El Salvador's Bitcoin Bet Is Working, Finance Minister Says (bloomberg.com) 71
El Salvador's finance minister defended the country's strategy to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender even as critics urge the nation to ditch the experiment as the cryptocurrency world suffers through a bear market. From a report: Almost a year into the country's bet on Bitcoin, Alejandro Zelaya said the digital currency has brought financial services to a largely unbanked population and attracted tourism and investments. While its use as a means of exchange is low, he said he remains a believer in digital money and added the government is still planning to issue a Bitcoin-backed bond using blockchain technology. "For some, it's something new and something they don't entirely understand, but it's a phenomenon that exists and is gaining ground and will continue to be around in the coming years," Zelaya said in an interview on Wednesday.
The government has purchased 2,381 Bitcoin with public funds, which, today, are worth about 50% less than what authorities paid for them, according to calculations by Bloomberg based on tweets by President Nayib Bukele. A survey by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research found that most businesses and consumers in El Salvador still prefer to use hard currency to pay for goods and services and send remittances. The International Monetary Fund has urged the nation to strip Bitcoin of its legal standing. The government is negotiating a $1.3 billion extended fund facility with the IMF, but no deal has yet been reached.
The government has purchased 2,381 Bitcoin with public funds, which, today, are worth about 50% less than what authorities paid for them, according to calculations by Bloomberg based on tweets by President Nayib Bukele. A survey by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research found that most businesses and consumers in El Salvador still prefer to use hard currency to pay for goods and services and send remittances. The International Monetary Fund has urged the nation to strip Bitcoin of its legal standing. The government is negotiating a $1.3 billion extended fund facility with the IMF, but no deal has yet been reached.
He has to say that (Score:5, Insightful)
It's in his financial and career interest to say that.
Next article below this: "Terra $45 Billion Face Plant Creates Crowd of Crypto Losers"
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"It's in his financial and career interest to say that.
Next article below this: "Terra $45 Billion Face Plant Creates Crowd of Crypto Losers"
Naw it will be another trillion Dollar coin.
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It probably is working fine for him. Maybe not so much for the country.
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I doubt it's working fine even for him. With the collapse of crypto, I can't really see any way it works for anyone. The folks that were going to profit from it already profited, and left the bottom tiers of the Ponzi scheme to drown in worthless tokens. But when finance ministers admit they just mortgaged the country on a financial scam, and they tell the truth, they're usually lucky to get out of the country alive.
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"I would like to have a 3-way Marsha Blackburn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and in a perfect world Kelly Anne Conway would be there too. How do I make this happen?"
Deepfake.
Henhouse is perfectly secure... (Score:5, Funny)
Lovely (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds ripe for an exit scam.
He's absolutely right (Score:5, Insightful)
The local economy is screwed though. Big time.
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Since it's in the ledger, it should be plain to see no?
Fuckup claims not to be fuckup (Score:2)
What else is new. Standard behavior for a politician as well.
Re:Gotta love how... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's still better than their inflation numbers were.. So.. Theoretically a win?
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If there currency was less stable than bitcoin, then bitcoin would be better than what they started with.
It is all about perspective. For anyone with a stable currency it would be a big lose, but for anyone whose currency is unstable and/or experiencing high inflation it may look like a win (so long as crypto simply does not collapse completely).
Re: Gotta love how... (Score:2)
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With that line of thinking they should have just adopted USD or EUR and would be better off than with Bitcoin.
They already have (USD since 2001).
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With that line of thinking they should have just adopted USD or EUR and would be better off than with Bitcoin.
They already have (USD since 2001).
In others words they adopted a much worse solution for a problem that was already fixed. Dollarized economies are common in the developing world and work pretty well.
The U.S. long used foreign currency as a supplement or replacement for domestic currency. For the first 65 years of existence foreign currency was often used instead of U.S. coins in the United States. This ended with the Coinage Act of 1857. The Spanish dollar was most popular.
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The U.S. long used foreign currency as a supplement or replacement for domestic currency. For the first 65 years of existence foreign currency was often used instead of U.S. coins in the United States. This ended with the Coinage Act of 1857. The Spanish dollar was most popular.
Thanks! Interesting, I wasn't aware of this (including link as I looked it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ).
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If there currency was less stable than bitcoin, then bitcoin would be better than what they started with.
It is all about perspective. For anyone with a stable currency it would be a big lose, but for anyone whose currency is unstable and/or experiencing high inflation it may look like a win (so long as crypto simply does not collapse completely).
How about focusing on fixing their own currency that they have control on instead of taking some foreign-controlled currency and lose their sovereignty?
I guess that's too difficult to do in a corrupt society.
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It is *never* going to collapse completely. BTC and ETH will have demand and usage no matter how far the price dips.
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I do wish they did. I would opt to be paid in and spend "bitcoin" as a currency. I'd also pay my taxes in it. That isn't currently possible without translation between different currencies via a third-party which takes a cut.
Never say never [Re:Gotta love how...] (Score:2)
It is *never* going to collapse completely. BTC and ETH will have demand and usage no matter how far the price dips.
Why in the world would you think that?
If the price dips to zero, the demand and usage will be zero. And there is no reason the price should not dip to zero.
Re: Gotta love how... (Score:1)
Very True. People completely miss the main point / utility of btc/eth and come up with their own ideas of its utility and then think why it's not making sense !
If you don't own any btc yet then it's probably of no use to you anyway. Just like someone can question why invest in Silver when we have Gold. Or why invest in Microsoft when you have Apple!
The 'engagement' / involvement level of anti crypto guys is so intense here it's surprising.
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The currency in El Salvador is the USD.
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It's still better than their inflation numbers were.. So.. Theoretically a win?
Their inflation has been rising and is currently at 7.76% https://tradingeconomics.com/e... [tradingeconomics.com] (in comparison for the US it's 9.1% https://tradingeconomics.com/u... [tradingeconomics.com]), so no.
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The American dollar isn't doing that bad.
Re:Gotta love how... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think this story paints the picture it thinks it does. Who's the winner? Not the country, not the citizens. Just the grifters who are burning energy to produce nothing.
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If the value of a human life is taken to be implicitly nil, the great energy expended giving birth to and raising a child is all waste.
Nonetheless, you have an emotional instinct within you to justify this waste axiomatically.
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How much did you lose on that car? How about that sofa?
Futurama - Once again, the conservative sandwich heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor! [youtu.be]
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That's true, no golden parachutes in government, not even huge bonuses like the private industry bankers got for crashing the worlds economy in 2008.
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You may want to do some research about these things which date back far into the 90s and earlier. Our discussions regarding what evolved into "bitcoin" began with the United States invasion of Iraq, and the associated speculation about the reasons including Saddam Hussein's switching to the Euro as a reserve currency and his urging of OPEC members to follow suit.
You may be more correct about how cryptographic "currencies" have been utilized, but this is all mere description
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The inherent value of anything is subjective. It isn't so much what something is worth, but rather how you feel about it.
Humans require a baseline input of energy on a day-to-day basis to survive. It used to be thought that energy was expended differently depending upon what sort of activity was undertaken.
Slashdot: Evolutionary Anthropologist Busts Myths About How Humans Burn Calories [slashdot.org].
In that sense the inherent energy value of T (time) in terms of a human being can be determined. All humans require this
is it really a victory for cryptocurrency? (Score:2)
I have a question. Is it really Bitcoin they're trading, with cold wallets and waiting an hour for a transaction to be confirmed, or is it shares in the government's wallet? The latter isn't really token money, it's just inefficient/expensive banking.
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Yes, they are really using BTC, like a currency. They are using the lightning network, so transactions are instant and practically free
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Bitcoin can be done instantly. Whenever I sent the transfer, it went through instantly and then it was pending confirmation for a while. To the end user it operates just like VISA/Mastercard or cheques.
I'm sure you can commit fraud that way, but that is no different than paying with any non-cash asset.
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I'm sure you can commit fraud that way, but that is no different than paying with any non-cash asset.
This is where the 50% attack comes in. The 50% attack allows someone to roll back transactions (it doesn't allow the attacker to make arbitrary transactions). So you buy a painting for 1 million bitcoins, take control of the painting, roll back the transaction, and disappear. Then you have control of the painting and also the bitcoins.
This is why experts recommend you want for 6 blocks to be added on top of your transaction block (a new block is added every ten minutes), to make the probability of rollback
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We had agreed to never exchange currency-to-currency between BitCoin and any other medium.
I always believed such was the purest form of Sin.
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It seems best to me to open-source everything. Centralized control and the burning of books shouldn't be possible anymore. While not everyone has the literacy required, some do, an
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Leecher (computing) [wikipedia.org],
Free rider problem. [wikipedia.org]
It never was about banking (Score:2)
There are many, many easier and safer ways to get people to have small bank accounts, and many developing countries have implementes basic money-transfer systems with which you can even send money to someone else by just sending an SMS.
Also, bear in mind that Bukele has done a lot of quasi-dictatorial things. Soldiers in the parlament, replacing judges with sycophants, and so on.
The Salvadoran system was and is probably quite rotten, so
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Corruption and greed are things we can rely upon. Some persons believe humanity is in essence good, while others face a more stark reality in observing their fellow human beings and themselves.
I believe if it weren't for greed, BitCoin would remain unknown and the source-code and documentation might simply fade away forever.
The wise take advantage of the sins of the common man in order to further just causes ... or so one might hope.
Morality may be relative [wikipedia.org], but where a great harm occurs trivially recogniz
Propaganda to pacify (Score:2)
I really won't believe what is coming out of that guy's mouth until I see results that the people of ES are benefiting from.
WTH (Score:1)
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Whose hare brained idea was this??
Their president Nayib Bukele is a coin bro: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] he was planning to build a crypto city at the base of a volcano: https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com] Although they have a constitutional bar on how long a president can sit, he replaced their highest court judges who ruled that the ban doesn't apply to him https://apnews.com/article/ele... [apnews.com]
Your other option (Score:2)
Better inflation rates than the US (Score:1)
Their inflation has been trending negative the whole time and just now is going to 3%. US inflation is over 9% and expected to rise another 8% on top by end of year.
So translated, whatever product cost 1 bitcoin a year ago, now costs 1.03 bitcoin in El Salvador, whatever cost 50,000 dollar a year ago, is going to cost more than 55,000 soon.
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For the US, $40000 this time last year would buy you 10101 pounds of chocolate chip cookies and now buys 8753 pounds. (price data [in2013dollars.com])
1 bitcoin would also buy you 10101 pounds of chocolate chip cookies this time last year, but now buys 5208 pounds.
It's hard to see why the El Salvador consumers are seeing 3% rather than something close to 100% bitcoin inflation (10101 -> 5208).
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You're assuming the cookie costs the same in the US as it does in El Salvador. If everyone is trading in Bitcoin, and bread costs 1 microcoin today and 1.03 microcoins tomorrow the fluctuations against the USD and what consumers in America spend doesn't matter much. Only matters for people traveling or exchanging business.
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Their inflation has been trending negative the whole time and just now is going to 3%. US inflation is over 9% and expected to rise another 8% on top by end of year.
So translated, whatever product cost 1 bitcoin a year ago, now costs 1.03 bitcoin in El Salvador, whatever cost 50,000 dollar a year ago, is going to cost more than 55,000 soon.
What measure of inflation are you looking at? (As I have the links handy from a previous post I'm looking at 7.76% for El Salvador https://tradingeconomics.com/e... [tradingeconomics.com] and 9.1% US https://tradingeconomics.com/u... [tradingeconomics.com] ).
Speculative insanity (Score:2)
If you look at the various points at which El Salvador have acquired BTC, it absolutely looks like a cryptocurrency n00b, despite the huge figures involved.
I guess Nayib Bukele is sitting there, in his pants, late at night, after a few drinks, playing "Mr. Big Guy" with his countries assets.
It is madness and greed rolled into a fool sandwich.
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It is madness and greed rolled into a fool sandwich.
Awful, is it not? The very thought that "bitcoin" might be used as a currency rather than a get-rich-quick scheme investment! Madness, truly!
Hate boner (Score:2)
I'll never understand the collective hate boner a group of supposedly tech-positive people have for blockchain technology as a whole.
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It's easy to understand in the sense of people discussing a topic which they have little to no knowledge of.
There are three or more groups involved. I'm one of the original programmers who were interested in the subject back pre-2007. I was never particularly interested in the cryptographic implementation side of things, albeit I understood and do understand the general workings. I just do not find hash functions or elliptic-curves fascinating per se.
The other groups include "miners" (actually: minters, but
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Because we are savvy enough to grok what blockchain technology is useful for, which is in fact very little. One of it's biggest problems is that it doesn't scale.
Seriously, name some good uses of blockchain technology that aren't better served by other technologies.
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Applications that use blockchain...you know, anything that actually puts the concept of decentralizing a complete ledger of all transactions across a computer network to work and does something useful with it.
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Name some good uses of bubblesort that aren't better suited served by other algorithms? Sure, bubblesort tends to be the shortest implementation where you do sorted-insertion into an array. On an embedded system where performance is not an issue for short arrays such as 16 - 128 entries, the performance and size of bubblesort is far better than other choices.
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I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, bubblesort has (admittedly rare) instances when it can be the best choice, like on small lists that are mostly pre-sorted, or if you are getting small amounts of data at a time off of slow old media or something. It is also useful as a teaching tool.
What does that have to do with blockchains?
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If you are trying to point out that things that "don't scale well" can still be great for something small, sure. But what is a SMALL usage of blockchains that is useful?
There must be some things it is good for.
The comparison to bubblesort makes sense in one way: we know it's a bad idea to try and wedge bubblesort into everything.
That's how lots of us feel about blockchain.
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If I came on strong about how the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was definitely the one true and correct interpretation, and people who disagreed are being dumb, I would get strong push back from most any "science-positive" community, too.
Crypto enthusiasts on slashdot have made many overreaching claims that cannot be sustained by logic, and then insulted people who politely disagree. Many such enthusiasts have relied on very ideological-driven arguments, including aggressive and sloppy fl
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Fiat currencies vs. "something else". I agree, but I feel you need to distinguish between "enthusiasts" and "others" like myself. It's easy to do so and I'll give an example of how: I have never converted between two currencies or purchased an investment seeking to reap undue gain.
Such is a very complex topic of course, but albeit the value of provisioning liquidity in a market is valid and may very well be enough to support an individual as an elder ... I believe the independent anti-social notions in far-
And the people (Score:2)
Of El Salvador, don't know any better, if this is indeed thier 'first banking experience' if what a real bank is and that it shouldn't lose much of it's value like as crypto account does.
Meanwhiile in Turkiye... (Score:1)
Surely, he is a shoe-in for the Nobel in Economics this year!