Looking forward to them establishing monero as a legal tender
The government, she assured, will continue buying bitcoin and having reserves in this cryptocurrency. According to the National Bitcoin Office, El Salvador has 6,050 bitcoins worth $634.8 million. “President Bukele continues buying bitcoin, we have a Bitcoin Office, we have the Bitcoin Law, bitcoin can be used in El Salvador.
They’re going to have the US by the balls like Saudi Arabia when bitcoin crosses $1mm/coin
BUT I WAS TOLD THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BUTTCOIN AND REAL MONEY, WHAT THE HELL?!?11?!
Who could have ever seen this coming other than anyone who thought about it for the briefest amount of time?
Bitcoin isn’t good for making little purchases, firstly because it takes so long to get confirmations, if each block is 10 minutes and you need like 3 blocks to consider it confirmed that’s 30 minutes. But that ties into the second issue which is that you probably don’t want millions of tiny transactions on the Blockchain, you want them processed off-chain and then settled in bulk (to the Blockchain) periodically as a single transaction.
Bitcoin is great for little transactions if you use the lightning network. Sending on the lightning network means instant payments with no confirmation required and absolutely tiny fees. And the only thing that shows up on the blockchain is the transactions to initially start using lightning network and to take your coins back off the lightning network. Transactions made over the lightning network aren’t recorded anywhere other than maybe by the people transacting.
i got back into bitcoin recently and decided to move the contents of my old wallet to a new SegWit one and look into using lightning.
To open a lightning channel i have to stake £170 up front though which is crazy, how are people in poorer countries supposed to do that?
or even here. poverty is on the rise, a lot of people are living hand to mouth and just having that kind of money lying around isnt a thing.
i like the idea of bitcoin but i worry it doesn’t scale well.
Add to that that virtually nowhere accepts it. The value of bitcoin comes from its use as a currency. if it doesn’t have that then it’s entirely speculation.
oh well, i have £2k in there and i’m not turning it back into fiat. I’ll spend it if i can or ride it all the way to 0 if that’s the way it goes
“Bitcoin is great if you don’t use the block chain”
That’s what you just said. So why even use it in the first place?
the lightning network still uses the blockchain, just less. it’s acts like an immutable public bar tab you can’t default on. once you have spent enough with another person that it is worth them conducting the transaction on chain then it does it. usually when fees are low too.
That is an extremely simplified explanation of how it works though, it is more complex than that.
Sounds like you can steal or fake things
IIRC, a deposit is made by two parties to create a lightning network channel that’s enough to cover all transactions (kinda like a multi-sig escrow), and both parties have to sign-off on their balances after every transaction (the last balance signed by both parties is the only valid state). I think most people would use a custodial wallet where the custodian already has channels set up, and this would require trust in the custodian. Lightning networks didn’t exist, and wasn’t fully spec’d out the last time I looked into it though.
Finally someone who knows what theyre talking about, with an actual valid criticism.
That’s the same way as the economic system works though
Each bank and creditor keeps track of if what they owe each other and then they settle the balancebetween them periodically (depends on the country)
If assume you could do something similar with bitcoin, but you would need an overlay
Let’s not get astray here.
The reason El Salvador stopped using Bitcoin as a legal tender is not because it’s some sort of failed experiment (it had issues, but still), but due to continuous pressure of IMF interested in maintaining a US dollar-centric economy.
El Salvador is reliant on US dollars in its economy, which puts it under heavy US influence. Knowing Salvadoran currency wouldn’t be strong, Nayib Bukele suggested an alternative option - risky, volatile, but free from pressure of other countries and strongly appreciating in the long run. IMF didn’t like it, and that’s where we are.
So, when you cheer Bitcoin not being legal tender anymore, you also cheer US and IMF projecting power over the country.
Yeah the headline is insane. This would have been a wildly successful experiment, and now is a great time to cash out.
I guess they made a deal to sell their coins to the US.
Edit: misinformation, sorry. They’re not selling. they’re still buying. The IMF is just forcing them to strike the word legal tender
Its even funnier. They just straight up promised them a billion dollar loan on the condition that they abandon bitcoin.
In December, the government struck a $1.4 billion loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that scaled back its bitcoin embrace after the lender urged officials to limit its exposure. The lender specifically advocated making acceptance of bitcoin voluntary for the private sector, which is spelled out in the hastily-approved law.
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The link is still working and reuters is a huge organization so its probably an issue on your side.
Hot damn why is this not the headline we are seeing
Thats what im wondering, because thats the blog post headline i first saw.
Exactly. The title is misleading af
They were forced to stop using Bitcoin as legal tender by external parties. The question people should be asking is why? And the answer is not that it was a failed experiment.
The experiment was to move beyond external parties. They were not able to do so and returned to using external parties. Ergo “the experiment failed”.
They were forced to do it by the IMF and US
Why do you think that they’d care about it if it was failing?
So they experimented with resisting the US and IMF and it was not successful.
We call that an experimental failure.
You really don’t get it. “Blockchain” was not the experiment. “Utilizing blockchain in the global economy” was the experiment.
And it failed.
Again, for the people in the back:
The experiment was whether or not they could be independent monetarily. Not whether or not blockchain works. But whether, in actual practice, if it could provide the monetary independence some people claim it has the power to do.
Outside influences were strong enough to overwhelm Bitcoin adoption and it succumbed to those outside influences. As an experiment seeking to test whether or not Bitcoin could resist these influences it failed.
This is how experimentation works. Now you can tweak your experiment and try again, but acting like failing at the exact thing you were trying to accomplish is somehow not an experimental failure is just delusional.
The IMF wouldn’t give them a credit unless they stopped forcing people to accept Bitcoin as payment, which almost no one was using anyway.
officials ensure that the government will continue betting on this cryptocurrency, whose price currently exceeds $100,000.
“This is good for bitcoin.”
Honestly with the Trump government right now and the pending trade war, this might be good for Bitcoin. It’s supposed to be a store or wealth that you use to buy other cryptos like monero to spend.
This is not good for the environment because crypto mining is second only to AI model training in useless expendenture of natural resources and pollution.
But ironically, and I say this with no joy. This could be good for Bitcoin and that’s bad for us all.
Bitcoin price movement seems to follow the US stock market, so I wouldn’t bet on it.
The government, she assured, will continue buying bitcoin and having reserves in this cryptocurrency. According to the National Bitcoin Office, El Salvador has 6,050 bitcoins worth $634.8 million. “President Bukele continues buying bitco
They are still keeping the mass reserves just not forcing it to be accepted as legal tender in stores. Before if someone wanted to pay in Bitcoin you had to accept it, now you don’t have to.
The problem with any new kind of currency no matter what it is will always be controlled and manipulated by the wealthiest individuals who will flood their wealth into that new system.
Strike the word new.
Crypto is a massive scam. It has no value. It is just used to obscure fraud.
If you think crypto is a scam, wait until you learn about how fiat currency works. Crypto is a great idea that has been plifered by scammers trying to make another pump and dump scheme.
It really isnt that far off from the stock market, and there are books of regulations involving share trading because all the various frauds commited over the centuries, though most are to protect the captial…
I mean neither does FIAT currency, U.S. currency is based on taxes , there is nothing that backs it. Majority of GDP is just finance. We need more education on what and how a currency actually works.
Nothing backs US currency?
I’d argue the US military backs the US dollar.
