Topic: Bitcoin Legal Tender in Central African Republic - page 8. (Read 3560 times)

There are so many poor nations who are looking bitcoin as their liberation from poverty. These countries have very small economy, but they are liberating it for international investments. I think bitcoin is the way forward but big economies are not really ready to accept bitcoin out of insecurity to their conventional economy. But citizens  are enthusiastically doing it. Lets see what course will international economy will take. But bitcoin will certainly be an important factor shaping our future economy

Hahahaha

I am glad that you picked up on that point..  and, maybe I overstated the dynamics a wee bit?

Some people proclaim that they like working, and surely working seems to be way more enjoyable (and less inconvenient) when it is optional.. or if you are able to be in charge of your work place and work duties rather than having to follow a bunch of lame and sometimes contradictory directives or even to not have a whole hell of a lot of autonomy or other options that might be available (to choose not to perform that kind of work).. so in that regard, we must concede that there may well exist some scenarios in which work might not be so inconvenient when it is mostly optional and can be delegated when it gets in the way of enjoying hookers, lambos and blow, for example.

I am sure many rock stars (once they have "made it") have periods in which they do not mind working, and sometimes they may be in a position to take some time off, and other times they don't.

Yup, its in millions. On my chart the last month is at $8.2 Billion(May 2022) tho. The discrepancy between El Salvador and Honduras would be logical, if we keep in mind that Honduras uses their own currency. So in times of high inflation it would make sense to hold more foreign exchange reserves that are stronger than the own currency, or to peg their own currency in some way? Their forex reserves were just at $5.5 Billion in january 2020, so the increase makes sense. El Salvador on the other hand is using the usd, it would make little sense to accumulate different currencies now, their focus also seems to be into investing into the country and Bitcoin at the moment.

And indeed they just increased their usd holdings.

• Honduras holds¹: 0.69 tonnes of gold and $8.292 billion.
• El Salvador holds²: 1.37 tonnes of gold and $3.484 billion.
• CAR holds³: nothing how it seems.

¹ https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/foreign-exchange-reserves/honduras/
² https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/foreign-exchange-reserves/el-salvador/
³ https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/gold-reserves/central-african-republic/

So i actually found something:
From my understanding it serves different roles, for example: What i mentioned above to reduce risk by holding stronger currencies; To influence the value of the countries own currency, you would buy/sell another currency to keep your own currency at a certain rate for example, this then influences other things like the cost of exports/ imports; To trade and pay debts to other countries.

Yup, this is another use case to simply stay solvent, or to simply fund projects, pay for things or whatever.

That is what is fishy to me, they even created their own shitcoin.

It most likely is.

I was a little bit confused by that above chart in terms of the unit that it was describing, so I looked it up and it appears to be in the millions of dollars, so it appears that El Salvador's forex reserves are running in the $3.5 billion neighborhood.

https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/foreign-exchange-reserves

 I was not sure if that would be considered high or low, relatively-speaking as compared with other countries of similar sizes and debt levels, so I did a quickie look at Honduras, which is a similarly-sized country in terms of GDP, and they seem to have a bit more than double the amount of reserves that El Salvador has... at $8.9 Billion (if I am reading the matter correctly)

https://tradingeconomics.com/honduras/foreign-exchange-reserves

Your other point (tadamichi) regarding the fluctuation seems to be valid in terms of El Salvador having had gotten back to where they were prior to mid-2021 .. and so at the same time it does seem to be good to attempt to understand what unit we are referring too and maybe someone can explain how countries use these kinds of reserves..

I would imagine that we might be able to see a crisis with any country if they had had a historical practice of keeping FOREX reserves at a certain level, and then they have ongoing trending downwards that's showing that they don't have money to cover various debts that they might have.. and in this case we realize that El Salvador has an upcoming loan that is in the several hundreds of millions that is coming due in early 2023, so if they are not able to roll it over, then they have to pay it, and maybe if they do not have funds available in any other place, then they would pay from their FOREX reserves?


For sure El Salvador is way better thought out than CAR.. and fuck shitcoins that CAR seems to be distracted in various ways.  It probably is not a good comparison.. because El Salvador is light years ahead as compared to the CAR offerings .

Actually, this linked chart seems to show that CAR is about 1/10 the size of El Salvador in terms of GDP (and shows Honduras as similar size to El Salvador)


Surely the balance of savings (investing) versus spending is not an easy one to strike, and surely we find people who many times have to work way beyond what they expected that they were going to have to do, and surely based no the way the current system is structured, it cannot be easy to figure out ways to maintain some kind of balanced abilities to provide assurances that cashflow is going to continue to be enough once reaching ages in which it is difficult (and/or inconvenient -- maybe it is always inconvenient?) to work.

Im unsure, their Bitcoin law was introduced in june and came into effect in september 2021. Maybe they sold off some forex before this to purchase Bitcoin, but as we can see levels are already back to before.

I disagree, how it seems is that El Salvador is actually bettering financially and trying to payoff it’s foreign debt beforehand in the upcoming weeks, let’s see if it comes true. They’re definitely not solely betting/ dependent on Bitcoin, their holdings are relatively small.

To me it seems their approach is actually more thought out than CARs approach.

Yup, but then it’s also not impossible to recover the seedphrase depending on how well family members/ friends could have access to it. Recovering an unknown passphrase is hard, but not always impossible depending on what passphrase was chosen. Having a plan early will make things easier. Some coins will get lost forever, some will be recovered, some will be passed on.

Im also a fan of maintaining a healthy balance between spending and saving throughout life. Simply saving everything is pointless, because you can’t get time back, so you might as well spend enough when you’re still able to. But simply spending everything, never allows someone to build something.

At least you have figured out a way to interact with me without throwing a temper tantrum.. hahahaha

I remember some of our first interactions, you were not even ready, willing and/or able to engage... you got emotional and refused to engage.. hahahahaaha

I am thinking that in the interim, you must have received some talking-points (training) from your handlers in order that you are somewhat better (arguably improved in?) able to deal with differing perspectives.

Doesn't mean that you are right, but you are able to get through some of these discussions a wee bit better (to the extent that you are actually grappling with reality rather than your own lil fantasy?) without falling into a hissy fit.   


Sure many of us question the extent to which CAR has fallen down the shitcoin rabbit hole, but hypothetically if they were more prudent and just intertwining their various implementations with bitcoin investments, then they can profit in similar ways as individuals in terms of experiencing hedging/insurance benefits - yet of course, we know that countries have more power than individuals, so there could be ways that they could profit in other ways too (from their employment of bitcoin systems) - presuming that they are genuine (a relatively big presumption given some of their structuring of products so far) and not going to end up employing some kind of rug pull.


You seem to be unwilling and/or unable to understand the concept of a hedge or insurance.  Sometimes you do not employ the insurance or the hedge, but it still serves a purpose.  Also, both tadamichi and I have already mentioned that there are several kinds of non-monetary benefits that can come from bitcoin too.. and we need NOT reck our brains trying to list all of such possible non-monetary benefits of getting involved in bitcoin in order that you should be able to get the idea about getting into a system (bitcoin in this case) that provides more value transfer options (even if we take your assumption that the BTC price might have ended up going down at various points or even reduced in half at some point 10 years down the road as you would like to leave that as an assumption with which to work..).


I agree that it would be best to attempt to have a plan for your bitcoins to either spend then all before you die or to have some kind of successor direction for your coins; however, it really does seem that there are going to be an ongoing continued questionable levels of succession and failures to safeguard keys in order that they can be passed down after death (and other ways lost coins).

And of course, we likely already realize that bitcoin does not die if large percentages of HODLers end up losing their keys during their life or at their death.


I doubt that El Salvador is in as great of "trouble" as you are suggesting them to be.  Sure there might be some countries who are discourage about bitcoin in recent times, but I doubt that countries are as discouraged as you are making them out to be either. 

Many of us already know that building and planning tends to take place during times in which bitcoin's prices are in bear-ish kinds of markets - and/or deep consolidation trends (which largely seems to be where bitcoin is at currently), and we also know that bitcoin continues to work - tick tock the next block - and the longer that bitcoin continues to survive the stronger it likely becomes, including that various other countries, individuals and/or institutions are learning about it and either getting a position in it or figuring out ways in which they might get involved in it.

In case you do not have many bitcoins or if you are a no coiner or a low coiner (whether country, institution or individual), you might want to consider ways to get some in case it might catch on.  Right?

But in the case of El Salvador, the key is that they can hold out until the next cycle or until the price recovers significantly. Chances are that we have seen the bottom of this cycle and that from now on the price will go up, not in a straight line obviously but with some oscillations. If this happens, El Salvador's move will look better and better as the price goes up.

The problem with Bitcoin is volatility, which as time goes on should reduce. If this comes to pass, we will see many countries holding Bitcoin for their reserves, just as they now hold gold.

In case of Central African Republic, at least they didn't converted any of their Forex reserves to Bitcoin (do they have any Forex to start with?). In case of El Salvador, they converted a large part of their forex to Bitcoin, and in addition to that they also setup facilities to mine cryptocurrency. Now they are in deep trouble, because the Bitcoin prices plummeted by around 70% from the peak levels. And actually this has discouraged other countries from taking a similar step, and make Bitcoin a legal tender in their jurisdictions.

If were strictly talking about the coins itself then yes. But there can still be net benefits for a country/ person for simply starting to use/ learn Bitcoin, outside of having profited monetarily.


I am. K nah just kidding. Ofc you have to ultimately be able to spend, if you wanna get something in return for it. Otherwise it would be broken.

I think what he mean there, are countries who legalize bitcoin as a legal tender like what El Salvador did. If it's only legalizing bitcoin the normal way then many countries already did that and some of them are bigger than Qatar I believe.

Legalizing bitcoin even not making it a legal tender is already a big thing for all us bitcoiners as it can still allow us to buy and sell or use our btc for purchasing almost anything but mostly online though. Big countries are big already so they are not in a hurry but it will be beneficial for a small country to make an early move of making bitcoin a legal tender so that they can catch up as it's said that btc can help a country.

And hedges are being used because it protects value, if people would believe Bitcoin would go to zero nobody would be buying it, so you're looking again from the other way around, it's not the hedging factor that is driving people to buy, is the trust that people have in the coin and desire to own bitcoin that makes it a hedge factor.


Seems like my new investment of 50$ in nearly new panties bought online has paid off   Value is such an interesting thing, isn't it?
But it was worth seeing you write only one and a half line at least once!


Just like JayJuanGee you're looking at what gives Bitcoin value in the first place, that kind of insurance, the ability to control your own finances without anyone interfering is what generates both value and attractivity for new users, it's not the other way around.
If just those would be defining the value we would have LTC or shitcoincash also worth 25k, which obviously and hopefully will never happen.


You're only focusing on the mid of the story, all these scenarios would end with you finally using those coins one way or the other, and if nobody is willing to buy you coins for more than 1$ then everything was....well, useless, right? In the end, at the point when you decide to use them, there must be somebody who is offering you something worth in exchange, euros, dollars, cheese, ammo, porn DVDs, or used panties otherwise the whole concept of a store of value is broken.

And that is exactly from where this debate has started, if CAR will be wanting to take the profits from BTC there must be somebody offering them something in exchange for those coins, so they need somebody else to be a believer and they need somebody else to pay a higher price to reach profit.


Again, how can you profit from something you're not using and how is Salvador profiting from the coins they hold in their stash?
Oh, of course, it's insurance, it's a deposit, but just like insurance, it's worth having only when you're able to cash in!
Please tell me you're not planning to be buried with your seed phrase and untouched coins!

I wouldn’t overcomplicate it, not planning to sell doesn't mean not being able to. So having an asset that has the least likelihood of failure when other assets will, is like having an ace up one’s sleeve. Having an asset that’s least likely to be able to get confiscated, is also like having an ace up one’s sleeve. So it will be there exactly when betty needs it, kind of like an insurance.

And if we look at the current state of the world, where are the 400k best placed in? You have to put it somewhere to really preserve it, even when not planning to sell. And then again i don’t see a better option than Bitcoin for this purpose, for the simple fact that you can move and self custody it. Simply holding will benefit a whole lot of people trough many possible scenarios. Good luck crossing borders with 400k in gold, good luck spending 400k in fiat in other currencies or getting this trough the banking system easily. Simply holding Bitcoin can be the difference between a complete wipeout or having preserved even something for a lot of people, this is game changing.

In the scenario you mentioned where Bitcoin would hypothetically have dropped 50% over 10 years(which has never happened), she could have still profited by still having access to it. Something like gold can get confiscated in economic turmoil, currencies can undergo monetary reform where people get disadvantaged heavily. So it could be, that even in this hypothetical scenario where Bitcoin fell, that it preserved more value for the average person then they otherwise could preserve.

You never need an insurance, until you actually need it. And that’s where you benefit.

I think that I already sufficiently explained a variety of bitcoin's value propositions that are not necessarily tied to price, and surely there is the insurance element - which is also part of the idea of hedging.. Hedges do not always pay off monetarily if you just look at one of them, but the general idea is that if you have your feet and hands in a variety of places, you are better off than just putting everything in one place, even if some of them might not end up paying off.

Of course, you have every right to invest however the fuck you like, including being underinvested in bitcoin (at least you do not seem to be a nocoiner, even though sometimes through your seemingly highfalutin assessments of matters, you talk like one.. hahahahaha) because you look at it in narrow kinds of ways.. and that's your choice for sure.


I already did it... above, and it does not necessarily add up to one line or even two.  Otherwise, you have to figure out the matter for yourself, since you seem to be so smartie panties.  Good luck, and hope you have enough BTC (or do I?)...   

Of course I'm not, that's the basic definition you would find in every dictionary.


I am not spinning any Ponzi scheme angle, you were the first to mention a Ponzi scheme and you were the only one to associate bitcoin with a Ponzi, so don't throw this at me.

Let me say this once more, there is no way for an asset to be profitable for you if you are not able to sell it for a higher price than you bought it!
END of it!

And the other value and what it represents is meaningless when we talk about wealth and profit and investment.
A pill can cost 2$ and save a life that can't be measured in money, but it's still a 2$ pill! And if the pharmaceutical company sees it as a profit source that is in demand it can rise the price to 100$  and that will be its value if it's still bought. If it's not being bought at that price not, then it's not worth 100$ anymore but 2$ or the next higher bidder!


Seems like we're not sharing the same habit of going full Alexandre Dumas (the father) when it's not needed


Say what?  


Please do share with me an example where you buy Bitcoins, you send them in a cold wallet for 10 years, you don't plan on selling any of them, the value drops in 50% and you still "profit" from them...

And I know it's hard for you and I'm most likely trying to compete with mythical heroes here by accomplishing the 13th task that even Hercules himself wasn't able to do, a thing that was never experienced in the history of this forum since it was founded and has seen many contributions bad or good, long or short, funny or sad on it, but still, pulling myself together and thinking that this is a good time to ask, that this is an opportunity that might not arise for days or even years to come, knowing that you have strike while the iron is hot, I humbly and sincerely, truly sincerely, you don't have to ponder even for one second that there is an ulterior motive to my request, could you for probably the first time, I know this is much, but please bare with me...

Can you make that example in one line of text without going back and forth from the genesis to the end of the universe?
Simple as this:

Betty has 10 BTC in her cold wallet she bought at 40k per coin and she doesn't plan on selling it for 10 years.
How is Betty benefiting from BTC?

For now, not only small countries have legalized Bitcoin, but big countries like Qatar have not banned Bitcoin and even some investors from Qatar themselves really like cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin and are also trying to explore cryptocurrency by collaborating with certain parties. So I am more sure that in less than five years there will be several other countries that will legalize Bitcoin even though they do not immediately adopt it as a means of payment.

You are likely not technically incorrect to say that there is price appreciation when someone chooses to pay more for any item, and at the same time there is importance in appreciating that some asset classes have greater levels of fundamental value than others, so if you are spinning a ponzi scheme angle, then it can sometimes end up coming off as not being a very genuine way of capturing ongoing value that is being built in bitcoin and not always reflected in the price.  We cannot know for sure value versus price, but surely price does tend to be amongst the strongest of indicators of value... even though in some assets the price will fluctuate greatly based on a variety of factors beside merely fundamental value... so in that regard, some folks will advantage from being able to understand and appreciate value that is not necessarily reflected in spot price.


Of course, different asset classes, products or services are going to have differing price movement dynamics that can depend upon a lot of factors that are particular to that asset class, product or service.  Bitcoin is pretty unique in terms of its having had created a paradigm shifting phenomenon that had never been seen previously and of course there are some forces at play that go beyond it's mere short-term utility, and even likely inspires reflections upon whether it may be a vehicle that facilitates the greatest wealth transfer in history.. and surely we could be in the early stages of that, and no "greatest wealth transfer" in history is going to go without either a battle or even confusion regarding what is bitcoin's contribution to society - or its use case, which can increasingly inspire folks to pay more and more attention to it, but not necessarily agree upon its value or even agree upon whether there might be needs to push it's price up or to push it down, and even with the great overleveraging that had blown up for several entities, including but not limited to Tera/Luna, Celsius, Voyager and even some of the bitcoin miners, - there are ramifications when bitcoin is being used in various kind of financialization ways that go beyond retail bets, but likely creates excitement for traders too.. and even excitement for long term holders to increase their position or just to get an entry point into BTC.


I don't have any major disagreement with you on this point - even though of course, it does not hurt to point out that many of us likely know that there are some ongoing interesting aspects of bitcoin in which bitcoin's network effects continue to build, there is a kind of Lindy Effect that continues to make bitcoin stronger with blocks being produced every 10 minutes.. tick tock, the next block.. there is a kind of ongoing power in that in which bitcoin is likely getting ongoingly stronger with the passage of time.


Bitcoin remains a good hedge, and sure the basic premise is that it is likely to go up in value with the passage of time and people are likely going to continue to be willing to pay more and more for it.  But you also get value from having more options available to you that empower you in terms of being able to hold and transmit value and even potentially have a lot of privacy too, even if the BTC price might not go up in price.

You have to figure out your own reasons for investing into BTC and what kind of allocation to make into it, and if you ONLY think about price, you may well be missing some of the other ideas regarding how powerful Bitcoin is to be able to communicate value without having to go through a third party intermediary or having to risk having your funds frozen or debased - and surely there is some devils in the details regarding how some of the systems in bitcoin are going to continue to develop in which third-party intermediaries might lose a decent amount of power over your finances when you have abilities to transmit value apart from them (in whole or in part) - including considering that historically, we had been able to transact value with physical cash, and even physical cash is being attacked in terms of sometimes not being available or used.. and of course fiat (not just physical cash) is being debased on an ongoing basis too.


Nope.  They can still advantage in a lot of ways by investing into bitcoin and using bitcoin, and surely bitcoin is likely to continue to go up in value/price, but it is not an absolute condition precedent that bitcoin has to go up in price in order to profit from it... Furthermore, one of the great things about bitcoin is that you can develop all kinds of strategies to be empowered by bitcoin without necessarily having to have the BTC price go up, but an almost inevitable side benefit (kind of a perk in which you can both have your cake and eat it too) remains that bitcoin is likely to go up in price/value whether we need it to or not, and in that way HODLers of bitcoin end up profiting in those additional ways that come from that likely ongoing price appreciation.

Another way of framing it is that you can do the right thing and get rich at the same time, as long as you do not get too fucking greedy in the process, so in that regard, you really do not have to invest a lot, just invest reasonably and prudently, and surely there are advantages to being somewhat aggressive, but being aggressive is not necessary either if you are bearish about the asset, you will likely still advantage from investing into bitcoin and maybe those who do not gamble too much or become too obsessed about it will end up doing better because they will not end up overleveraging themselves in terms of their investment into bitcoin.


Yep.. it seems that they are not getting too much investment into it so far, and surely people will be nervous about long locking periods, unless the issuer inspires them to have confidence that Sango coin will not end up playing out as a rug pull.

Many people say that currently only small countries want to legalize bitcoin, but I'm sure 5 or 10 years from now more and more countries will legalize bitcoin, this of course is a start and makes us have to be optimistic about the future of bitcoin.

No, what I'm describing is every investment on this planet, from shares to real estate to precious metals.
From the very basic definition of an investment, which has the final goal of generating either income or appreciation, I think we both know appreciation means a rise in value.
Now excuse my English but how the f* word would something increase in value if there isn't somebody paying more than you have paid for?

I don't see the car that I bought for 30k and I could barely sell for 10k increasing in value, I don't see bitcoin cash increasing in value and I don't see houses in Detroit increasing value, maybe because nobody pays more and more for them?


Bitcoin's properties were the same when Bitcoin was 1$ and will be the same when it will be 1 million.
From 60k to 2k nothing has changed, neither in the protocol nor in the way it works, what happened is that the basic laws of a free market kicked in and when the supply out with the demand then the price goes down. Just how the opposite happened for years when people were willing to pay more for one bitcoin with each passing day.


Because ....it will appreciate in value, right?
And how would I profit from this without somebody offering me more than what I paid for one coin?


I didn't focus that reply solely on you but rather on the 40 pages and nearly one thousand posts on the same topic about Salvador which claim Salvador will get rich because they are buying coins now and those will appreciate in value. But in order for them to profit from their investment, again, they will need someone to buy that stash from them at a higher price, right?

Back to the Sango coin,

this thing doesn't match anything in the whitepaper


So god knows what's happening there.

I see bunch of other websites sharing the same news, but honestly I would be surprised if result was any different. As a matter of fact, I am surprised that they even managed to sell that considering Sango Coin ridiculous tokenomics (looking like a 2017 ICO) and the reputation of the country issuing it.

I also read that they had top lower minimum investment from $500 to $100 which also says a lot about the interest.

A bit of update about CAR adoption:


The news comes from Bloomberg, relaunching an Intellinews piece. I wasn’t able to find the original news on intellinews website.
So, pinch of salt.