Re:El Salvador's crypto experiment ends in failure
by SpicyLemonZest on Sunday March 09, 2025 @09:03PM
(#43315757)
The Salvadoran government did have a "thou shalt accept this" policy, in addition to exempting bitcoin holdings from capital gains tax. It worked to drive initial interest, with a quarter of Salvadorans using Bitcoin for at least some transactions in 2021, but adoption fell sharply over time. I haven't studied it in depth, but my vague understanding is that many businesses couldn't actually figure out how to practically accept Bitcoin despite being theoretically required to.
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Re:El Salvador's crypto experiment ends in failure
by Ferret7446 on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @01:37AM
(#43329472)
Which isn't surprising. Bitcoin is unfortunately not well suited for petty transactions, even though it shines as a truly neutral platform for larger transactions. They should have tried to implement something like Lightning nationwide; some of Lightning's flaws could be overcome with government investment/buy-in.
Re:El Salvador's crypto experiment ends in failure
by roenxi on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @02:01AM
(#43329596)
And we can see the IMF got on that lickity split before anyone figured it out how to make the system convenient. 4 years to detect and act on this sort of international action is commendably speedy. I'd expect that the experiment would fail. The IMF probably expected it would fail. But we can also observe that the IMF moved with the speed of bankers worried that it might succeed.