I think el-salvador is going down this path because their current path doesn't work. So instead, they are trying another monetary theory.

Short term profits might come, not from money laundering, but from bitcoin whales that are true believers and decide to come live there. Some of those whales might have gotten their bitcoin illegally, and are happy to avoid a fiat off-ramp. I suppose that might be money-laundering in some sense.

The core problem about this is that they don't have money.

My statement about money laundering is their attempt to fix it partially. But Bitcoin by itselve won't fix their core issue.

Another one is is connectivity ( to make faster payments and not take the bus), bitcoin won't fix that either.

They are pushing internet access to help Bitcoin, but it creates a false dogma. Since Bitcoin was not the answer, it was internet access for all to make faster payments.

PS. Africa has payments by text, this could have worked there too without Bitcoin: https://onereach.ai/what-the-u-s-can-learn-from-mobile-payme...

I don't think blockchains are particularly well suited for solving El Salvador's actual problems, like gang violence.

There's a not entirely implausible theory that says Bukele is going for Bitcoin specifically because El Salvador uses the US dollar and is thus prevented from taking the typical path of printing more its own currency to "solve" problems. With Tether and various dodgy custom apps in the mix, they can now print money.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/el-salvador-bitcoin-off...

Printing money in bitcoin requires some really weird stuff to happen. Essentially, either you need to scam others with Tether, or you need your apps to literally lie to their users.

Bitcoin was made to be deflationary. That means it was made not to allow anyone to print money. It would have made more sense for them to pick ethereum if they wanted the ability to print money.

Really, the only thing I can imagine is using colored coins in bitcoin, or switching to some other currency later.

If you look through the technical details this proposal, it 100% allows for money printing.

El Salvador isn't actually giving people Bitcoin. It's giving people records in an SQL database that supposedly correspond to Bitcoin in a government wallet.

The government can just edit that SQL database to print money.

And become insolvent in a bank run?

> Short term profits might come (...) from bitcoin whales

I don't understand. How are you supposed to make money from wealth hoarders? The trickle-down fairy?

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.

> Trickle down works for immigration.

Proof/evidence for that statement?

The fact that immigration is not wealth re-distribution (zero sum in the short term) but wealth influx.

Like the OP said, it will force their citizen to understand how it works. One can speculate that the average Salvadorian will understand more about Bitcoin than the average HN reader.

The opinions of any person seriously using the label "salty nocoiner" can be safely ignored now, and in future.

Thats a gross generalisation. One would think, that average HNer would be a coiner because of their background.

Nope, lots of people here are just like me: proud salty nocoiners.

We poor old salty nocoiners can only wipe our flowing tears with the 100$ rags from our fat wallets. Oh poor us, we foolishly put our wealth into cashflow producing assets. Oh the sorrow every quarter as the dividends are deposited in our flash-loan-hack-proof bank accounts.

That's not completely true. I left it at ~18 k. A couple of years ago as i didn't saw a path to become profitable. I suppose a lot of HN'ers joined early on and left by now.

My stocks are doing good enough for me to not care at all about crypto since then. Even if that wouldn't be the case, I wouldn't invest in something that I don't think has a viable path.

Eg. The current solutions are using off-chain centralized transactions to fix core things ( eg. transaction fee).

Thats a weird thing to brag about - if talking about past returns there's few 'cash flow producing assets' that'd have done as well as just putting the money in btc.

Also flash loans don't take anything out of your wallet/account either and I know of people whose bank accounts have been hacked.

There's plenty to complain about btc but you've somehow chosen the least convincing argument for why you are a noncoiner.

Victims of bank fraud mostly receive their money back by the bank.

This one recent example of an crypto exchange that fled with the money, has defrauded more in value than the entire ACH payment system worth ~51T ( fraud = 0,0008 % = 0,08 basis points).

https://www.engadget.com/africrypt-bitcoin-disappearance-174... https://silamoney.com/ach/understanding-the-basics-of-ach-fr...

That's not a hack that's a scam.

Both are labeled as fraud.

Bitcoins do not produce any cash flow, the only way to profit is to sell them to a greater fool.

There's plenty of crypto (including e.g. ETH) that does so via staking but that wasn't the point anyway.

No, this was the GP's point. Many of those "salty nocoiners" are invested in assets that produce reliable cash flow, which is considerably safer than holding a purely speculative asset like crypto.

It may be a gross generalization but based on the majority of comments on HN, it is unfortunately an accurate one.

Not only are the comments salty, they are generally ill-informed.

See Dang’s recent call to HN for more insightful comments and less vitriol for example.

It hurts me to say this about HN because on other topics comments are often deeply insightful but when it comes to Bitcoin (and other cryptos) HN comments are often ignorant and dismissive.

What happens is that many on HN were around in 2009-2011 when it first appeared and was cheap. Everyone who didn't buy in then has a vested interest in it failing because then they feel like they didn't miss out and that their decision not to get involved was validated.

It is becoming apparent as time goes by that there are very many of them here. I seem to have attracted some that downvote every comment I make.

I owned Bitcoin back in 2012-2014 when i thought it was going to be an actual currency to exchange goods and services. Since then, it has become a tool for speculation and an ecological disaster, both of which are strongly opposed to my ethos.

I now own precisely 0€ worth of Bitcoin and strongly recommend all my friends never to fall into that kind of trap. Because capitalism and speculation ruins lives, whether you trade stocks or magic BTC numbers.

I'm not alone: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...

I have had a chance to read the article now. I still have some BTC and I have made money from it. I am not looking to make any money back, I can never make a loss. Same for all the people I advised to get into it in 2011/2013.

I am also fortunate and with enough self-awareness to understand that the economy that I operate in is not the same for everyone all over the world. I understand what being un-banked means, I understand the extra costs that come with being poor. I understand that remittances from developed nation to developing nation are a lifeline for many many families. I understand that the traditional ways of sending money to these destinations involve fees as high as 20% or more and doesnt always include the ability to immediately access those funds at the other end. I know that there are unscrupulous Western Union branches/employees that will charge further fees at the receiving end. So whilst it is nice to have a high horse to sit upon, perhaps you could use that perspective to understand that not everyone is in the same position as you. Where you see waste someone else sees financial access, where you see speculation others see utility.

You don't plan for the future because you forsee the downfall of society, so through choice you elect not to plan. Others don't plan for the future because they cant plan further than a week or 2 weeks ahead because the subsist and survive on a day to day basis.

Are you in the US? If so do you have a 401k for retirement? That is capitalism and speculation and trading stocks. If you don't what is your retirement plan?

I am not a huge fan of capitalism, but here I am living in a world where it exists and I have to survive in it, it's. It going to change before I retire so I need to invest in the stock market via a retirement/pension fund. Of course I could choose not to do that but the only cost there is a negative one for me, it won't change the system.

> what is your retirement plan?

I don't exactly have one, because i'm also from the global north (france). I'm betting that before i get to "retire" (i'm not a employee so there's not really a such thing for me) either climate change will collapse the capitalist economy (let's enjoy clear water before industry has used it all) or government will have turned fully fascist and put the rest of us (anarchists, muslims, homosexuals/trans*) in concentration camp...

> it won't change the system

Do what you need to do. But keep in mind together we're strong enough to change it. Changing the system (which can only happen through a global revolution) is the only thing that matters to give new generations a chance to live a better life than the shitty one we had... and to escape all dystopian scenarios that are slowly coming to life.

Bring me another option and I'm there in the revolution with you friend. Sitting idly by is not my thing at all, bitcoin was a start to upsetting the existing system but it was never going to do it on its own.

So sign me up for the revolution mailing list but let's get some content.

>capitalism and speculation ruin lives

And yet here you are on hackernews, owned and run by ycombinator, an organisation that exists to capitalise on both of these things, with the aim of making a small group of investors and founders very very rich.

https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/

Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?

For reference I also got involved in a similar period and used it successfully to transact business with people in foreign countries at a much lower cost than via bank transactions.

Yes bitcoin has pivoted now to a store of wealth or even a cheap way to move large sums and it is less efficient for smaller transactions, but lightning network solves this problem sufficiently.

Again pivoting is not something unique to bitcoin and many tech firms have pivoted to find their niche. Being able to react and respond is a feature not a bug.

Are you literally trying to be this guy as some kind of parody?

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

No, I am having a discussion with someone and trying to understand someone else's position on something on which we are opposed. Is that wrong? Or are you just anti-bitcoin/cryptocurrencies and have come to argue with me and are picking up something without bothering to read the whole context of the comment chain?

> Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?

I am more than aware of my position and my surroundings. But i don't feel any dissonance, though i do feel a lot of ethical/ideological conflict in these forums (which i'm happy to take part in on occasion).

Why would I be a coiner? Bitcoin is still wasteful as fuck.

I notice that hn largely ignores blockchain tech. It almost feels luddite.

A blockchain is a way to reach a decentralized consensus, but the devil lies in the details. Who gets to take part in this consensus? On what criteria? Most blockchains are vulnerable to 51% attacks, rendering them quasi-useless to actually distribute trust.

Consensus can also be achieved by trusting a 3rd party in a certain context. Funny that's precisely what BTC people are doing with their exchanges, with Lightning, and even with Bitmain & Cie owning the majority of the network.

Also, you should know historically the luddites were artisans who destroyed the machines (introduced by the bosses) that ruined their lives and work conditions. They were not loonies opposed to any form of technological progress. In that sense, maybe some of us from HN are in fact luddites, because we want the machine to help, not to ruin society and the environment.

Most (software) engineers understand rather quickly that blockchains are a wasteful solutions to problems that are already solved by other methods.

That's not true.

Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins/crypto's.

Just like Stackoverflow doesn't correlate with the value of the .Net framework or HN doesn't correlate with the value of the ARC programming language ( since it's build on that tech)

It's an example of the tech, but the value of blockchain does not have a correlation with any of the 8000 implementations as crypto.

Additionally, the implementation of El Salvador uses Lightning network and since that obfuscates transactions off-chain to a centralized authority. It's not what i'd call blockchain anymore.

> Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins

Yes and no. The latter is built from the former. But the former is ensured to build wasteful tech. I explain the difference between consensus and gossip in an article about decentralized forging, if you're interested:

https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/

I don't think decentralized tech ( = blockchain) applies to Bitcoin anymore in El Salvador.

Eg. With the lightning network

There's a lot of very pro and very anti blockchain people here and I'm not even sure which are the majority.

Yeah, the blockchain-related discussions become highly polarized. This one has been removed by mods rather quickly.

Because it is over hyped by coin owners who want you to buy coins and make them rich

Yeah, pro-coiners probably fail to realize, if they've put their money in it, that means they've bought the hype. And people don't like to believe they're stupid, but since they also have a confirmation bias, they also look for proof that they're right, and all the stories from random websites saying "Crypto is the future!" remain in their minds, while all the skeptical articles, they just say "Pah, another luddite!" and dismiss.