Topic: El Salvador has become the first country to make #Bitcoin legal tender! 🇸🇻 - page 132. (Read 40721 times)

I decided to respond to this especially since you had decided to chide another member - see below for using your post as a springboard to say whatever that poster had wanted without addressing the concerns that you brought up in your post (see below).

Surely, I do not know too many of the on the ground facts either, but any of us should be able to speculate about such facts in such a way that does not end up arriving at a dire conclusion, unless all that you are wanting to achieve is the arrival at a dire conclusion by reading negativities into what seems to be a decently powerful, empowering and positive news.

My understanding is that there are around $7 million people in El Salvador, and let's assert that the place is so god damned poor that ONLY about 1/10 of its population has cell phones, and perhaps similar numbers for various kinds of internet access or wifi.

I would think that this is going to mean that the government is going to have to start to invest in the development of that kind of technology and create incentives for the building of the infrastructure and getting some kinds of electronic device into the hands of more people, including any businesses that might be selling goods and services.  If the situation is very dire in terms of lack of availability of such devices, then I would consider that the government is going to have to work its ass off in terms of trying to make this successful beyond merely 1/10 of the economy.  

I doubt that the on the ground situation is as dire as you seem to be presumptively making it out to be, Obito, even if it might take some work and perhaps many years to spread even the technological abilities, my understanding is that there has been a kind of bitcoin beach already present in El Salvador and certain levels of expansion of adoption of the Strike app... so the El Salvador President (Nayib Bukele) has already seen some "on-the-ground" possibilities based on already existing facts and technological possibilities.  I would think that Bukele has some ideas about the kind of technological expansion possibilities or would have made the bill a wee bit more whimpy in terms of saying that businesses need to accept bitcoin unless they technologically are not able to.. which is already pretty strong language to be suggesting in such bill if the situation on the ground in El Salvador were to be as barbarically lacking as you seem to be presuming in terms of your doom and gloom ideas about failure or costs of going forward with bitcoin as legal tender greater than benefits, blah blah blah.



If we are in a public thread members can quote others for whatever reason that they like, or no reason at all... so sure it would be nice if members were responsive to the posts that they quote, but members are all over the place - especially newbies.. not trying to give any excuse to the newbie, but members are all over the place and sometimes do not have any clue about how to answer a speculative question, such as the one you presented, Obito.. in which you seem to be presuming facts and then wanting some other member to provide facts for your hypothetical.. and perhaps agree with your presumptive conclusion that this whole El Salvador bitcoin initiative is seemingly doomed to failure "cause da peeps there be too much poor ones.".. and maybe you are correct in the end, but seems like you are doing a lot of presuming and assuming too in your arrival at such a conclusion in such an early stage that we are ONLY one week into the announcement and only a few days into the bill passing (admittedly things seem to be moving pretty quickly there, but they also have 90 days from the publication of the bill - which presumably happened a few days ago - let's say June 8 - before the law goes into effect - let's say second week of September for the law to go into effect).

This news was the source of bitcoin to recover and that's really a good news to heard these kinds of news that will eventually be root of success on mass adoption just like what El Salvador did. With the legalization it will bring more countries to embrace bitcoin adoption and support it all the way.

I guess we will have time to find out all the details about this soonest. This is a big move for Bitcoin and of cause, we might see some other countries following this path even though the IMF is having its concerns about the move and why won't they? Bitcoin was created to take us out of this people's chokehold but they don't want that to happen.

 El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele will be remembered in history for taking this brave move.

this is the best step taken by el salvador, this is also interesting news, what we have to wait for in the future, after el salvador legalizes bitcoin, maybe their economy will start to improve, if el salvador can make their economy improve because it legalizes bitcoin, I believe the country others are following in the footsteps of el salvador..

That doesn't answer my question though, how will the impoverished population going to access bitcoin if they don't even have their own electronic devices since they can't afford it, next time try to answer what you're going to quote.

If it makes the world's biggest loan shark unhappy, then I like the news all the more, heh.

Something tells me it's more about self-preservation for them.  Imagine if nations do adopt a currency which the IMF are unable to control and it does have the effect of improving their respective economies (it's a big "if", but imagine it happened), that results in fewer countries relying on the IMF, reducing their overall influence on the world stage.  This is a potential threat to their vice-like grip on struggling countries if it proves successful.

I'm pretty much sure that we have El Salvador representatives on the forum. I'm very much interested to read Salvadorians experience about it.
How it influenced their every day expenses. Was it convenient to pay in Bitcoin. Was is simply easy to switch from national currency to BTC. I'm interested in everything, because they are the first and they experience this adoption first.

I was just responding to what you said, and I already responded to that (of course in this above post).

Here's what you had said..




I was NOT trying to get caught up in a shitcoin discussion, I was mostly just attempting to respond to various points of your earlier post, and of course, the El Salvador law passage ONLY deals with bitcoin, but of course, shit coin pumpers are going to end up coming.  Surely, you have likely noticed that I am not very much into either talking about shitcoins or getting involved in them, but I have trouble anticipating a variety of scenarios that any government, such as El Salvador, might attempt to deal with some of the potential problems of the various shitcoins, and surely the shitcoin issue also goes much beyond the borders of El Salvador even if El Salvador is attempting to invite bitcoin in without dealing with the shitcoin matter, at least not in that legislation that has so far passed.



For sure we are going to have some interesting times with perhaps some jurisdictions, such as El Salvador becoming quite friendly and even inspiring copy cat jurisdictions, and we could also have some jurisdictions become hostile to bitcoin, so it will be interesting to see how some of those opposite approaches might play out, assuming that some opposing approaches continue to attempt implementation - even if in the longer run, there might develop some common standards - and surely the pro-bitcoin folks are going to want to have models like El Salvador, but even El Salvador is not in a vacuum, so they might have to both revisit their law or figure out some of the implementation challenges along the way, including figuring out how much support that they might have to provide for some businesses that are not currently technologically enabled to take bitcoin but might be able to get up and running with some assistance training and maybe even figuring out ways to afford devices that can process bitcoin/lightning payments.

Salvador has become a sign of the Bitcoin market. In the near future, there may be more and more people in the world who will use Bitcoin as the country’s legal tender. This is just the beginning, not the end.

@ JayJuanGee, I don't know from where you get the idea that I am supporting the shitcoins. I have always opposed the altcoins (with rare exceptions such as Cardano). But the reality is that there is a very large section of users who prefer these coins for a wide variety of reasons. Some of them think that coins such as Cardano and NEO represent more advanced technology and are therefore more suitable to resolve issues such as scalability and high transaction fee. Also, another large section believes that BTC has already plateaued and they will get better returns by investing in the alts. I don't agree with the second view. I still believe that in the long run, BTC will give much better returns when compared to the alts.

For most of the other points, I could somewhat agree with you. I could foresee an increase in the amount of hostility from the authorities, but as you have posted, now the community is mature enough to take care of these challenges to a great extent.

It is OK. From what I have heard, the parliament has passed the law with a supermajority (62 out of the 84 legislators supporting the move). Anyone who is willing to invest 3 BTC in the Salvadoran economy will be given the citizenship of that country. And as expected, some of the international agencies have been quick to come up with their criticism. Gerry Rice, who is the spokesman for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has criticized the moved and he claims that it will lead to a dilution in regulatory screening.

Does El Salvador have a loan made with the IMF? It appears it has begun. The IMF will influence the economic and fiscal policy of a country again hehe.

If anyone does not know, the IMF and the World Bank are the institutions that use debt trap policy for many of years before China begun using it. They let countries borrow money in exchange for influence on that country’s policies.



IMF sees legal, economic issues with El Salvador bitcoin move

The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday it has a number of economic and legal concerns regarding the move from El Salvador to make bitcoin a parallel legal tender.

“Adoption of bitcoin as legal tender raises a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues that require very careful analysis,” said Gerry Rice, an IMF spokesman, during a scheduled press briefing.

Rice said the Fund will later on Thursday meet with Bukele to discuss the bitcoin law. El Salvador is in discussions with the IMF seeking a near $1 billion program.

Source https://www.reuters.com/article/el-salvador-bitcoin-imf-idUSL2N2NS1PB

Bitcoin is not Ethereum, and this is not cryptokitties.. .fuck that smoke and mirrors nonsense, even trying to suggest that bitcoin and ethereum are similar.. ethereum is not even up and running that is why the diptwats involved with that project are proposing that they have to move to another system.. which is really a whole new system to even get the nonsense to work.. so yeah.. they can keep up the smoke and mirror nonsense trying to appear that people can actually run nodes, when it does not even function now, and surely the cryptokitties showed that it did not function a few years ago either.


Not sure about your point exactly.  Bitcoin is decentralized and Visa/Mastercard is not... bitcoin can learn from visa/mastercard, but bitcoin is not just visa/mastercard it is more.

Yes, lightning network and strike are layers built on top of bitcoin, and of course they take time to develop, but still bullish as fuck for bitcoin to see increased attention towards developing bitcoin and incentivization systems within a country to attempt to attract development in their location and with their citizens as guinea pigs.. at the same time El Salvador did not just jump into this blindly because there had already been some practice and expanding of the strike/lighting network and bitcoin ecosystem for a couple of years on bitcoin beach... so they seem to be building on that and more of course, and they seem to also be inspiring both OGs in bitcoin and very technically and business minded folks to them.. think of Adam Back jumping on board almost as soon as the thing was announced.. .,. so sure some things might break or need to be improved, but it is hardly bad for bitcoin nor something that should be feared in any kind of meaningful way in terms of whatever visa/master card was doing in the 50s/60s and 70s which is more like 50-70 years ago rather than 100 years ago.. but whatever... all systems have some aspects of building on other systems whether we are talking about payment systems or communication systems or banking and sound money systems.    Bitcoin is no one trick pony, either... so there are a lot of angles in which it can be used by people, institutions and governments, and there seem to be a lot of people working on it and changing their perceptions and uses of it with the passage of time, too.


We know some stuffs right now. and we will find out more as it gets used more and more, won't we?  So who the fuck cares if various aspects break, it will get fixed and bitcoin seems quite capable of handling the project.  Of course, there is a difference between bitcoin the base layer and bitcoin the lightning network and other second layer solutions that might be going into El Salvador to "assist".. sounds like exciting times rather than doom and gloom nonsense times that seem to be coming from a nocoiner/bitcoin naysayer, aka worldtraveller321



Fair enough.. what you going to do to stop this?  Whine on the interwebs that "we are moving too quickly"?  Maybe you should go down to help out El Salvador if you believe that they are insufficiently armed to handle the influx and of course, you are not saying anything new when you are suggesting that this is a work in process, so not sure if I am understanding the level of your negative nancyisms.

We are not ready...

we are not ready.. .


so fucking what?  the time has come, and some peeps are stepping up to the plate of the various challenges.. and quite proud of the various work being done by a lot of bitcoin techie peeps, business and government folks too.  Sounds like a great thing to me, rather than some nonsense about we need to wait longer.. blah blah blah.. bitcoin gives no fucks if you ready or not, people are going to do what they are going to do.. you want to help or whine about it?



So?  There are always difficulties in anything that is new or being incorporated into lives of people and systems that are being touched.


Yes.. let them speak up.  There are a lot of bitcoin naysayers and whiners like you who say all kinds of nonsense.. and sure they scare some people off, especially scaring off the fence sitters, and in the end, people have to decide for themselves if they want to participate in bitcoin, and sure if you are operating a business in El Salvador then you are likely going to receive some pressures to learn about various technologies and/or to add features that you do not want to add.



that's obvious.

this is good news, we have to wait for the future, hopefully this will become a reality, and can improve the economy in the country of el salvador, but this is still in the process, because there is still much to be done first by the president of el salvador, the president of el salvador must send it to congress past..

I think this is a mix of good and bad.  I think in some case this is too soon for adoption in this manner. The tech of Bitcoin has yet to evolve.
just like the situation with ETH in 2017 and cryptokiddies that shut the network down since many more people were on it.

Visa and Mastercard has had 100 years to work on their network. They are able to work on the network in a scenario of let's say billion people did a transaction at one time. System can handle it.

With Bitcoin, we have no idea how the system could handle a very large number of transactions at one time. Sure the lightning network is improving. However, things with all tech are based on trial and error.

There will be many difficulties in this route El Salvador is going with. Right now we have not heard of the ones who are opposed to this. For sure there are many people in El Salvador who are totally against this movement as well.

Correct me if i am wrong, nothing is perfect.

The new laws making bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador will only become actual and active in 3 months time from now.

El Salvador is the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender but as of this moment, it isn't been passed to the congress so there is a slim chance that it might not happen but I'm optimistic on it and for sure it will pass into the congress.

If this will be a success then it will be good for the crypto users and this might create a domino effect towards other small countries and they might do the same... or not . On the other hand though, I don't expect for some 1st or even 2nd world countries to do the same as what El Salvador did.

El Salvador uses Bitcoin as legal tender, demonstrating its acceptance and recognition of Bitcoin.This move will also affect other countries and promote the economic development of Bitcoin.

This is great! Well congratulation because they made it to be the first country to make bitcoin legal. It is one great move for them and and it will be a challenge for other country too, to accept bitcoin and adopt it and become part of their economy's system, and for those who are still skeptical about it they will observe it and see what will happen to them if if really be worth it.

Fair enough with a kind of cautionary consideration of the term probable, and it is possible that we could be saying very similar things, but just using different words to say it.

On a personal financial level, I don't have very high expectations in terms of future financial increases, so I am quite content with something in the ballpark of 6% per year on average - but then there comes into play a bit of spoiledness once we have already reached certain prices, then the bottom of the BTC price moves up and the 6% per year needs to be calculated from a higher bottom, rather than from wherever the BTC price might have been one or two years earlier.. because it seems that we have transitioned into a different realm of calculation - so in that sense looking at the stock to flow price prediction model can be quite helpful to see that the BTC price has actually moved up a kind of ladder - which does not guarantee future BTC price but it kind of brings some foundation to the price where we are at.

Another good measure of the foundation seems to be the 208-week moving average, which is currently at about $13k... and in March 2020 when we had the liquidity event, the 208-week moving average was ONLY about $5k (even though the BTC prices dropped below it for nearly a couple of weeks).  Anyhow, the higher prices in BTC have brought up the 208-week moving average quite considerably.. which seems to be a pretty damned conservative bottom indicator.

Regarding comparing BTC's market cap to gold, there is likely some fair considerations therein, and surely, I think that there is a lot of fair considerations to consider bitcoin to easily be somewhere between 10x the value of gold and 1,000x the value of gold - however, it is very difficult to reasonably speculate regarding how much time it could take to get to gold's market cap and even to exceed gold's market cap, especially getting to levels that are 1,000x or so of gold's market cap.  There is a kind of battle that could take several years to play out and perhaps even several decades.

I think that you are getting quite distracted if you believe that shitcoins deserve much if any calculation in terms of how far bitcoin can go or what is reasonable in terms of both bitcoin's price performance or even kind of suggesting that bitcoin is meaningfully sharing much if any value with shitcoins.  Yeah, I know that shitcoin pumpers and bitcoin naysayers talk some pretty BIG game, but in the end, there really is no there there in terms of Gresham law type considerations, and the value flows into the soundest of monies, which is bitcoin.  Sure people are distracted by a variety of shitcoins and thinking that they might offer something concrete, but either that value is going to get absorbed into bitcoin or if there might be anything salvageable in any of the shitcoins, there could be some pegging (maybe like second or third or some other layers on top of bitcoin?), but still seems erroneous trying to calculate various shitcoin projects in terms of substantially or meaningfully taking away any of bitcoin's value propositions.

Of course, you are free to include shitcoins in your thinkenings about what is possible or what is going on in the space, but seems to be quite a big distraction in my thinking.. and sure, I am not denying that shitcoins exist and I am not even denying that people are investing in that nonsense as well as some of them making a lot of money from various shitcoins, but still muddy thinking to me if you cannot attempt at least consider their value (to the extent that they have any) as sucking off the teat of bitcoin rather than bitcoin actually suffering from any kind of meaningful competition or loss of value because of such distracting pee wee junior leagues nonsense.



I don't know who you believe is assuming that?  We have a lot of things going on and a kind of war going on with the  greatest wealth transfer in history.  Why would anyone be presuming things to be staying the same?  Almost anything can happen, and bitcoin does seem to be designed to be able to account for a variety of scenarios in the next 5-10 years.  

Maybe you need to explain exactly how your presumptions differ from the presumptions of those of us who are too optimistic?

By the way, bitcoin hardly gives any shits about these various worldy issues, and if people find utility in bitcoin, then they will use it and if they don't then they won't, but bitcoin is already built with sound money incentives that value is quite likely to gravitate into it and does not really matter if you want to or not, if you fuck around and delay getting into it, then you are likely the one who is under-appreciating the power of bitcoin's already existing design and it is currently the best asset and system to deal with a variety of uncertainties, and it has already been up and running for 12.5 years in order to continue to show its various strengths to deal with new variables and let's see what happens and let's see if you can throw bitcoin off of its already inbuilt genius of a design that is able to deal with the knowns and the unknowns and even the unknown unknowns in way better ways than any other existing system that we currently know about.. so good thing if people make sure that they have some bitcoin in order to be in a better position on a personal level to have options no matter what happens.


You are referring to status quo powers that be such as governments and financial institutions.  O.k.... so what?

The status quo powers have already been employing various tools to fight bitcoin, so sure, they can ramp it up and try some other tactics, but I doubt that it is really clear and obviously to their advantage to make these kinds of direct fights with bitcoin because bitcoin is world-wide, and sure they can attempt to coordinate fights, and then countries are going to take sides, and people will take sides too, and bitcoin seems to already be designed to be ready for these kinds side taking, and sure it's price might suffer during some period of these kinds of battles but so far we have not seen anything really meaningfully being thrown at it.. so your fears about potential battles seem to be the same nonsense that was asserted 6-7 years ago when I first got into bitcoin, but the fact that bitcoin has been around for 6-7 years since then and has gotten stronger and stronger, makes it quite a bit less convincing that bitcoin would not be prepared for such a battle and even question the extent to which such a battle is going to happen, like you are speculating (seemingly mostly blindly speculating).


So?  These are still new developments that have one act on one side and then an act on the other side and seems to me that we should be watching how it plays out rather than just concluding that automatically one side is going to trounce the other side...


Ok.. let them do it.  There is already decent embedding of bitcoin into various US systems, so they are going to have a lot of constituents that are NOT going to appreciate US Govt actions that strive to confront bitcoin too directly in terms of stunting its growth..




You are not really saying anything too novel, so far.  


Here's some more muddied thoughts.

Are you talking about bitcoin or some amorphous concept?

If we are talking about bitcoin, then let's talk about bitcoin.

As far as cryptocurrencies, who fucking cares?  There are a lot of them trying to be like bitcoin and they have a variety of central points of failure, so sure they are all over the place, and some governments and financial institutions likely consider the various shitcoins as potential allies to try to beat up on bitcoin that is much more difficult to touch.. so sure, various governments and banks might be using various shitcoins to try to get some grounds in undermining bitcoin, but it is not exactly clear how a lot of that is going to play out and for sure a lot of shitcoins are way too frothy so some purging of their baloney is likely in order.. but I cannot say whether purging of shitcoins in the short to medium term, if it happens, is automatically going to drag bitcoin down.. who knows?  Some value will flow into bitcoin, especially in the longer term, but in the short term, prices and perceptions could go all over the place and there are going to be a decent number of casualties, including people who do not know what the fuck ios going on and they confuse bitcoin with shitcoins or some other nonsense like that, but there are also likely going to be an increasing number of folks who recognize that bitcoin remains the solid pillar in this whole mess.. so sure, it could well have some messy times in the short to medium term to figure it out and for individuals, institutions and governments to figure out how to play their allocations... and those who are gravitating into bitcoin will likely be rewarded in the long term, even though in the short to medium term there could be a decent amount of unclearness about if they are being rewarded (or not) for gravitating their financial and psychological (including their mental resources) into bitcoin.



Sure.. you are not the ONLY one... and there are many of us who have already done quite well from bitcoin, and will increasingly do well because we are in the midst of the largest wealth transfer in history so folks with bitcoin will be greatly advantaged as compared to those who fight it or are not allocating in bitcoin.  Another sense is that none of us likely even need to have very much bitcoin (in these times) in order to profit stupendously.. despite some possible upcoming battles that might be uncomfortable.

So, for you and I, we already may well be quite prepared because we have a certain value in bitcoin, but there are likely quite a few people who have either no bitcoin or they have only small amounts such as less than $100 or something like that.  Sure, each of us can profit stupendously, even with small allocations into bitcoin, but we likely need to be a bit more aggressive than something less than $100.  So, of course, there could be some larger lump sum investing or there could be DCA type investing for folks who don't have any kind of lump sum cash available.  So sure, $10 per week or $100 per week could be meaningful and sufficiently aggressive strategies, but each person has to figure out his/her level of aggressiveness (if any).. Institutions and governments are in similar places regarding such decision making, and sure individuals, so far, have been lucky to front run institutions and governments, but in the past couple of years, and even  these recent events, we are finding out that some institutions and governments are getting in, so could make it more expensive for individuals to garner as much of a decent stake in BTC, relatively speaking - even though still seems like we are quite early days, too...   never really easy times, and most people seem to conclude that they are too late, but if they do not start to take a stake or to get set up, then they are likely to have fewer abilities (relatively speaking) to be able to garner as much of a stake in BTC, relatively speaking.