Her reasoning was: "what people need to understand is, 95% of money laundering with fiat currency already succeeds today without getting caught."
In other words, this won't really change much, it was already really hard to catch money laundering.
It's an interesting game that law enforcement is caught in. On the one hand, they want to demonize bitcoin because it's outside of their control. On the other hand, if they attack bitcoin users too strongly, they push people to alternatives like monero that are both outside of their control and legitimately untraceable in system.
Which devil do you want to deal with?
Monero is being used as a currency though which is relevant because bitcoin used to be used as a currency too before the first bubble/speculators got a hold of it. It's critical to any conversation with claims about bitcoin being a great currency (it's not)
ETH is not deflationary and it is a good candidate to be used as currency.
The characteristics that make Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency right now isn't is deflationary printing, it's that it's unregulated, uncontrolled, and subject to tragedy of the commons (as is seen with the multiple rejected block size increases).
I'm guessing you're opposing EIP1559 then
Intuitively (have no idea how to do this), it would be interesting to have Country's coin supply grow (approx.) with its GPD/productivity.
ETH2 won't be deflationary because such things is nearly impossible in a PoS network. You need issuance to rewards validators. It can't be network fees because if network fees are high, the network is doom to fail.
that said I wonder if having another path won't make them even more hungry.. i'm sure criminals are very creative when it comes to making more money
However, I think it's very easy to understand where it started and why it generally isn't in bad faith. Digital currencies (of which Bitcoin is the largest and most well known) make certain types of crimes easier (drugs by mail, ransomware). Those crimes (as they are understood) always involve a digital currency so they feel new (even if they aren't in many ways). Most people don't pay attention to digital currencies so it's not surprising that they associate them with new behavior that doesn't seem possible without them.
I also suspect that, if you were to break down digital currency activity, that most exchanges of goods and services (as opposed to investments) do choose to use a digital currency because it evades some regulatory processes or laws. With the transaction cost of Bitcoin at over $4[1] (down from over $50 recently), I really doubt that people are using it for many exchanges of goods or services where its digital qualities don't enable the transaction in some way.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
Edit: added a clarification about ransomware and drugs-by-mail. Ransomware and "darkweb markets" are based on older practices that, to an extent, are distinct because of digital currency. Corporate espionage and ransom demands are quite old, but we call generally call it "ransomware" when the extortion is based on holding digital assets and paying digitally as well.
The only thing that's actually public are the public keys of the transacting parties. Public keys can be anonymously generated for free. It only becomes possible to deanonymize transactions if the money actually touches a deanonymized terminus.
Even assuming all the fiat off-ramps are properly KYC'd, it still gives the criminal unilateral control to arbitrarily decide when and where to risk deanonymization. You can commit a crime, then wait years for the heat to let up and make sure you're in a safe country without extradition treaties.
The thing is, this is a strange argument, you want a sudden world wide adoption, like, tomorrow every biz owner wakes up and decides to accept bitcoin, so that you can buy your coffee at your local starbucks, have you thought through this? how does the total adoption happen what steps should happen before.
I assume it has to do with using a transparent open ledger...
It's not that hard to imagine when you don't have to send anything physical.
Most trusted BTC exchanges are going KYC so even tax evaders have to start reconsidering.
Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, has some things to say about the use of BTC in crime:
> Based on our research and discussions with industry experts, I have confidence in two conclusions: • The broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit finance are significantly overstated. • The blockchain ledger on which Bitcoin transactions are recorded is an underutilized forensic tool that can be used more widely by law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify and disrupt illicit activities. Put simply, blockchain analysis is a highly effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool.
Source: https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitc...
There's also a strong (IMO) argument that energy-intensive crypto-mining can make renewable energy more competitive, by only mining when renewables are producing excess power. That lessens the problem of renewables creating excess energy (which can be damaging to power grids).
I'm not trying to downplay El Salvador's vulnerability to climate change. But actual solutions to climate change - or even just mitigating its effects - is going to require considerable capital and other resources. If using BTC gives El Salvador an economic advantage, then more power to them.
If this is true then the goal is to create a mining algorithm that focuses on being as wasteful as possible.
> by only mining when renewables are producing excess power.
This is simply not true. There is no such thing as excess power, whatever is not used should be stored or sold to other countries.
> (which can be damaging to power grids).
Excess energy production has always been a thing and there are mitigation efforts in place much better than "lets put a server farm that wastes energy"
> I'm not trying to downplay El Salvador's vulnerability to climate change. But actual solutions to climate change - or even just mitigating its effects - is going to require considerable capital and other resources. If using BTC gives El Salvador an economic advantage, then more power to them.
The problem here is El Salvador is basically burning its clothes to keep itself warm. any cryptocoin would've been a better solution. hell even dogecoin would've been a better choice.
This is where we are all headed.
https://www.rt.com/business/524923-iran-bans-crypto-mining-s...
This wouldn't be profitable for miners, so the economics of the coin would collapse. Bitcoin is designed to balance these incentives.
> This is simply not true. There is no such thing as excess power, whatever is not used should be stored or sold to other countries.
You don't understand power grids. Electricity is diminished the further it travels over transmission lines. Only fossil fuels like oil can be "stored and sold to other countries", renewables don't work like this. Excess power generated by renewables, and even by some non-renewables, is frequently wasted because (at certain times) it's either not economically feasible to transport it to population centers, or the grid is at full capacity. You can't pump that excess power into the grid or you will break it.
> Excess energy production has always been a thing
Sure, but this is a new solution.
> and there are mitigation efforts in place much better than "lets put a server farm that wastes energy"
Why do you think current plans are better? Bitcoin mining gives a financial incentive to produce renewables as a direct result of the technical details of power grids. You're being awfully dismissive for someone who knows so little.
I agree that would be ideal, but current battery technology is limited and we loose power with transmission distance.
A gravity battery could work for storing that excess power (up to a point) but that seems like it could be a pretty capital intensive project.
In lieu of better solutions, we sometimes have to go with less than ideal ones.
The point about opening up a bank is interesting though. The amount of money WU is skimming off the top must be a non-negligible percentage of the country's GDP. There's gotta be a less pie-in-the-sky way to disrupt that without making El Salvador a money laundering haven, which will absolutely happen with this idea.
20% of El Salvador's GDP is remittances, and WU takes a 5-10% cut. I don't know how much of that business WU controls, so let's pick a range out of a hat: 75%.
That would imply that WU fees represent something in the neighborhood of 1% of the country's total GDP.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/remittances_percen...
Bitcoin mining is mostly a subsidy to renewable energy (fossil fuels are too expensive to make fossil-fueled bitcoin mining profitable), so although I could be wrong, I expect it to ameliorate global warming, not worsen it.
This is incoherent. Nothing ties these prices together. If tomorrow the price of BTC goes up 1000x, the price to buy a joule of energy via burning coal doesn't change at all.
It's true that rapid price changes can make fossil-fueled mining temporarily profitable, and things like burning off flare gas are also profitable, but bitcoin mining is already dominated by renewables and becoming progressively more so: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
I'm sorry I abbreviated this whole explanation so much in my original post that you ended up so confused.
Either energy prices are decoupled from mining rewards, in which case reduced prices of either fossil fuels or renewables (or increased price of BTC) means more profit for miners or energy prices are coupled to mining rewards, in which case changing prices of fossil fuels or renewables means nothing to miners.
Please tell me why mining does not incentivize cheaper fossil fuel energy technology in the same way it supposedly incentivizes cheaper renewable energy technology.
> that you ended up so confused
I am not confused. I've heard this argument 1000 times. It is bogus.
> But that's true for renewable energy too. Nothing about the two energy sources are different.
There is one crucial difference: renewable energy is much cheaper. In the quaint units used for electricity trading, solar energy is being typically sold (in PPAs) for US$20–40/MWh in China and India, and every few months there's a new record low price; the latest is US$10.40/MWh in Saudi Arabia this April, but there have been solar PPAs signed for under US$20/MWh all over the world:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/25/insan...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/solar-cheap-energy-co...
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/merchant-income...
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/saudi-arabia-to-add-3-7-gw...
By contrast, continuing to run existing coal plants costs around US$40/MWh, and US$50/MWh is a more typical wholesale price.
> Please tell me why mining does not incentivize cheaper fossil fuel energy technology in the same way it supposedly incentivizes cheaper renewable energy technology.
Oh, it totally would! If it existed.
We could imagine a disaster scenario in which someone figured out how to turn coal into electricity at US$1/MWh, and also found a hitherto unsuspected giant coal deposit that can be strip-mined, so the cost of mining is similarly low. Massive power plants would immediately be built, heedless of the vehement protests from other countries as well as the hapless villagers living atop the coal, and bitcoin miners would flock to the province just as they now flock to hydroelectric regions, and just as aluminum smelters have always clustered around hydroelectric dams and geothermal regions. The planet would warm up even more rapidly.
But that isn't the world we live in. With the exception of marginal cases like flaring of oilfield gas† and subsidized pricing, fossil fuel energy isn't cheaper. It's more expensive, and not just by a few percent—100%–400% more expensive. That's a contingent fact—it could certainly have happened differently, just as we could happen to live on a planet with abundant platinum in the crust, and fossil fuel used to be cheaper before we extracted all the easily accessible deposits like sea-coal—but it's still a fact. And it seems unlikely to change rapidly, since the bottleneck in exploiting fossil fuels is the cost of industrial-scale heat engines, which are 250 years old and consequently improving fairly slowly. The Parsons turbine, the mainstay of fossil-fuel electricity generation, hasn't changed fundamentally since 01884, although innumerable incremental improvements have raised its efficiency. By contrast, PV's getting cheaper at a double-digit percentage per year.
So, for bitcoin purposes, renewable energy is interchangeable with fossil-fuel energy, just cheaper. But from the standpoint of renewable energy, bitcoin mining has several unique factors to recommend it:
· It's perfectly portable. Portland cement kilns use a lot of energy too, but we don't see renewable-powered cement kilns in Saudi Arabia bankrupting fossil-fuel-powered cement companies in Mexico, Germany, and Akron, because cement is too heavy (per dollar of value) to be economically transported long distances, and so are the raw materials that make it up. Bitcoin, by contrast, can be sent anywhere in the world in under a second, so the new utility-scale solar plants in Chile and Huanghe are competing directly with the dirty old coal plants in Akron. Guess who wins?
· It's perfectly fungible and not subject to import tariffs. A car factory in Bangalore might survive competition from a more efficient solar-powered auto plant in Shanghai by virtue of making cars that are better adapted to local Karnatakan needs, but there's no such thing as a "bitcoin better adapted to local Karnatakan needs". The UK isn't switching to solar energy anytime soon (its average PV capacity factor is 10%, making local PV uncompetitive there) but people in the UK can easily trade using bitcoin mined in China or Portugal.
· It's very elastic: you can turn a bitcoin farm off in under a second if the price of power goes high, and turn it back on again in a few minutes when the price goes back down. (Try that with a steel mill, or even an aluminum smelting pot.) Moreover, you can load it onto the back of a truck and drive it to a different province if power is going to be expensive for a long time—an ability that has sometimes been abused by hydroelectric miners who drive their farms to regions with underutilized coal plants in the dry season, although that alternative seems to be, if you'll pardon the pun, drying up.
· It doesn't produce pollution of its own, the way cement kilns and paper mills do.
· It's very energy-intensive; the cost of energy is typically about half the total cost of bitcoin mining. An average product of the economy is about 11% energy, so a 20% increase in the cost of energy raises the price of the product by 2.2%. But a 20% increase in the cost of energy raises the price of bitcoin mining by about 10%, which is easily more than your entire profit margin. This means that bitcoin experiences much stronger pressures to seek out cheaper energy than most other industries.
Now, obviously the whole zero-sum competition aspect of bitcoin mining is bad and wasteful, benefiting nobody, and I hope we find a workable alternative soon; but it's fortunate that, at least at the moment, that wasteful competition is subsidizing renewable energy.
Does that help?
______
† Mining bitcoin from oilfield gas that would have been flared anyway doesn't promote global warming, it just makes the gas less likely to accidentally get vented without burning, which has even worse global-warming effects.
BTC is not stored energy because it cannot be converted back to energy and its creation does not increase the amount of usable raw materials available to humanity. And a future where mining is constrained by geography and friendly states absolutely obliterates any decentralization - ruining the only benefit obtained by the outrageous energy cost.
Renewables are obviously not cheaper than fossil fuels in any general sense because we are still building coal and gas plants all over the world for purposes well beyond having flexible energy sources. It is abundantly clear that the problem of transitioning to a largely CO2 free energy system is not a problem of deployment. And even if it was, sucking up the fixed deployment to support ever more BTC mining is harming the transition to CO2 free energy. You've swapped now to "The UK will just not mine locally because they are never going to switch off coal" when the original argument was "BTC adoption will speed world transition away from coal".
However, I'm not sure that's any different than saying that money (in general, not just bitcoin) is a store of energy. The difference here may be that the remote hydroelectric in Canada may not have had market demand for 15MW extra, thus it would have been wasted had it not been converted into bitcoin; that's something not all traditional moneys can do.
Certainly not. I never claimed it was. Neither can cement, cars, porcelain, or most other products of heavy industry. Aluminum is an exception here.
> a future where mining is constrained by geography and friendly states absolutely obliterates any decentralization
I'm not sure what kind of future you're imagining here. Are you thinking that maybe Algeria will monopolize world bitcoin mining because it has 0.1% more sunlight than Chile and Saudi Arabia, so its mining costs will be 0.05% lower? That seems unlikely to me.
> Renewables are obviously not cheaper than fossil fuels in any general sense because we are still building coal and gas plants all over the world for purposes well beyond having flexible energy sources
This is in fact not true; having flexible energy sources has been the primary reason for building gas plants for decades (gas is usually more expensive and always less portable than coal), and coal plant operation and construction is being canceled all over the place. Outside PRC, not even enough coal plants are being built to replace those that are being decommissioned, and the coal industry is suffering extreme economic hardship as renewable energy replaces it through a combination of better prices and political programs.
https://chinadialogue.net/en/energy/2020-a-dismal-year-for-c... 45 GW of coal power construction cancelled in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam because investors pulled out, leaving only 25 GW planned.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/25/bangladesh-scra... details on the 7.5 GW of coal cancelations in Bangladesh.
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/europe-is-halfway-into-clo... European coal output has been cut 60% since 02000, and projections are that they'll shut down 50% of the remaining 162 plants by 02030 (though 36 new plants are being built).
https://www.eiu.com/industry/article/589070442/europe-coal-u... In 02018 European coal power output was 619 TWh/year (71 GW), down 24% from the year before, which probably means European coal generation capacity was about 120 GW; "renewables have been squeezing out coal" and now account for twice as much electrical output (not capacity) as coal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/world/asia/china-coal-pow... China cancels construction on 103 coal power plants totaling 120 GW (an entire Europe's worth) four years ago, including plants where construction had already begun.
https://ieefa.org/peabody-energy-flirts-with-bankruptcy-agai... Peabody, the world's biggest coal company, went bankrupt 3½ years ago and is at risk of going bankrupt again; "Coal bankruptcies in the United States have become increasingly common. Cheap gas and renewable power have steadily replaced coal in the U.S."
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas... the 1GW San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico is unprofitable because its US$44.90/MWh operating cost is almost twice the average energy price at the Palo Verde Trading Hub (US$26.58/MWh) and three times the price on new solar PPAs (US$15/MWh); not mentioned in the article, but this is also why the 2.2 GW coal Navajo Generating Station, the largest in the US, was just demolished.
Now, there are some places where coal power generating capacity is increasing. PRC built 38.4 GW of new coal power capacity last year. But it also built 48.2 GW of new solar capacity and 71.7 GW of new wind capacity.
Outside PRC, worldwide coal generating capacity fell by a net of 17.2 GW in 02020, while PRC's net coal power capacity increased by only 29.8 GW (so 8.6 GW were decommissioned): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U
This despite the fact that 50% of PRC's coal power generation is unprofitable and there is an epidemic of bankruptcies: http://www.xinhuanet.com/power/2019-08/22/c_1210252090.htm Factors cited include "low electricity prices" and "new energy competition" ("新能源竞"), meaning wind and solar.
(For scale, worldwide bitcoin mining is estimated at 12.5 GW. China used 836 GW of electricity in 02019 and about three times that amount of energy.)
And, as explained in the articles I linked in my previous comment, solar is not cheaper everywhere yet. Polar countries like Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands have very poor capacity factors (around 10% for fixed PV). But the vast majority of the world lives in places with much more sun than that, so for them solar is cheaper. Bitcoin mining, as I explained, doesn't care where it happens.
> You've swapped now to "The UK will just not mine locally because they are never going to switch off coal" when the original argument was "BTC adoption will speed world transition away from coal".
I have not swapped, and I do not endorse your attempted restatement of my thesis. Allow me to clarify.
Today, PV in the UK is not cost-competitive with coal because even though PV modules cost 10% what they did ten years ago, they are still too expensive to be cost-effective in such a marginal region. Also, possibly the UK needs to build more energy storage—not necessary for bitcoin mining, but necessary for some other uses of grid power. What drives the price of PV modules is the learning curve: a 20% price reduction for every doubling of shipped volume. Another couple of doublings in volume, whether driven by bitcoin or (as seems overwhelmingly more likely) just general industry, and we'll get the price low enough to beat coal in the UK too. But not low enough that the UK can mine bitcoin profitably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law
This learning curve for PV modules is an empirical phenomenon with vast amounts of data to attest to it, and it's so fast because PV is such a new field that's still in a rapid exponential growth phase. The absence of such a rapid improvement in costs for fossil-fuel technology, and indeed the gradual increase of its cost due to resource exhaustion, is an even better known phenomenon, one which has been central to geopolitics for half a century.
So, I do think bitcoin mining will speed the world transition away from coal, by subsidizing the development of solar panels and solar-panel factories, which drives down the price of energy, although the total effect is small. Although even in China bitcoin mining is not currently a major percentage of total electricity consumption, much less total energy use, it is a percentage with characteristics that have already driven it to be peculiarly dominated by renewable energy, and those characteristics are intensifying. I do not expect bitcoin mining to become such a large industry that its effects on the renewable transition, though positive, will be large. But bitcoin mining definitely moves the world, even if in a small way, in the direction of a world where net CO₂ emissions are not merely small but actually negative.
It is understandable that, since you were unaware of the most basic facts of the situation, you were unable to apprehend the causal relationships in play, and misinterpreted perfectly straightforward points like the ones I was making. Hopefully this quick primer will save you from making such embarrassing errors in the future!
However, I am done explaining things to you.
These are resources. The more we have of them, the more we can do. BTC does not operate this way. If 100BTC exists and if 100,000,000 BTC exists the network functions in the same manner.
> I'm not sure what kind of future you're imagining here. Are you thinking that maybe Algeria will monopolize world bitcoin mining because it has 0.1% more sunlight than Chile and Saudi Arabia, so its mining costs will be 0.05% lower? That seems unlikely to me.
I'm hoping to imagine a future where no nation uses a considerable amount of carbon to generate energy. The claim is that BTC adoption moves us in this direction (though this is later dropped).
> Now, there are some places where coal power generating capacity is increasing. PRC built 38.4 GW of new coal power capacity last year. But it also built 48.2 GW of new solar capacity and 71.7 GW of new wind capacity.
Given that China is one of the regions you mention earlier where glorious cheap renewables are dominating, I think this is a pretty darn important fact. Any increase in carbon use is terrible. We need it to go to nearly zero.
There is still the undressed assumption that deploying more solar lowers the cost but that the same effect is impossible with carbon.
> However, I am done explaining things to you.
I'll wait for 1002 I guess.
Still, who knows? Maybe they have some kind of tricky angle on the problem, like using bitcoin mining to convert earned income into capital gains in order to evade taxes, which might make their clients money even if the actual operation is unprofitable.
This bitcoin to dollars confluence is even more interesting in the case of El Salvador where the US Dollar is the official currency.
When you are in El Salvador you use actual, physical US Dollars for all cash transactions.
This is not a de facto standard as in some other countries - it is the official legal currency in the country.
So that's interesting in terms of geography, currency usage and the ability to wash bitcoins into (physical) dollars...
El Salvador has very strict cash regulations. Most transactions over $100 in cash require an ID. Even paying for a new laptop in cash would require you to fill a form stating source of income.
Use and El Salvador’s use has no influence on that
The hyperbole only marginalizes yourself
This news appears to have spiked the price of Bitcoin.
Presumably, if El Salvador actually implements this policy and starts using Bitcoin that would also increase demand for Bitcoin and increase its price.
Additionally, a full bitcoin block with high fees pays for more mining expenditure than an empty one. So if there is high demand for block space, that also can increase mining energy usage.
The total value of the miner reward does increase with price, but because of halvings every 210,000 blocks it's a slower rate than the price increases on its own.
Note here, https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue, that the current miner reward (in USD) is currently lower than it was at the peak of the 2017 bull run, despite the unit price being approximately double.
But anyway:
1. A transaction creating a channel factory for 6.4 million different keyholders would be too large to fit in a block.
2. 6.4 million users on LN would be a great target for flood and loot[0].
[0]https://medium.com/blockchains-huji/flood-loot-a-systemic-at...
I said how it works
Your dissertation seems to be unrelated to this conversation. Your topic sentence says “thats not an argument.” Or “thats not how it works” and proceeds to not disprove that at all, derailing every conversation with something completely unrelated
This is against HN guidelines
How can you find fault with someone trying to make more money? This is capitalism at work. Not saying the energy argument for crypto is moot, but it is certainly blown way the heck out of proportion. Let's regulate lithium mining while we are at it, no?
Economic advantage is a like gas in a vacuum, it will spread everywhere it can, until it cannot.
But it's hard for me to think of another thing that makes a worldwide competition for who can waste the most energy, with a massive crowdfunded prize every 10 minutes, and the crowd that has paid into the system to fund the prizes so far wants me to join in funding it so the prize can get bigger.
Edit: for example, take Cathie Wood's claim that Bitcoin will be worth $500,000. If that happens before 2024, that would make the reward for the winner of the useless-hashing race $3.1 million plus change, every 10 minutes. Awesome!!! That kind of money can buy a lot of useless-hashing ASICs and energy to run them. The smart miner had better spend most of it that way, just to be able to keep up with the others in the race.
We can argue until the cows come home about which energy expenses increase human well-being, and which are “wasteful” (Adam Smith hated opera and thought it was a waste of money), but the only fair answer is to ask individuals and firms to pay their fair share proportional to usage, be it crypto mining or cloud marketing analytics or Christmas lights.
I wasn't commenting on whether use of the network makes it more attractive to compete for increasingly scarce bitcoin with sustained or greater use of energy
Its not that hard, just imagine you are taking a standardized test, the accurate answer is the one you choose
Can you elaborate? With remittance there is people with physical cash in tens of different local currencies and countries, and they need to transfer that value to some other (obscure) country. I don't see any scenario how "just set up a bank in the US" is going anywhere near in fixing that problem.
The idea of increased remittances is interesting but the logistics of doing that on the ground might be challenging for the unbanked.
And most importantly, withholding blockchain technology is not a solution to money laundering - it is happening already with legacy systems.
Fixing money laundering is not the priority here - we can look at fixing this later in our journey.
The number one export of El Salvador is actually people. If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from OCGs and Western Union / Money Gram etc.
El Salvador is set to be a big climate change loser, and every joule spent on bitcoin is bringing them closer to disaster.
"El Salvador has seen a steady increase in extreme events (storms, floods and droughts) during the last 30 years. The Pacific coastline is already experiencing rising sea levels and it is expected that 10–28 percent of the country’s coastal zone territory will be lost by the end of the century. Coastal areas, home to over 30 percent of the population, are highly vulnerable to the combination of sea level rise and El Niño events."
https://www.climatelinks.org/resources/climate-risk-profile-...
Coastal flooding risk is significant due to loss of mangroves.
https://thinkhazard.org/en/report/75-el-salvador/CF