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Bitcoin

Bitcoin Set To Become Legal Payment in Brazil (yahoo.com) 60

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Brazil's Federal Deputy Aureo Ribeiro has revealed that Brazilians could soon be able to buy houses, cars and even McDonald's with Bitcoin. From a report: The South American nation is preparing to vote on a cryptocurrency regulation bill which is expected to be presented to the Plenary of the Chamber of Deputies within the next few days. "We want to separate the wheat from the chaff, create regulations so that you can trade, know where you're buying and know who you're dealing with," Ribeiro said.

"With this asset you will be able to buy a house, a car, go to McDonald's to buy a hamburger -- it will be a currency in the country as it happened in other countries." Bill 2.303/15, which calls for the regulation of virtual currencies, was approved for presentation last week. If it gets the thumbs up from the Chamber of Deputies this week, then Brazil looks set to follow El Salvador's example and make Bitcoin legal tender. Further reading: In Brazil, Bitcoin Acceptance Comes With More Regulation.
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Bitcoin Set To Become Legal Payment in Brazil More

Bitcoin Set To Become Legal Payment in Brazil

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  • should help with their annual 9-10% inflation rate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Micah NC ( 5616634 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @11:12AM (#61863299)
    Amazing to me how much politicians think they can print money and devalue everyone else's wages / property.

    • Re:should help with their annual 9-10% inflation rate / Amazing to me how much politicians think they can print money and devalue everyone else's wages / property.

      Ahh yes. This is done because the Brazilian politicians have suddenly become honest and just want to pay all their fellow citizens properly and has nothing to do with using crypto to fleece the people.

      It's astounding the way that this is happening in all the most corrupt regimes in the world, but that still doesn't make the crypto-fanatics think about who they are keeping company with.

      • Crypto is mathematically challenging, and it is unlikely the Brazilian government has devised a way to create it. That is the whole beauty of crypto. I don't care if God or the Devil own it, just so long as its creation is limited (unlike currencies). If I am going to have to work for my spending, then fuck you if you think you don't have to work for yours, whether you are a king or a government.

        • Re:Definitely not just scam. No sireee (Score:5, Insightful)

          by bkmoore ( 1910118 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @11:54AM (#61863439)
          Bitcoin is a limited supply of nothing.

          • Re:Definitely not just scam. No sireee (Score:4, Interesting)

            by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @12:00PM (#61863457)

            If that were true then it would be worth nothing.

            • It is worth nothing. Just like beanie babies.
              • Nothing is worth anything other than what someone is willing to trade for it.

                • Nothing is worth anything other than what someone is willing to trade for it.

                  If I have a radish, that nobody else wants. That I'm happy with, then I can eat the radish and get value from it. I could try to extend your idea to say that radishes are "potentially" sellable, but it's really easier to just accept that the radish has a real value as food and that makes it "worth" something - more or less, the replacement cost of the radish. That's different from the value that someone is willing to trade it for.

              • It might be worth nothing to you, I do not know. My guess is if I sent you a bitcoin right now, you'd spend the rest of the day figuring out how to accept it. If we look beyond this obvious discrepancy, it is not your evaluation alone that determines the value of an asset. You are not the market maker.

                • My guess is if I sent you a bitcoin right now, you'd spend the rest of the day figuring out how to accept it.

                  No. I already have money and it works.

                  If we look beyond this obvious discrepancy

                  A discrepancy you just made up to support an argument that can't be supported otherwise.

                  it is not your evaluation alone that determines the value of an asset. You are not the market maker.

                  Irrelevant.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by shanen ( 462549 )

                    Moderately interesting branch and I hope you get modded up.

                    My contribution would be mathematical from the "limited supply of nothing" and "worth nothing" comments. Something can still be worth nothing even if the supply is infinite. Now we have to go to diagonalization and degrees of infinity... Part of the psychological scam that is Bitcoin is that Satoshi started by declaring an artificial scarcity. (If that were true value, then anyone could create a "more valuable" cryptocurrency than Bitcoin simply by

          • Its not actually a limited supply of nothing because, as we have seen, all it takes to change the algorithm is for a majority of miners to agree to do it.

        • I'm from Brazil. I seriously doubt this law will get approved. Brazilian ruling parties have always had a serious allergy at allowing the people to use any currency other than the official one. If they don't allow one to go around paying things in stores using US dollars, Euros or, to use a closer example, Argentinian pesos, the likelihood of them allowing people to do so with Bitcoin is far from credible.

          • There's an important difference between using a foreign national currency subject to foreign influence, and an internationally used crypto currency. The former grants a level of control over your economy to a foreign government. The second is a way to attract sound money (compared to shitty local currencies) into your local system.

            • Not really, because the a governments uses their own currency precisely because it gives them, the government, power. Any currency over which they have no power, be it foreign-controlled, be it physics-controlled (gold, silver etc.), or be it math-controlled (crypto), is always a reduction to their own power, which for most is all that matters.

        • I don't care if God or the Devil own it, just so long as its creation is limited (unlike currencies).

          Then why are there more cryptocurrencies than countries, and yet still more to come? Crypt-heads still refuse to answer this question.

          • No one has found any way to create more Bitcoins.

            By your logic, the USD money supply is unlimited because Zimbabwe can print shillings. It doesn't make any sense.

            • Sure they have, because transactions can now occur in fractions of a Bitcoin. Unless I'm missing something, there's no floor on how much you can fraction a BC. If you want to buy a hamburger, it can cost you 0.00001 of a BC...or whatever (the actual value is irrelevant to the discussion...whether it's 0.001 BC or 0.0001 BC...the point stands).

              So while maybe there's a fixed number of BC, because the coin can be infinitely fractionated in the process of a purchase, there's no real supply limit.

            • So you're saying USD money supply is not unlimited now? Fancy hearing that from a crypt head.

              Your criticism of "fiat" currencies is that the government can keep printing more money. What's to stop a country from creating more cryptocurrencies for legal tender besides Bitcoin? How is that not the same (or worse) than printing money?

              Dumbass.
            • In 2010 there was a overflow bug which caused 184 billion BTC to be mined in a single block. In 2018 there was another inflation bug found but was not exploited. In the past, there were also numerous incidents such as double spending, eclipse attack etc... Also the 21 mil max cap can be changed via soft and hard fork. The point of this argument is to show that bitcoin is just a software, and as software it can have many flaws. The ref on inflation bug: https://medium.datadriveninves... [datadriveninvestor.com]

      • ... but that still doesn't make the crypto-fanatics think about who they are keeping company with.

        That's a deprecated way of thinking.

        Bitcoin is for everybody, and that's a feature not a bug. You can use it, your friends can use it, and yes your enemies can use it. You can't stop your enemies from using it. "Crypto-fanatics" don't have to like or keep company with corrupt regimes. It's an open network, like the Internet itself. I don't have to like or agree with everybody on the internet. I don't have to like or agree with how other people use money.

        Often the same people who are for limiting comm

        • Often the same people who are for limiting communication and speech on the internet are also fearful of a money that can't be censored. To such I say: You're on the authoritarian side. You're not fooling anyone so you might as well come out as authoritarian.

          That's a defecated way of thinking.

          There's nothing authoritarian about regulating the stock market. There's nothing authoritarian about banning Ponzi schemes. There's nothing authoritarian about banning pyramid schemes. Newsflash: every system needs a way to prevent its own volatility and collapse.

          For some perverse reason, idiots like you keep wanting to reinvent the mistakes of old, thinking that merely moving to a new system will magically avoid all the mistakes of the past, instead of understanding

          • That's a delectable way of thinking.

            Liberty and authoritarianism are a continuum. Any organizing principle that is enforced with violence (like all laws) are at least more authoritarian than a state of nature. So, there is definitely something authoritarian about restricting one's freedom to hope for the best and get scammed.

        • Corrupt regimes will use Bitcoin and the ability to use common currency manipulation tactics to screw over their people and line their own pockets. The problem with Bitcoin is that as a currency like in currency large players and state actors can manipulate the value of it pretty easily. Normally you would step in as a government and regulate this but if you do that then Bitcoin goes away. Because it becomes no better than using a gift card to make purchases. You lose its value as a means to buy drugs, pay
      • Please tell me how you "fleece the people" with crypto.

        Thanks.
  • It's one thing to say something is a legal currency. It's quite another to incorporate ways for everyone from small vendors, big box stores, government agencies, etc. to be able to receive those payments. And then for all those groups to be able to deposit the funds into their current banking systems in a way that can be translated into an accepted banking tender. I wonder what their adopted payment service will be to handle these transactions and will it be monitored in any way by their government.

    • There are plenty of tech companies willing to do it in exchange for vacuuming up customer data, and plenty of financial companies willing to do it if they get 5% of every major transaction and 30% of any small one. These realities don't change just because you're doing crypto. You just need a little bit fancier terminal and a phone-based app to act as your wallet.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by flink ( 18449 )

        There are plenty of tech companies willing to do it in exchange for vacuuming up customer data, and plenty of financial companies willing to do it if they get 5% of every major transaction and 30% of any small one. These realities don't change just because you're doing crypto. You just need a little bit fancier terminal and a phone-based app to act as your wallet.

        At that point, why not stick to Master Card? The problem I have with crypto currencies is that most schemes that make it convenient and cheap enough to be actually usable also seem to trade away most of the benefits - decentralization, non-repudiation, irreversibility, etc...

        So my choice is, if I want to spend crypto like I spend cash, then I have to use a wallet app directly. Fill that wallet up using cash at a bitcoin ATM or something.Then at the point of purchase, I need to pay a $25-$50 transaction fee

  • Good luck with selling/buying a hamburger when the value of the currency you're using is swinging by 5-20% at any given time. Maybe you'll make a lot of money on the sale, maybe not...

    With the margins most companies operate on for day-to-day sales, BC and other crypto is a miserable way to do business.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      5-20% swings on the commodities market is a common occurrence, it's how people make money by hedging and betting against those swings. The only way to keep market swings stable is by artificially inflating the price and as a result subsidizing every corporation which is what happens now, every time a company is looking to fail, the feds print and infuse cash into the system.

      Obviously at some point you hit a debt ceiling and get massive inflation which is what is happening with the US$ now and has been happe

      • Is Bitcoin a commodity or a currency? Currencies are expected to remain relatively stable over long periods of time as they are a means of exchange. I don't buy my groceries with oil futures or wheat bushells.

        Inflation is rising currently but we are talking about less than 5%, we have not even hit a 2008 level, and the "debt ceiling" is a wholesale created idea from the Public Debts Act of 1939 which was borne out of Bond Rasing in 1917 for WWI. Before that even for the US any individual new debt was simp

        • But many currencies outside the top 4-5 are not stable anyway. If your alternative is a local currency in an inflationary spiral, a foreign currency which undermines your sovereignty, or a volatile deflationary currency, many may find volatility is a small price to pay for wealth preservation.

          • Wealth preservation for who? The rank and file citizens of the apparently failed state, or it's leaders which lead it to that condition?

            If you are in a country that cannot maintain a stable local currency in any form your problems are not going to solved via crypto, a product whose value is predicated strongly on being able to convert into those other currencies. Nevermind that the ability to convert to those benchmark currecies in necessary to take place in the global trade markets. At some point you ha

      • I have to point out the the U.S. "debt ceiling" is an annual-or semi-annual debacle that has nothing to do with the ability of the US' ability to find people willing to buy bonds-- even though the US is borrowing at very low rates. [treasury.gov].

        And the inflation rate in the EU has been around 1 to 4 percent in my cursory check of "a few years now" (with the 4% being now). If you consider that "massive" then imagine your reaction when you go to buy a hamburger and it costs 20% more (not a common occurrence in first worl

      • You do understand that you winning 20% means that someone else has to lose 20%, yes?

  • Crytocurrency idiots on suicide watch: Your 'anonymous' money-substitute is, in the end, going to be tracked and logged just as much as real bank transactions because cryptocurrency is used for criminal activity. You can't escape it. Better go back to cash money now.

    • You really don't have the faintest clue about bitcoin. It isn't anonymous and was never meant to be. In fact it's the opposite where we can see every transaction. Yes there are privacy based coins like Monero which the tin foil hat slashdot readers should love.

      • True I don't know everything about it because I'm not obsessed with it, I just know that it's a stupid idea that is mostly used for criminal activity, and that it's massively wasteful of limited resources and creates more pollution, and that I'll be happy when it all dies and goes away forever.

  • Misleading title (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SouthSeb ( 8814349 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @12:01PM (#61863463)
    Brazilian here to say that's not really what is being discussed in Brazilian Congress. Bitcoin (and every other cryptocurrency) is already legal in Brazil and may be used as payment, if the seller accepts it. What's (mainly) in debate are ways to avoid the use of cryptocurrency for money laundering and other criminal activities like kidnappings.
  • HODL people! BTC is already topping $50K and I'm hoping for $100K before the end of next year.

    I'll be retiring early BTC keeps rising in value. I'll see you at the beach!

  • Would not be in the car behind the crytpo-dweeb trying to pay for his #3 with BC.

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