El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so

Re:El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first co... by yebyen on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @02:22PM (#28461096)

I'm hearing reports (unsubstantiated, but reports) that Chivo is built on "a partition" of lightning and that it will be difficult for people who want to get their money out.

I don't know enough about lightning to dispute it, but it would seem these reports about Opennode and McDonalds are in conflict with those reports. Do you have any local color or stories to add? I'm interested in what they actually are technically doing, I didn't know that Lightning could be "partitioned" but my Technical Spanish is rusty.

Are there any controls that would prevent folks from using Chivo to spend their $30 literally anywhere they wanted, in as much as there is a Bitcoin receiving address for them? (If I opened it up to "all lightning-capable nodes" would that change the story? I understand little in spite of knowing lots about Bitcoin and friends, something something, needs to be a route/path from one node to another?)

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Re:El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first co... by bubersson on Saturday September 11, 2021 @09:08PM (#28497676)

Chivo is a "custodial" wallet, so Chivo is in charge of the funds and can block sending those anywhere if they want. From the current reports the $30 needs to be send to another Chivo to be able to spend it on whatever. After this initial back and forth, it's spendable anywhere.

Chivo has just usual Lightning node as any other, you can follow it publicly here: https://amboss.space/node/02f72978d40efeffca537139ad6ac9f099... and you can see that they have direct channels with IBEX and others, so payment to many businesses from Chivo can literally be done with 0 sats fee. IBEX then has channel with OpenNode, so when paying to McDonalds there's a chance that IBEX will take some fee.

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