Topic: El Salvador has become the first country to make #Bitcoin legal tender! 🇸🇻 - page 106. (Read 40907 times)

Not really of the assests, but rather of the value of those assets, measured in counter-valued fiat terms … but only on the books to date, since they are unrealized losses until they actually sell their BTCs.

That doesn’t mean that the situation is not worrying at some level for them, not only from the perception perspective, but also from the bookkeeping point of view. The bitcoins owned by the government allegedly came from the initial 150M $ bitcoin Trust established to give liquidity to the Chivo System. I say allegedly because, if my memory serves me well, the initial statements pointed in this fashion, but there is no explicit mention to all subsequent purchases. Even so, the Trust likely has some bookkeeping rules to comply with, and standing at a loss of say those mentioned 40M $, even if only on the paper, may trigger some inner problems at some point in time.

El Salvador has bought 2,301 bitcoins in the last few years and if we look at the lowest price they bought around $30k some time ago, then we can say that salvador has now lost about 50% of the assets they own, as an adopting country bitcoin of course there will be fear from their people about the fiscal occurrence of the el salvador economy due to a bad market, I hope if president nayib bukelele can still keep the salvador economy stable under current conditions.

You have no option of using bitcoin directly, you need some software like wallet. Interacting with such software means you need to understand how crypto works (and why Chivo wallet is not as safe as an open source non custodial wallet). It is not directly what bitcoin is. LN is not bitcoin also, it is made to work with bitcoin but not is bitcoin itself. So we can talk about which part of crypto should Salvadorians be educated first (including why other cryptocurrencies are risky to use) but not that there should be no crypto education at all. When I talk about crypto to be taught I mean what is bitcoin, how decentralization works, how to use wallets and how to choose wallets, what are other cryptocurrencies and which are risks of using them (at least not to be cheated with fake bitcoins and bitcoin forks), what is LN and how it works, — it is a bit wider than to learn bitcoin.

As far as I have heard, so far there is no goal to educate Salvadoreans about "crypto" unless it is incidentally to focus on bitcoin, and to imply to stay away from that other shit.  The same would be true in regards to the various other non-governmental forces in El Salvador which would be focusing on bitcoin, lightning network and matters related to those - not shitcoins or "crypto" .. fuck that shit..

Of course, there would be no way to completely escape shitcoins and their desires to figure out ways to attempt to benefit from El Salvador's decision to make bitcoin legal tender.. so I suppose I am not going to disagree that there may well be ongoing needs to make sure that stupid-ass vague framings such as "crypto" does not confuse bitcoin with shitcoins and some of the likely incidental needs to clarify those kinds of points that bitcoin and crypto is not the same thing... so stop trying to suggest that there is some kind of first order need to educate about "crypto" in El Salvador when that is not the case in El Salvador.. at least not any kind of primary focus.

Yes, I understand that it is not a trivial problem to educate a society of an entire state so they can get better understanding of economy and crypto. But to adopt bitcoin we IMO have no other ways as any crypto solutions are still not so easy to use. To get all benefits crypto can give and not to lose crypto user should get enough economic knowledge. It is hard but it is the only way, IMHO.

Most of the time, I do not intend to be mean when I respond to the ideas of others, and sure sometimes some of members will take my comments in a personal way, so there is always some potential that some kind of back and forth exchange of ideas might end up devolving into personal attacks.. It does happen from time to time.. .

As South American, my opinion is that the topic of education is a vicious circle when comes to countries with social problems. Education in general is an important weapon against poverty and manipulation, ignorance itself is something taken advantage of to manipulate the masses, we all know that.

One can call El Salvador a "poor" country and part of this problem is the lack of education and culture there are nations that have such a strong culture about work and education that allows its population to be reborn from the ashes, Japan is a good example.

The vicious circle starts when there is poverty that does not allow to get education and therefore there is a perpetuation of poverty. The president of Salvador (as any good president would) is trying to break this circle by attacking the poverty but he should also attack the ignorance at the same time, if possible, because we would encounter himself swimming against the stream otherwise. The vicious circles are quite hard to break at a personal level, ever harder at a nationwide level.

It is a question of enlightenment: if El Salvador's government wants to have high enough support despite low rates of bitcoin it should educate Salvadorians more and give them enough economical and crypto information. If Salvadorians will understand that it is not a problem that long term investments went down in short prospective they will still support their government despite low rates of bitcoin. If not... well, we all can guess what can be then.

all done with great intention and courage and believe that what is done to bitcoin will always bring good news. even though it is currently in a slump, the past has proven that bitcoin has surprised at high prices. bitcoin will always do this over and over, so no need to worry about this. elsavador has taken the best steps and it is a phenomenal record for a developing country to be willing to adopt bitcoin as a recognized means of payment. it must have been obvious that everything had been thought out carefully about what was to come but bold action was something that was greatly appreciated.

I scratch my head when you question someone if their mind changes if it is a bull or bear market hehe. My argument is similar to yours. El Salvador's bitcoin investment and how it appears to world will be continued to be questioned not only by the critics. It will be questioned by their own people because it is their money that is being used in what might appear for them to be a gamble made by Bukele.

I do say one thing that it is better to have a rough start and gain a good finishing, what will be the cost and price of a success if never been through difficulties, time kike this should be a testing and trial times for El-Savador and Central African Republic to make the good record of history they would live to requone with in the future to come, what will it be said of this two countries if the price of bitcoin breaks the limit of it all time high and mark a nee history, we all want the glory but not one want to experience the story, i believe theirs a great reward for every bravery decision made in life as such in the case of El-Savador and Central African Republic who adopted bitcoin as a legal tender.

But do you really think that the main purpose of taking such a dangerous step using taxpayers' money is for the state to become a storehouse of Bitcoin? This would not have required a law to legalize it on the scale of the daily use of individuals, nor would its adoption be accompanied by that wave of populist propaganda.
The approach with Tesla for electric cars is not appropriate in this example, because the company is solid and strong compared to the case of countries such as El Salvador and other countries in the southern half of the American continent.

It would only be matter of time, what would be said as an unwise decision made by countries that legalize bitcoin as a legal tender would be later changed to a brave decision that later favoured. Bitcoin price decreases and unfavoured period like this present bear market has been in history, not only in 2022 but back then in 2014 and 2018. These should not be a surprise but a possible indication that next long period bull market is coming and should probably be in less than 2 or 3 years from now. It can be far, but the months of bulls that will lead to all-time-high will become tomorrow soon. You are saying the truth, the world has been full of lies since the beginning of human advancement.

Can you see what I quote in bold now when I first brought the topic, you can read it below:


I hope you can get the meaning of that bolded quote, that is just how the world is, there are bitcoin critics and people prefer to take up the unimportant part that is not having significant effect on economy compared to the main ones they should talk about. Bitcoin adoption is not the problem of El Salvador, even El Salvador is not as rich as many other countries when it comes to citizens holding and buying bitcoin. People just failed to understand that countries that do not make bitcoin a legal tender but their citizens buy are also having such effect just like El Salvador, but people are not talking about that but focus on what is not.

There is not dream that reality kill, bitcoin adoption continues as a result of what has happened in the past. I hope you are not the type that will change your mind during bull and again change your mind during bear and change your mind again during bull. Bitcoin is a safe haven but in long term, not short term.

We should also not forget that El Salvador is a poor country, their president bought a risky investment near the all time high and he used taxpayers money to buy this risky investment. What would this make him appear in front of his constituents presently that bitcoin has dumped?

I support the inspiration of uniting South America under bitcoin, however, it appears reality has come again to kill the dream. But what has just occured is they have become bagholders. If someone told you a country and a multibillion electric car company would become bagholders of bitcoin, no one would believe you hehehehe.

For sure they had already studied about the probabilities thats why they are already expecting something like this for the market to be on this condition.Its true that 1 btc is always equal to one and no matter what
happen as long they dont sell everything or anything then its not considered to be losses.It might be on negative or deep reds but its not really into that situation where its totally considered to be one.
They could always opt to hold and wait and even the President might be considering on buying even more with these cheaper price since he do indeed know on how crypto game
works and only to those dumb or lacking some ideas will really be just whining and keeps complaining.

In my opinion, this statement is the mass and media consumption of something similar to populism. No party that uses cryptocurrencies periodically can not be affected by a sharp decline in price, whether in the current wave or others in previous crises and even the next.
For savers, we cannot talk about a definite loss as long as the savings have not been touched and as long as there is a firm conviction that the price will return to the rise. But once they think about their use, they are necessarily losers. Do not forget, my friend, that we are here to talk about a country-wide investment with an important economic size .

Sure, but we should not ignore the obvious consequences of the bear market we seem to be going into.

The fact that El Salvador (and other institutional investors) is in the zone of unrealized losses will be use as ammo by the detractors of Bitcoin and decentralization as a whole. I would not feel suprised if the FMI and the World bank started to issue some official declarations against the "unwise" investment made by the Salvador in Bitcoin, I would not feel surprised either if some protests started there under the narrative that the president is gambling the money of the people away, etc.

We all know Bitcoin has powerful enemies and during this bear market they weill show up again, wielding as well the Terra-Luna and Celsius cases as extra ammo to seed the FUD around the community and the people of Salvador.

At Which volume, i don't think that's so important in this situation, since Bitcoin is a decentralized currency and being used and adopted as an alternative currency in El Salvador, the volume at which the country reserve stands is what is important and since 1 Bitcoin= 1 Bitcoin and the 2,301 holding is still intact El Salvador government through the president understand the game quite well and are prepared what this even before the Bitcoin adoption and that can be deduced from the minister of finance interview yesterday.


Screen short source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-has-not-had-any-losses-due-to-bitcoin-price-dive-finance-minister-says

I agree, they’re using an accounting trick that can be risky depending on how much is actually being put into the trust.

To be fair tho, i think they took the danger into account. The trust is relatively small with just 150 million $, this can’t bring them into any serious risk.

Also with the hospital thing, they marketed a short sited gain as a win, which is questionable(but this is politics). But i still think a country with such a weak economy should invest into infrastructure and jobs and this 4 million $ were more than well spent.

// Edit: Also i cant think of a model that better fits their interests than this.

1. As Bitcoin goes down, they can accumulate more sats for cheap, keeping the trusts value stable.

2. As Bitcoin goes up, they can pull usd out and take home profits.

Leaving them with more and more Bitcoin over time, till they run out of usd. Then they can scale the trusts value higher.

They would never need to dump btc on the market(which is good for price), but they can still pull out profits and stack sats. This fits perfectly into the bet we all do with Bitcoin, we want more sats not fiat. Is there a smarter way than this?

I am sure that it is worth looking for a very thin level between whether to use bitcoin, and if so, in what volumes. I think it's pretty important.