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El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#91

Post by varajelle »

chinathrow wrote: post #78
justsomeperson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can restore from a backup surely? Unlike losing a physical wallet, which in most cases, means losing the cash it holds at least, but possibly getting things like your ID returned. If you lose your mobile, you will likely never have it returned, but any funds or accounts you have on it can be reinstalled on a new mobile.

Go tell 6M citiziens to back up their mobile wallet - how exactly is the key here.

The key is just a bunch of words which one need to write down with pen and paper and store in a safe place nobody can access. One can imagine better schemes of course, to hide or share the secrets.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#93

Post by thehappypm »

varajelle wrote: post #90
rocqua wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning network helps repeated small transactions between the same pair. However, the first transaction between a specific pair (channel opening) still needs to occur on-chain. That transaction still pays a full fee.

You can route through your pair. Say A has a channel with B, B has a channel with C and C has a channel with D, you can make payment between A and D provided that B and C are online. In a way that nobody can steal money from one another, and neither B not D know who is paying who. In practice, B and C would probably be like banks or exchanges, with many channels, while normal users only need one channel open.

So you need something centralized for it to actually work.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#94

Post by errantmind »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #37

It seems like many here don't get what I think they're doing: government buys 180 million USD worth of Bitcoin, stores it in their wallet, and creates an SQL database (well, with a bank as a wrapper) with 6 million entries with $30 (or whatever that is in BTC) each. The transactions can just be recorded in this SQL database, and the "reserve" would be untouched. If someone wants to exchange their BTC to USD or Euro,…

As you pointed out, this isn't how Lightning Network works. The fact this is being upvoted is useful information about the state of this site and people's knee-jerk reaction to anything cryptocurrency related (coming from someone who has been here a while)

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#95

Post by errantmind »

robjan wrote: post #60
aaronhayes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But over the lightning network it will be close to free

They'd still have to open 6M channels which would create the same number of transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain

This doesn't seem factually accurate. Please support this claim with more information and preferably a citation. This isn't how LN works to my knowledge.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#96

Post by errantmind »

xiphias2 wrote: post #44
mjburgess wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 1/4 of the citizen's wealth comes from US dollar transfers from abroad (ie., from immigrant families). (Their currency is the US dollar.) Presently very high transaction fees and poor banking-system support eats up a significant amount of this wealth. Can you see why this isn't "populist none-sense" ?

Transaction fees is one thing, but going to the city by bus to pick up the money is extra cost and hours of time. I sometimes wish people from US would travel to these places to understand the life other people were born into.

I have traveled extensively in developing countries (years) and see this cryptocurrency initiative serving a real need with remittances and electronic payments.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#97

Post by rocqua »

varajelle wrote: post #90
rocqua wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning network helps repeated small transactions between the same pair. However, the first transaction between a specific pair (channel opening) still needs to occur on-chain. That transaction still pays a full fee.

You can route through your pair. Say A has a channel with B, B has a channel with C and C has a channel with D, you can make payment between A and D provided that B and C are online. In a way that nobody can steal money from one another, and neither B not D know who is paying who. In practice, B and C would probably be like banks or exchanges, with many channels, while normal users only need one channel open.

True, and in fact lightning payments tend to take many hops if routed publically.

But every citizen would still need atleast one lightning channel. And opening those is expensive.

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#98

Post by hamburgerwah »

altacc wrote: post #15

The current bitcoin transaction fee is about $7, so nobody is going to be using this for everyday transactions, making $30 not much of an incentive. It sounds like there will be the option of choosing to accept cash instead, so it will be interesting to see how many prefer $30 of real, spendable cash over $23 of virtual, difficult to spend tokens. Edit: Perhaps I was a bit glib as using the lightning network will pro…

I don't understand how you arrive at this seven dollar figure. Right now a median fee is 3-4 satoshi's per byte resulting in a typical transaction cost of about $0.64 usd. Here is a site that shows the live fee spread: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),...

Re: El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

#100

Post by rocqua »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #81
rocqua wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you convince them to move to the country / spend more time there, then they will spend more of their money in your economy.

You just explained the trickle down fairy he mentioned :)

Trickle down works for immigration. Immigration is not even close to zero sum. For wealth re-distribution within a country it starts of zero sum. And indeed, putting all the wealth concentrated does not help the poor.

Making the wealthy wealthier without taking from the poor will help the poor some. Moreover, it will help the government a lot more.

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