Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
Part of it depends on whether or not your think money created in the US should be taxed for leaving the US because that is at least partially what Western Union is doing, along with ensuring the safe transfer of that money.
I'm not defending the predatory tactics of western union just the general ideas that crypto is mainly trying to circumvent.
Considering that money created in the USA leaves the USA every day via cheaper avenues, this is more screwing over those too poor to have access to those options.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
Potential and theoretical benefits aside (And acknowledging that Western Union is absolutely a shit company full of assholes) the inherent limitations and bottlenecks of bitcoin make it fundamentally unsuitable to be adopted at a national scale.
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
Potential and theoretical benefits aside (And acknowledging that Western Union is absolutely a shit company full of assholes) the inherent limitations and bottlenecks of bitcoin make it fundamentally unsuitable to be adopted at a national scale.
My take on it is that Bitcoin is used as the currency because it is the most widely known and although it is crazy volatile, it retains the best value (and the $25 million they bought could be worth double next year). The actual tech behind their apps isn't on Bitcoin though so all of the bottlenecks that come with Bitcoin don't effect their day to day use. If El Salvador announced they were adopting Algorand or another lesser known crypto it probably wouldn't have worked as well.
It's similar to GPU mining, you can't mine Bitcoin with a GPU, you mine Ethereum and whatever other PoW crypto, but you get paid in Bitcoin.
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
The actual tech behind their apps isn't on Bitcoin though so all of the bottlenecks that come with Bitcoin don't effect their day to day use.
See this is the thing.
They made a government-sponsored money transfer system accessable to the general populace an not just financial institutions. This is good, this is a great public service and every country should have one. (*stares at the US*)
But the fuck is crypto doing to add to that?
It's just an unnecessary middle step.
I guess the best thing is that crypto sets a new baseline. Public or private money transfer services have to be at least as useful as crypto. It's not a particularly high bar but before there wasn't a bar at all.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
Potential and theoretical benefits aside (And acknowledging that Western Union is absolutely a shit company full of assholes) the inherent limitations and bottlenecks of bitcoin make it fundamentally unsuitable to be adopted at a national scale.
My take on it is that Bitcoin is used as the currency because it is the most widely known and although it is crazy volatile, it retains the best value (and the $25 million they bought could be worth double next year). The actual tech behind their apps isn't on Bitcoin though so all of the bottlenecks that come with Bitcoin don't effect their day to day use. If El Salvador announced they were adopting Algorand or another lesser known crypto it probably wouldn't have worked as well.
It's similar to GPU mining, you can't mine Bitcoin with a GPU, you mine Ethereum and whatever other PoW crypto, but you get paid in Bitcoin.
The whole situation seems very weird and like Bukele is probably planning to make money on this somehow or other.
They legally adopted bitcoin as their currency, alongside the US dollar, and mandated that all businesses who have the technical capability to do so must accept bitcoin as payment. The way they're supposed to accept those payments is through the use of the Chivo app, which isn't actually bitcoin. All the ATMs the government installed are based on the Chivo app. Chivo is based on Algorand, which is proof of stake, and everyone using Chivo are putting their money into, effectively, an exchange. It's surprisingly (or not, depending on how cynical one is) difficult to find any actual technical details about the app but I think that means the company who owns the app servers (Bitso) are the ones who own the "stake" in Algorand's Proof of Stake. If the app is successful enough then they (Bitso) basically get to decide what transactions go into each Algorand block since its system randomly selects stakeholders to vote on block contents. It all seems very shady to me.
So now the average El Salvadoran using the app has to worry about the value of an Algo (Algorand's coin) and the value of Bitcoin since that's the actual official currency of the nation. If the value of an Algo drops but the value of BTC doesn't then their money is now worth less. Or if the value of BTC randomly drops by 25% the morning they try to go grocery shopping they can aburptly afford 25% less food than they expected. I don't see why anyone would leave their money in the app, especially if there are ATMs all over spitting out USD for Algo. Use the app for a free international wire transfer equivalent, then go get the cash out. And hope you don't lose just as much due to BTC and Algo volatility as you'd have lost to Western Union fees. And that the gangs who apparently hang around outside Western Union offices in El Salvador don't do the seemingly obvious thing and hang around near Chivo ATMs.
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
I mean, its sorta an apples to oranges comparison.
WU takes cash at a physical location and dispenses cash at a different physical location. It is literally servicing the least efficient market possible.
I'm sure the fees are much less to send money via a digital wallet(WU has its own mobile wallet that doesn't have a fee best I can tell), because the costs to do it are infinitesimal by comparison. Just in the US there are 10x more WU locations than JP Morgan Chase branches. I'm sure its improved in the *mumble* years since I did WU transfers at the grocery store I worked at in highschool, but they were always a tedious pain in the ass to actually process. If you were just sending $10, the store probably needed to charge you 10% just to cover the pittance they paid me for my time.
But as that article points out, the various payment apps(strike/venmo/etc and apparently WU itself) were already cutting out WU with low/no fees. I'm also not sure what "but now its bitcoins" really adds there, besides moving from the stability of the USD to the volatility of bitcoin.
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
Part of it depends on whether or not your think money created in the US should be taxed for leaving the US because that is at least partially what Western Union is doing, along with ensuring the safe transfer of that money.
I'm not defending the predatory tactics of western union just the general ideas that crypto is mainly trying to circumvent.
That money has already been taxed and the government got their cut when income tax was paid. Western Union taking another 30% on top of that is just another way that the little guy gets fucked over.
Bitcoin fees can vary wildly depending on the day. Right now it looks like it's under $1/transaction, but even within the last 6 months it's been as high as $30. The wallet they're providing says "free" transactions, but if it's going on the bitcoin network, someone is paying it, so maybe the government is just subsidizing transaction fees for now to get this adopted or something?
Their services aren't running direct on the Bitcoin blockchain, it's using Algorand for the backend. Transaction fees for Algo are very low and are expected to go lower with their next upgrade, costs like 0.001 Algo to transfer between crypto wallets.
I definitely haven't looked into it enough to know how that's going to work, but transferring bitcoin between two parties either needs for the transaction to happen on the bitcoin blockchain, or it needs all the bitcoin to be held by a 3rd party (like an exchange or something) so that the exchange then can just internally say "I'm moving 0.1 bitcoin from internal wallet A to internal wallet B." Of course having everything run off-chain by a 3rd party is also pretty much the only way to make realtime bitcoin transactions work, because they control both wallets and can easily verify everything right away, while a transaction on the bitcoin blockchain can take minutes to hours+, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's how their wallet app is working.
That's pretty much what it is - it's an exchange and all the crypto is in wallets held by the exchange, with user accounts being database entries of how much is supposed to be theirs. Moving coins between users on the exchange costs nothing, any fees are pure profit for the exchange. Moving the out to (or in from) your own wallet on the block chain is where blockchain transaction fees happen.
Also, at least in an LA Times article I read about it, the majority of surveyed El Salvadorans opposed BTC being made an official currency of the nation and were not planning on using the Chivo app. Despite that, though, the app did not work on launch day because they did not have enough servers. If the app actually takes off like the president wants it to, where businesses are primarily making transactions via the app instead of people just using it as a way to transfer USD into the country, having your nation's currency randomly go down because of a server farm in California seems like a terrible idea.
So the apparent solution that has been settled on is to have everything run by one company and have them do all internal transactions to avoid bitcoin fees and processing times? So we're back to a single trusted authority again I see. I'm failing to see why crypto is involved in this at all since it is explicitly going against the primary thing that makes crypto a thing.
So the apparent solution that has been settled on is to have everything run by one company and have them do all internal transactions to avoid bitcoin fees and processing times? So we're back to a single trusted authority again I see. I'm failing to see why crypto is involved in this at all since it is explicitly going against the primary thing that makes crypto a thing.
I think the transactions are all actually on a blockchain. It's not the BTC blockchain, it's the Algorand blockchain. They can handle that many transactions because it's presumably not as terribly designed as BTC and the per-transaction fees aren't absurd in either dollars or kWh because it's proof of stake (people with Algorand coins get to decide what's in a block) rather than proof of work (people with enough processing power get to decide what's in a block). But it may well be that all the transactions are just done in a DB on Bitso's servers and the only things actually recorded on the chain are when coins come into or out of their exchange.
I'm fairly certain crypto is involved because the president of El Salvador came up with a way (or was proposed a way) to make a big pile of money by getting his citizens to use Bitso's Algorand app.
All Proof of Stake systems are inherently based on a single trusted authority, who gets to dictate, essentially, which wallets ACTUALLY have the money they're staking. Proof of Work is the thing that allows for decentralization because no single entity (without ~majority control) can spin up a set of fake transactions that looks more valid (read: longer) than the consensus chain. With Proof of Stake, you can easily spin up millions of fake blocks, so it relies on having an authority saying "these transactions are the real transactions".
Naturally, having a central authority that keeps track of an processes all transactions means it could just... stand on its own, without the crypto bullshit. As always, it's just smoke and mirrors.
So the apparent solution that has been settled on is to have everything run by one company and have them do all internal transactions to avoid bitcoin fees and processing times? So we're back to a single trusted authority again I see. I'm failing to see why crypto is involved in this at all since it is explicitly going against the primary thing that makes crypto a thing.
I think the transactions are all actually on a blockchain. It's not the BTC blockchain, it's the Algorand blockchain. They can handle that many transactions because it's presumably not as terribly designed as BTC and the per-transaction fees aren't absurd in either dollars or kWh because it's proof of stake (people with Algorand coins get to decide what's in a block) rather than proof of work (people with enough processing power get to decide what's in a block). But it may well be that all the transactions are just done in a DB on Bitso's servers and the only things actually recorded on the chain are when coins come into or out of their exchange.
I'm fairly certain crypto is involved because the president of El Salvador came up with a way (or was proposed a way) to make a big pile of money by getting his citizens to use Bitso's Algorand app.
Whether there is actually a blockchain with proof of stake involved or not, it doesn't really matter if none of the coins involved are ever owned by an outside entity. Either it's a regular database or it's a proof of stake blockchain with one entity owning the entire chain so you're relying on a central authority either way, which certainly solves one of the issues with a cryptocurrency (by completely abandoning the concept). I think they could have come up with something functionally similar that also has much lower fees than Western Union, but it wouldn't get the press attention of a country making Bitcoin legal tender and also would be harder (though not impossible) to set things up so that the people in charge can get rich from it.
Remittances are definitely a thing that lots of people rely on, and the current setup (with mostly Western Union profiting from it) is definitely not great. I remain skeptical that this will end up better for the end user instead of just enriching a different set of assholes, though.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
The thing about wire transfers and the like taking money is that that isn't the cost of the transfer in any way, shape, or form. That's just how much the transfer entity charges.
If crypto were to actually become a serious competition, (which, no), those prices would go down.
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
El Salvador is a remittance economy that doesn't mind the fees and inefficiencies because they basically see this as free money.
It's the same deal with phone scammers. They'll have the victims buy a gift certificate, then launder the gift certificate for bitcoin and trade the bitcoin for cash. They'll lose a a large amount in the process, but they don't care since it's not really their money to begin with.
So the apparent solution that has been settled on is to have everything run by one company and have them do all internal transactions to avoid bitcoin fees and processing times? So we're back to a single trusted authority again I see. I'm failing to see why crypto is involved in this at all since it is explicitly going against the primary thing that makes crypto a thing.
I think the crypto is involved to facility exchange. I don't know why transferring dollars internationally is so difficult, but apparently turning dollars into bitcoin, transferring the bitcoin, and then turning it back into cash or goods and services is easier. And making it legal tender makes it even easier, is the idea.
And I guess also to be less reliant on the supply of dollars? I suppose a better question is why bitcoin instead of creating their own govcoin but the answer seems pretty obvious, it takes a lot less upfront effort to use an existing crypto currency.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
The analysis I read in Dutch didn't go as deep on this, but it did note that 25% of El Salvadors economy is money sent from the US. That's crazy.
Significantly shaving down fees could actually bring in real percentages of GDP.
I share the doubts about the hidden software, and there are at least some rumors that part of the plan is giving the government massive tracking of people and finances because everyone downloaded the app for the free money.
Coinbase, a crypto trading site, has been advertising a program, scheduled to launch soon, by which their users could lend them USDC (a "stablecoin") for 4% APR, and with Coinbase guaranteeing the principle.
The SEC informed them that this would be an illegal security. And that they were preparing to sue them if they continued.
The CEO of coinbase posted about this on Twitter in the middle of the night, apparently as an attempt to reach out directly to the Security and Exchange commission, because he doesn't agree that this would be a security. He demanded that the SEC explain how it qualified.
I'm guessing that will be spelled out in the court filing. But I also have no idea how they managed to convince themselves that their idea is not a security.
This is basically how a savings account at a bank works, so I imagine they could convince themselves. I give my money to the bank, they're only required to hold a certain percent of it at any time, so they can lend/invest/whatever the rest (though the reality is more like the $10k I deposit becomes the reserve on a $100k loan they can offer someone else), and they pay me a small amount of interest. In that case the money is guaranteed by the FDIC.
It's also a bit more than that, because one issue is that lots of other crypto platforms are already offering similar features, so it's unclear why those aren't securities (or at least haven't been targeted by the SEC) but Coinbase's planned offering is.
Yes, but they don't have a banking licence.
So they get to choose which law they are violating.
Coinbase, a crypto trading site, has been advertising a program, scheduled to launch soon, by which their users could lend them USDC (a "stablecoin") for 4% APR, and with Coinbase guaranteeing the principle.
The SEC informed them that this would be an illegal security. And that they were preparing to sue them if they continued.
The CEO of coinbase posted about this on Twitter in the middle of the night, apparently as an attempt to reach out directly to the Security and Exchange commission, because he doesn't agree that this would be a security. He demanded that the SEC explain how it qualified.
I'm guessing that will be spelled out in the court filing. But I also have no idea how they managed to convince themselves that their idea is not a security.
This is basically how a savings account at a bank works, so I imagine they could convince themselves. I give my money to the bank, they're only required to hold a certain percent of it at any time, so they can lend/invest/whatever the rest (though the reality is more like the $10k I deposit becomes the reserve on a $100k loan they can offer someone else), and they pay me a small amount of interest. In that case the money is guaranteed by the FDIC.
It's also a bit more than that, because one issue is that lots of other crypto platforms are already offering similar features, so it's unclear why those aren't securities (or at least haven't been targeted by the SEC) but Coinbase's planned offering is.
Yes, but they don't have a banking licence.
So they get to choose which law they are violating.
Maaaan, turns out you gotta have a license for everything.
I swear to god when I die I'd better wakeup learning this was all a simulation with some people purposely trolling everyone else.
To be fair, wealthy people have been spending absurd amounts of money on completely useless, tacky bullshit for centuries. Buying multi-million-dollar NFTs are the equivalent of going to the strip club with a foot-thick stack of $100 bills and throwing them in the air, or buying a diamond encrusted cellphone case. Nobody who isn't deeply deluded thinks this trend is in any way a legitimate investment opportunity. It's just a stupid thing rich people can do to point to and say, "Look how fucking rich I am!"
Finally fulfilling the long awaited promise of the beanie baby millionaire
Or maybe this is more of a neopets millionaire thing?
Not really. Beanie babies were, briefly, absurdly valuable because there was a widespread fever for collecting them driving up prices.
NFTs are valuable because occasionally a wealthy person buys one for an absurd price. They don't all sell for millions of dollars and the ones that do aren't produced by famous artists or anything. There's no predicting which NFT some rich guy is going to buy so there's no way to 'invest' in NFTs. If you got in early on beanie babies and sold at just the right time you could have made a bunch of money regardless of which ones you bought, almost. NFTs are a pure crapshoot. And I don't think I've yet heard about anyone actually buying an NFT from someone else who bought it. It's all rich people showing off by buying new NFTs minted by random companies and internet people. I would be honestly surprised, despite the absurdity of the wealthy, if next week someone else bought the 101 bored apes for $25 million off whoever bought them this time, rather than buying some other NFT.
I swear to god when I die I'd better wakeup learning this was all a simulation with some people purposely trolling everyone else.
To be fair, wealthy people have been spending absurd amounts of money on completely useless, tacky bullshit for centuries. Buying multi-million-dollar NFTs are the equivalent of going to the strip club with a foot-thick stack of $100 bills and throwing them in the air, or buying a diamond encrusted cellphone case. Nobody who isn't deeply deluded thinks this trend is in any way a legitimate investment opportunity. It's just a stupid thing rich people can do to point to and say, "Look how fucking rich I am!"
The truly sad thing is that we live in a society where rich people can throw away a million dollars on literally nothing and still be rich.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Art items created in modern times are one of the classic ways money is laundered and hidden for the wealthy and corrupt. Attach some dumbass price point to a piece of shit, buy it with dirty money, sell it to some other rich person to clean the money, and repeat.
We look at a lot of this stuff and go "who the fuck would pay for this?" and the obscenely wealthy aren't buying the art, they're cleaning money and dodging taxes.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I swear to god when I die I'd better wakeup learning this was all a simulation with some people purposely trolling everyone else.
To be fair, wealthy people have been spending absurd amounts of money on completely useless, tacky bullshit for centuries. Buying multi-million-dollar NFTs are the equivalent of going to the strip club with a foot-thick stack of $100 bills and throwing them in the air, or buying a diamond encrusted cellphone case. Nobody who isn't deeply deluded thinks this trend is in any way a legitimate investment opportunity. It's just a stupid thing rich people can do to point to and say, "Look how fucking rich I am!"
The truly sad thing is that we live in a society where rich people can throw away a million dollars on literally nothing and still be rich.
That's been the definition of rich since the idea has existed, I think
They're also used as proxies for illegal item sales. Egypt has busted several exporters of stolen antiquities who were using auctions of cheaply produced garbage art to cover their sales. Why were rich people from New York bidding $30 million for a lump of clay with a handprint? Because they were actually bidding on a unique sarcophagus lid.
An NFT won't work on a physical import, but lots of non-physical illicit transactions that would be easier with a cheap gif instead of needing your hit man to go buy paint supplies and go all Jackson Pollock on a canvas before you pay him.
Art items created in modern times are one of the classic ways money is laundered and hidden for the wealthy and corrupt. Attach some dumbass price point to a piece of shit, buy it with dirty money, sell it to some other rich person to clean the money, and repeat.
We look at a lot of this stuff and go "who the fuck would pay for this?" and the obscenely wealthy aren't buying the art, they're cleaning money and dodging taxes.
But now we have crypto for that!
With the whole thing about the ledger being public and immutable, if you were able to get ahold of someone's wallet, could you do forensics to figure out what their previous transactions were? And presumably be able to do some sort of network mapping thing?
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
El Salvador is a remittance economy that doesn't mind the fees and inefficiencies because they basically see this as free money.
It's the same deal with phone scammers. They'll have the victims buy a gift certificate, then launder the gift certificate for bitcoin and trade the bitcoin for cash. They'll lose a a large amount in the process, but they don't care since it's not really their money to begin with.
Holy shit this is insulting (or I've misunderstood who you are referring to). I live here in El Salvador, my wife and kids were born here, and I've participated in the remittance system first hand. This entire post is patently bullshit. There is no "Free" money in this system. First and foremost, the legal minimum wage is something like $395 a month, and many people make FAR less than that because so many people work in "not organized" positions, like little pupuserias that are cash only, or are street vendors... if they have a job. The average remittance is something like half that amount. People have to live off this. We use Moneygram which is MARGINALLY better, but it's still not uncommon to pay as much as 5% or so on the transaction. Assuming 5% (and it's often higher) of $200/month, that may not sound like much, but that's several days of food and bills sometimes for folks down here.
The people sending them money are typically family in the US, a lot of times there illegally, so they aren't exactly rolling in the benjamins either. Being able to send their families a few dollars more, or retaining those dollars for themselves is a non trivial thing. Remittances aren't free fucking money. Someone went and worked for that money and is sending it to support their family, just like you might support your own kids as you raise them. Some of these are doing it without seeing spouses or young children for years or even decades at a time just to make sure they have this "free money" to survive.
Beyond all that, as to what it's like down here, so far... not much has changed. USD is still king and will be for a while, if not always. Most people are mostly confused at this whole thing, they don't really know what Bitcoin is more or less than most Americans do. A lot of the young techy folks are super excited about it, for much the same reason a lot of young US Millenials tend to be. I strongly suspect that the Chivo program will be just used for remittances, but we'll see. One of the big things they talk about is how when you go to a WU location, there are often lines out the door for people waiting to pick theirs up, and it's not uncommon for the gangs to stake these places out and take the money. The hope being that with people just hitting up their Chivo ATMs instead, that will die off a bit, but unless they get the regular banks to support Chivo, I think that's just going to change the point of attack from WU to Chivo ATMs. One of the things about Moneygram over WU is pretty much any major store or bank handles Moneygram.
As of now, (and this is anecdotal) most people are interesting in signing up, since with having a national ID number, you get a free $30 (see above for monthly incomes, this is not nothing for 80% of the population), but will likely immediately cash out any money in the account into USD.
The problem as I see it is that having bitcoin as a currency doesn't actually do away with any of the negatives of having the USD as their official currency (they can't print more, etc), and adds a VERY limited set of benefits that were somewhat already being addressed by Strike and the lot. Bitcoin is FAR too volatile to leave money in long term though for most folks here. Well, really for most folks anywhere. Power is also incredibly expensive here, so if they are doing any of the computational components here, that's going to suck.
Also, to the "spotty" internet, in most urban/suburban areas, it's fine. I'm generally up a lot more than my coworkers in the states using Comcast, so... there's that. The bigger issue has more to to do with limited access points to the greater world (most internet egresses to the world via the Caribbean undersea cable trunks over to Miami, so it's not SUPER unusual for that to cause widespread problems, but nothing that's common (at least not by any reasonable spectrum). I see more power outages than internet (I have a UPS on the network gear, so we still have internet for a couple hours during power outages) and MOST of that is due to storms during rainy season.
I swear I’m not going out of my way to find horrible things about NFTs, but I blundered into this Twitter thread about video games designed around NFTs and, just, holy hell.
I know there are apparently kart racing games where you race NFTs or something, but I have no idea how it works. It sounds even more scummy and scammy than your typical mobile gacha game though, which is saying something.
-edit- Oh man, just read those tweets and is is even worse than I thought, it sounds like many of these games turn your device into a mining hub of sorts, and probably does terrible things to its lifespan. It's pretty impressive that some are selling the ability to not have to play the game as well, that's next level right there.
chrisnl on
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
edited September 2021
I read this sentence, processed it for several minutes, and then my brain promptly packed its bags and exited my skull.
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
El Salvador is a remittance economy that doesn't mind the fees and inefficiencies because they basically see this as free money.
It's the same deal with phone scammers. They'll have the victims buy a gift certificate, then launder the gift certificate for bitcoin and trade the bitcoin for cash. They'll lose a a large amount in the process, but they don't care since it's not really their money to begin with.
Holy shit this is insulting (or I've misunderstood who you are referring to). I live here in El Salvador, my wife and kids were born here, and I've participated in the remittance system first hand. This entire post is patently bullshit. There is no "Free" money in this system. First and foremost, the legal minimum wage is something like $395 a month, and many people make FAR less than that because so many people work in "not organized" positions, like little pupuserias that are cash only, or are street vendors... if they have a job. The average remittance is something like half that amount. People have to live off this. We use Moneygram which is MARGINALLY better, but it's still not uncommon to pay as much as 5% or so on the transaction. Assuming 5% (and it's often higher) of $200/month, that may not sound like much, but that's several days of food and bills sometimes for folks down here.
There's a big difference between the concept of remittance in general, and remittance in the form of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. The problem with the later is that the volatility of price far outweighs the transaction fees of Moneygram type services, especially when you factor in the conversion rates. The only time this makes sense is if you're lucky enough to take advantage of the volatility by sending the bitcoin when it's worth significantly more than you paid for it... which is effectively free money.
i.e., if you bought bitcoin at $1000 and sent it to your relatives when it was worth $30,000, then it's no big deal if you end up losing 10% of the value by the time it actually reaches them.
Since this thread mainly appears to be anti-crypto, I'm curious what your takes are on the El Salvador adoption. Article below covers one of the good points of it - people not being fleeced by the middle-man for ridiculous fees when they send their family money.
El Salvador is a remittance economy that doesn't mind the fees and inefficiencies because they basically see this as free money.
It's the same deal with phone scammers. They'll have the victims buy a gift certificate, then launder the gift certificate for bitcoin and trade the bitcoin for cash. They'll lose a a large amount in the process, but they don't care since it's not really their money to begin with.
Holy shit this is insulting (or I've misunderstood who you are referring to). I live here in El Salvador, my wife and kids were born here, and I've participated in the remittance system first hand. This entire post is patently bullshit. There is no "Free" money in this system. First and foremost, the legal minimum wage is something like $395 a month, and many people make FAR less than that because so many people work in "not organized" positions, like little pupuserias that are cash only, or are street vendors... if they have a job. The average remittance is something like half that amount. People have to live off this. We use Moneygram which is MARGINALLY better, but it's still not uncommon to pay as much as 5% or so on the transaction. Assuming 5% (and it's often higher) of $200/month, that may not sound like much, but that's several days of food and bills sometimes for folks down here.
There's a big difference between the concept of remittance in general, and remittance in the form of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. The problem with the later is that the volatility of price far outweighs the transaction fees of Moneygram type services, especially when you factor in the conversion rates. The only time this makes sense is if you're lucky enough to take advantage of the volatility by sending the bitcoin when it's worth significantly more than you paid for it... which is effectively free money.
i.e., if you bought bitcoin at $1000 and sent it to your relatives when it was worth $30,000, then it's no big deal if you end up losing 10% of the value by the time it actually reaches them.
That would seem to depend on how long you are keeping it. There are some exceptional days that see really big drops or climbs, but day to day volatility is not that high. If you put 100 dollars into bitcoin at the highest price it was yesterday, and then turned it back into dollars at the lowest it was yesterday, you would be out a couple dollars. Obviously fees go on top of that and so on, but I think you would be hard pressed to hit 30% which has been the number cited for traditional services. Volatility is a bigger problem for investment and savings than if you are holding bitcoin only briefly as a medium of exchange.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
That would seem to depend on how long you are keeping it. There are some exceptional days that see really big drops or climbs, but day to day volatility is not that high. If you put 100 dollars into bitcoin at the highest price it was yesterday, and then turned it back into dollars at the lowest it was yesterday, you would be out a couple dollars. Obviously fees go on top of that and so on, but I think you would be hard pressed to hit 30% which has been the number cited for traditional services. Volatility is a bigger problem for investment and savings than if you are holding bitcoin only briefly as a medium of exchange.
The example I've seen of 30% fees involve scenarios where you're sending $10 in cash.
Bitcoin doesn't handle transactions that size effectively either. A single bitcoin transaction consumes about 707 KWH worth of energy, or about $150 in El Salvador. So if bitcoin fees simply mirrored the energy cost alone, then that would mean you're paying a fee of 1500%.
But wait... realistically, lots of people would make one transaction to buy the bitcoin, another transaction to send the bitcoin, and then a third transaction to sell the bitcoin. So three transactions total, worth about $450.
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Considering that money created in the USA leaves the USA every day via cheaper avenues, this is more screwing over those too poor to have access to those options.
Potential and theoretical benefits aside (And acknowledging that Western Union is absolutely a shit company full of assholes) the inherent limitations and bottlenecks of bitcoin make it fundamentally unsuitable to be adopted at a national scale.
My take on it is that Bitcoin is used as the currency because it is the most widely known and although it is crazy volatile, it retains the best value (and the $25 million they bought could be worth double next year). The actual tech behind their apps isn't on Bitcoin though so all of the bottlenecks that come with Bitcoin don't effect their day to day use. If El Salvador announced they were adopting Algorand or another lesser known crypto it probably wouldn't have worked as well.
It's similar to GPU mining, you can't mine Bitcoin with a GPU, you mine Ethereum and whatever other PoW crypto, but you get paid in Bitcoin.
See this is the thing.
They made a government-sponsored money transfer system accessable to the general populace an not just financial institutions. This is good, this is a great public service and every country should have one. (*stares at the US*)
But the fuck is crypto doing to add to that?
It's just an unnecessary middle step.
I guess the best thing is that crypto sets a new baseline. Public or private money transfer services have to be at least as useful as crypto. It's not a particularly high bar but before there wasn't a bar at all.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The whole situation seems very weird and like Bukele is probably planning to make money on this somehow or other.
They legally adopted bitcoin as their currency, alongside the US dollar, and mandated that all businesses who have the technical capability to do so must accept bitcoin as payment. The way they're supposed to accept those payments is through the use of the Chivo app, which isn't actually bitcoin. All the ATMs the government installed are based on the Chivo app. Chivo is based on Algorand, which is proof of stake, and everyone using Chivo are putting their money into, effectively, an exchange. It's surprisingly (or not, depending on how cynical one is) difficult to find any actual technical details about the app but I think that means the company who owns the app servers (Bitso) are the ones who own the "stake" in Algorand's Proof of Stake. If the app is successful enough then they (Bitso) basically get to decide what transactions go into each Algorand block since its system randomly selects stakeholders to vote on block contents. It all seems very shady to me.
So now the average El Salvadoran using the app has to worry about the value of an Algo (Algorand's coin) and the value of Bitcoin since that's the actual official currency of the nation. If the value of an Algo drops but the value of BTC doesn't then their money is now worth less. Or if the value of BTC randomly drops by 25% the morning they try to go grocery shopping they can aburptly afford 25% less food than they expected. I don't see why anyone would leave their money in the app, especially if there are ATMs all over spitting out USD for Algo. Use the app for a free international wire transfer equivalent, then go get the cash out. And hope you don't lose just as much due to BTC and Algo volatility as you'd have lost to Western Union fees. And that the gangs who apparently hang around outside Western Union offices in El Salvador don't do the seemingly obvious thing and hang around near Chivo ATMs.
I mean, its sorta an apples to oranges comparison.
WU takes cash at a physical location and dispenses cash at a different physical location. It is literally servicing the least efficient market possible.
I'm sure the fees are much less to send money via a digital wallet(WU has its own mobile wallet that doesn't have a fee best I can tell), because the costs to do it are infinitesimal by comparison. Just in the US there are 10x more WU locations than JP Morgan Chase branches. I'm sure its improved in the *mumble* years since I did WU transfers at the grocery store I worked at in highschool, but they were always a tedious pain in the ass to actually process. If you were just sending $10, the store probably needed to charge you 10% just to cover the pittance they paid me for my time.
But as that article points out, the various payment apps(strike/venmo/etc and apparently WU itself) were already cutting out WU with low/no fees. I'm also not sure what "but now its bitcoins" really adds there, besides moving from the stability of the USD to the volatility of bitcoin.
I definitely haven't looked into it enough to know how that's going to work, but transferring bitcoin between two parties either needs for the transaction to happen on the bitcoin blockchain, or it needs all the bitcoin to be held by a 3rd party (like an exchange or something) so that the exchange then can just internally say "I'm moving 0.1 bitcoin from internal wallet A to internal wallet B." Of course having everything run off-chain by a 3rd party is also pretty much the only way to make realtime bitcoin transactions work, because they control both wallets and can easily verify everything right away, while a transaction on the bitcoin blockchain can take minutes to hours+, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's how their wallet app is working.
I think the transactions are all actually on a blockchain. It's not the BTC blockchain, it's the Algorand blockchain. They can handle that many transactions because it's presumably not as terribly designed as BTC and the per-transaction fees aren't absurd in either dollars or kWh because it's proof of stake (people with Algorand coins get to decide what's in a block) rather than proof of work (people with enough processing power get to decide what's in a block). But it may well be that all the transactions are just done in a DB on Bitso's servers and the only things actually recorded on the chain are when coins come into or out of their exchange.
I'm fairly certain crypto is involved because the president of El Salvador came up with a way (or was proposed a way) to make a big pile of money by getting his citizens to use Bitso's Algorand app.
Naturally, having a central authority that keeps track of an processes all transactions means it could just... stand on its own, without the crypto bullshit. As always, it's just smoke and mirrors.
Steam ID: Good Life
Whether there is actually a blockchain with proof of stake involved or not, it doesn't really matter if none of the coins involved are ever owned by an outside entity. Either it's a regular database or it's a proof of stake blockchain with one entity owning the entire chain so you're relying on a central authority either way, which certainly solves one of the issues with a cryptocurrency (by completely abandoning the concept). I think they could have come up with something functionally similar that also has much lower fees than Western Union, but it wouldn't get the press attention of a country making Bitcoin legal tender and also would be harder (though not impossible) to set things up so that the people in charge can get rich from it.
Remittances are definitely a thing that lots of people rely on, and the current setup (with mostly Western Union profiting from it) is definitely not great. I remain skeptical that this will end up better for the end user instead of just enriching a different set of assholes, though.
If crypto were to actually become a serious competition, (which, no), those prices would go down.
El Salvador is a remittance economy that doesn't mind the fees and inefficiencies because they basically see this as free money.
It's the same deal with phone scammers. They'll have the victims buy a gift certificate, then launder the gift certificate for bitcoin and trade the bitcoin for cash. They'll lose a a large amount in the process, but they don't care since it's not really their money to begin with.
I think the crypto is involved to facility exchange. I don't know why transferring dollars internationally is so difficult, but apparently turning dollars into bitcoin, transferring the bitcoin, and then turning it back into cash or goods and services is easier. And making it legal tender makes it even easier, is the idea.
And I guess also to be less reliant on the supply of dollars? I suppose a better question is why bitcoin instead of creating their own govcoin but the answer seems pretty obvious, it takes a lot less upfront effort to use an existing crypto currency.
I have read about cruise ships and El Salvador on the interwebs, so I can confidently say '2.'
Significantly shaving down fees could actually bring in real percentages of GDP.
I share the doubts about the hidden software, and there are at least some rumors that part of the plan is giving the government massive tracking of people and finances because everyone downloaded the app for the free money.
Yes, but they don't have a banking licence.
So they get to choose which law they are violating.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Maaaan, turns out you gotta have a license for everything.
Apparently these goddamn things are now all the rage among people with far more money than brain cells.
To be fair, wealthy people have been spending absurd amounts of money on completely useless, tacky bullshit for centuries. Buying multi-million-dollar NFTs are the equivalent of going to the strip club with a foot-thick stack of $100 bills and throwing them in the air, or buying a diamond encrusted cellphone case. Nobody who isn't deeply deluded thinks this trend is in any way a legitimate investment opportunity. It's just a stupid thing rich people can do to point to and say, "Look how fucking rich I am!"
Or maybe this is more of a neopets millionaire thing?
Not really. Beanie babies were, briefly, absurdly valuable because there was a widespread fever for collecting them driving up prices.
NFTs are valuable because occasionally a wealthy person buys one for an absurd price. They don't all sell for millions of dollars and the ones that do aren't produced by famous artists or anything. There's no predicting which NFT some rich guy is going to buy so there's no way to 'invest' in NFTs. If you got in early on beanie babies and sold at just the right time you could have made a bunch of money regardless of which ones you bought, almost. NFTs are a pure crapshoot. And I don't think I've yet heard about anyone actually buying an NFT from someone else who bought it. It's all rich people showing off by buying new NFTs minted by random companies and internet people. I would be honestly surprised, despite the absurdity of the wealthy, if next week someone else bought the 101 bored apes for $25 million off whoever bought them this time, rather than buying some other NFT.
The truly sad thing is that we live in a society where rich people can throw away a million dollars on literally nothing and still be rich.
We look at a lot of this stuff and go "who the fuck would pay for this?" and the obscenely wealthy aren't buying the art, they're cleaning money and dodging taxes.
That's been the definition of rich since the idea has existed, I think
An NFT won't work on a physical import, but lots of non-physical illicit transactions that would be easier with a cheap gif instead of needing your hit man to go buy paint supplies and go all Jackson Pollock on a canvas before you pay him.
But now we have crypto for that!
With the whole thing about the ledger being public and immutable, if you were able to get ahold of someone's wallet, could you do forensics to figure out what their previous transactions were? And presumably be able to do some sort of network mapping thing?
Holy shit this is insulting (or I've misunderstood who you are referring to). I live here in El Salvador, my wife and kids were born here, and I've participated in the remittance system first hand. This entire post is patently bullshit. There is no "Free" money in this system. First and foremost, the legal minimum wage is something like $395 a month, and many people make FAR less than that because so many people work in "not organized" positions, like little pupuserias that are cash only, or are street vendors... if they have a job. The average remittance is something like half that amount. People have to live off this. We use Moneygram which is MARGINALLY better, but it's still not uncommon to pay as much as 5% or so on the transaction. Assuming 5% (and it's often higher) of $200/month, that may not sound like much, but that's several days of food and bills sometimes for folks down here.
The people sending them money are typically family in the US, a lot of times there illegally, so they aren't exactly rolling in the benjamins either. Being able to send their families a few dollars more, or retaining those dollars for themselves is a non trivial thing. Remittances aren't free fucking money. Someone went and worked for that money and is sending it to support their family, just like you might support your own kids as you raise them. Some of these are doing it without seeing spouses or young children for years or even decades at a time just to make sure they have this "free money" to survive.
Beyond all that, as to what it's like down here, so far... not much has changed. USD is still king and will be for a while, if not always. Most people are mostly confused at this whole thing, they don't really know what Bitcoin is more or less than most Americans do. A lot of the young techy folks are super excited about it, for much the same reason a lot of young US Millenials tend to be. I strongly suspect that the Chivo program will be just used for remittances, but we'll see. One of the big things they talk about is how when you go to a WU location, there are often lines out the door for people waiting to pick theirs up, and it's not uncommon for the gangs to stake these places out and take the money. The hope being that with people just hitting up their Chivo ATMs instead, that will die off a bit, but unless they get the regular banks to support Chivo, I think that's just going to change the point of attack from WU to Chivo ATMs. One of the things about Moneygram over WU is pretty much any major store or bank handles Moneygram.
As of now, (and this is anecdotal) most people are interesting in signing up, since with having a national ID number, you get a free $30 (see above for monthly incomes, this is not nothing for 80% of the population), but will likely immediately cash out any money in the account into USD.
The problem as I see it is that having bitcoin as a currency doesn't actually do away with any of the negatives of having the USD as their official currency (they can't print more, etc), and adds a VERY limited set of benefits that were somewhat already being addressed by Strike and the lot. Bitcoin is FAR too volatile to leave money in long term though for most folks here. Well, really for most folks anywhere. Power is also incredibly expensive here, so if they are doing any of the computational components here, that's going to suck.
Also, to the "spotty" internet, in most urban/suburban areas, it's fine. I'm generally up a lot more than my coworkers in the states using Comcast, so... there's that. The bigger issue has more to to do with limited access points to the greater world (most internet egresses to the world via the Caribbean undersea cable trunks over to Miami, so it's not SUPER unusual for that to cause widespread problems, but nothing that's common (at least not by any reasonable spectrum). I see more power outages than internet (I have a UPS on the network gear, so we still have internet for a couple hours during power outages) and MOST of that is due to storms during rainy season.
-edit- Oh man, just read those tweets and is is even worse than I thought, it sounds like many of these games turn your device into a mining hub of sorts, and probably does terrible things to its lifespan. It's pretty impressive that some are selling the ability to not have to play the game as well, that's next level right there.
I'm hoping this is a joke, but indications are it is more likely just a scam.
There's a big difference between the concept of remittance in general, and remittance in the form of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. The problem with the later is that the volatility of price far outweighs the transaction fees of Moneygram type services, especially when you factor in the conversion rates. The only time this makes sense is if you're lucky enough to take advantage of the volatility by sending the bitcoin when it's worth significantly more than you paid for it... which is effectively free money.
i.e., if you bought bitcoin at $1000 and sent it to your relatives when it was worth $30,000, then it's no big deal if you end up losing 10% of the value by the time it actually reaches them.
That would seem to depend on how long you are keeping it. There are some exceptional days that see really big drops or climbs, but day to day volatility is not that high. If you put 100 dollars into bitcoin at the highest price it was yesterday, and then turned it back into dollars at the lowest it was yesterday, you would be out a couple dollars. Obviously fees go on top of that and so on, but I think you would be hard pressed to hit 30% which has been the number cited for traditional services. Volatility is a bigger problem for investment and savings than if you are holding bitcoin only briefly as a medium of exchange.
The example I've seen of 30% fees involve scenarios where you're sending $10 in cash.
Bitcoin doesn't handle transactions that size effectively either. A single bitcoin transaction consumes about 707 KWH worth of energy, or about $150 in El Salvador. So if bitcoin fees simply mirrored the energy cost alone, then that would mean you're paying a fee of 1500%.
But wait... realistically, lots of people would make one transaction to buy the bitcoin, another transaction to send the bitcoin, and then a third transaction to sell the bitcoin. So three transactions total, worth about $450.