunk of the local banks deposits whic…

"...gov't supervisors stopped publishing financial reports."

And you thought OKRs were bad! Ha ha ha, reports suck? Let's really make reporting consequential for individuals, like in China.

The irony is just that "reporting" is not a popular human activity, and why we have things like GAAP and try to enforce the rule of law...

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#886

Post by verdverm »

desumeku wrote: post #848
verdverm wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many malicious actors in crypto for it to become mainstream, sorry, not sorry The community needs to self police and remove this problem if they ever want me to give it a third chance. There are several other fundamental issues in crypto, so not sure this will be enough on its own to reach mainstream adoption For example, I don't want my transaction history on a public ledger, encrypted or not

"Crypto needs to self-police and remove malicious actors" and "Crypto needs to stop having a public ledger" are two contradictory actions where achieving one would make the other impossible.

How so? Plenty of private system are fully capable of removing bad actors, if anything they become easier together

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#887

Post by ImJamal »

NewJazz wrote: post #878
ImJamal wrote: post #874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition according to Google is > the action of deporting a foreigner from a country. A citizen would obviously not be deported.

Forcing someone out of a country is deportation. Maybe not in your dictionary, but in reality. Tell me, when in history has the US sent its citizens to overseas prisons?

I literally just pulled the first definition. It is not my dictionary, but Google's. If you don't like the first definition that comes up, that is on you, not me.

Second, it is not even clear that any US citizens will be shipped off. Bukele is just offering it and Trump said he isn't sure if it will happen.

Third, US citizens are able to serve their sentence in a foreign country if they so choose since 1977 [1]. Obviously this situation is not the same, but the US does send its citizens to foreign prisons sometimes.

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#888

Post by cylemons »

mvieira38 wrote: post #806
cylemons wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason tax evasion with regular currency is so difficult is because pretty much all banks/financial institutions report your income to the state. But with crypto, especially anonymized ones like monero, the decentralized nature makes it almost impossible to track income and who it belongs to.

It is almost trivial for a 3-letter agency to track bitcoin flow. Every transaction is entirely public with only pseudonyms to obfuscate identity, and with the current KYC laws good luck not getting doxxed while buying BTC. We need to move this discourse away from "crypto" and towards Monero specifically if we want any progress on adoption

Isn't a wallet just a private-public key pair? One could easily generate those on a whim and start transacting using them. I assume the KYC laws apply to exchanges but what about individuals with bitcoin directly trading with each other? No way to track that

Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

#890

Post by GoblinSlayer »

motorest wrote: post #833
almosthere wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that doesnt hold for a deflationary currency

> that doesnt hold for a deflationary currency I think crypto proponents in general share this inability to understand the fact that one of the most basic traits of money is stability of it's value, and anything that fails to meet this basic requirement is simply useless as a currency.

Useless after IMF bribed you with a huge pile of money.
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