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World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

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Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#91

Post by rualca »

vermilingua wrote: post #74
throwaway4good wrote: post #34

Countries that use the USD for their official currency, and are not a part of the US, have a broken financial system. They need to fix that to a point where they can implement their own sovereign currency.

Countries that use the Euro for their official currency, and are not the European Union, have a broken financial system. They need to fix that to a point where they can implement their own sovereign currency.

Besides the blatant whataboutism, is there anything in OP's message that you don't agree with?

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#92

Post by bawolff »

I don't get it, why is this the sort of thing the world bank would help with at all. Isn't it up to El Salvador to figure out how to do this? If they were just adopting a new fiat currency, wouldn't it be up to El Salvador to implement? Why would the world bank be involved?

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#93

Post by senectus1 »

zakember wrote: post #28
gman83 wrote: post #22

I'm very ignorant about Bitcoin, but given El Salvador's big problem with crime, doesn't adopting Bitcoin give the cartels an extremely easy way to launder their money?

Depends on how tech savvy they are. Bitcoin has a public ledger, so once you know who the owner is of a particular address, you can view all of their past transactions and all the addresses of those transactions, potentially exposing a lot of metadata of their activities

> Depends on how tech savvy they are.

no it doesn't.

Most drug runners/dealer are not chemical engineers... they just hire guys that know what they're doing.

Same in the crypto space.

The tech isn't inherently evil or criminal, its the people that use it that way that make their activities using it criminal.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#94

Post by dmitriid »

chroem- wrote: post #52
sub7 wrote: post #33

We keep talking about how tech should be used to make a net positive change yet we allow this glorified linked list that has 0 real world benefits after a decade to get a pass because some man children run around promising it's the future.

That "glorified linked list" solves a lot of problems in peer to peer computing. In fact, blockchains are arguably the biggest breakthrough that subfield of computer science has ever seen.

> solves a lot of problems in peer to peer computing.

Can you list ten of these problems if there are a lot of them?

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#95

Post by zakember »

joosters wrote: post #65
throwaway4good wrote: post #34

Countries that use the USD for their official currency, and are not a part of the US, have a broken financial system. They need to fix that to a point where they can implement their own sovereign currency.

Maybe it's not as simple as you think? These countries generally chose to use USD, do you really believe that they all just made a stupid decision with no upsides?

You are right. It isn't easy. But no one ever said running a country would be easy. If you are choosing to use another country's currency for your economy, you carry all the risks associated to that currency

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#96

Post by senectus1 »

delaaxe wrote: post #38
deadalus wrote: post #2

Will the big banks, institutions and governments make a move against DeFi soon? Seems like it.

Big banks are already building on Ethereum, in case you didn't know

I think its mostly Ripple in Australian banking circles. but yeah... they are definitely seeing the upside to a lot of this technology and are using (abusing) it quietly in the background to their own benefits.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#97

Post by dmitriid »

anticodon wrote: post #72
cassepipe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be but what is your litmus test about? Can you elaborate on it?

Ghaddafi planned to stop selling oil for dollars and sell it for gold. It would be a disaster for US, because US enjoys benefits of printing as much money as it needs to purchase anything from abroad exchanging zeros and ones that cost nothing for real natural resources and goods from other countries. Just about any country leader that announced plans to stop using USD for trade, was killed in some way. Or, if USA is…

> ones that cost nothing

Second largest economy in the world

Second-fourth largest industrial country in the world

...

costs nothing

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#98

Post by bawolff »

sub7 wrote: post #81
chroem- wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "glorified linked list" solves a lot of problems in peer to peer computing. In fact, blockchains are arguably the biggest breakthrough that subfield of computer science has ever seen.

It's a kademlia based app, this shit was around in the 90s. I'd argue the biggest breakthrough was the Turing machine but sure the consensus math is interesting.

Did i miss something? I didnt think bitcoin used kademlia.

I would consider kademlia (or overlay networks in general) a bigger breakthrough though.

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#99

Post by beefield »

tsimionescu wrote: post #48
desine wrote: post #19

They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems. I have a litmus test I use when discussing global financial politics with friends - "What were the main factors you think lead to Ghaddafi's killing?"

The debt based system will not go away if we ever move the entire economy to bitcoin (laughable as that idea is). You'll have fractional bitcoin reserve banking with absolutely no difference compared to today. In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit is a major limitation that relegates it to being digital gold, not a digital dollar.

This. So much this. The disruption in finance was moving from things as money to debt as money. And somehow the people who think current crop of crypto could work as money are so delusional that they fail to understand they are trying to turn the clock backwards, not forward. The thought that bitcoin would somehow limit the amount of money (as currently defined, I am talking about M0, M1 etc) in circulation is simply nothing short of delusional. Bitcoin will not stop people wanting to borrow and loan money and it will not stop people using other entities debt as a mean to pay other people (money, that is.)

Defi, you say. Show me a defi project that lets people borrow more money than what they have in the first place. Show me a defi project where I actually take the credit risk for the borrowers when lending the money to them. (Show me those and I show you an emerging fractional reserve bank and uncontrolled money creation by the said bank...)

Re: World Bank rejects El Salvador request for Bitcoin help

#100

Post by throwaway4good »

vermilingua wrote: post #74
throwaway4good wrote: post #34

Countries that use the USD for their official currency, and are not a part of the US, have a broken financial system. They need to fix that to a point where they can implement their own sovereign currency.

Countries that use the Euro for their official currency, and are not the European Union, have a broken financial system. They need to fix that to a point where they can implement their own sovereign currency.

Yes. That is the case too.
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