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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

(ticotimes.net)
927 points smallerfish | 5 comments | 04 Feb 25 00:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ks2048 ◴[04 Feb 25 00:26 UTC] No.42925530[source]▶
Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily?

I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.

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georgeecollins ◴[04 Feb 25 01:25 UTC] No.42926197[source]▶
It doesn't have to be "magic" that causes it to go up forever. People need a way to put large amounts of money in places that are difficult for governments to get to and /or easy to move across jurisdictional borders. Think: money launderers, people that are worried their corrupt government will seize their assets, people hiding money from someone they owe like a spouse in a divorce. These all seem to me to be reasonable use cases for bitcoin.

All the things that make bitcoin a pain to buy a pizza are irrelevant if your goal is to hide $100m in your shoe. Nothing can do that better than bitcoin and there is a demonstrated need.

If you assume the reason to use bitcoin isn't going away and the wealth of the world goes up-- while the supply of bitcoin is pretty constant-- it can keep going up without magic.

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skybrian ◴[04 Feb 25 01:59 UTC] No.42926555[source]▶
But that doesn't distinguish Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. The thing that distinguishes Bitcoin is fame, pure and simple. Everyone has heard of it.
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1. markasoftware ◴[04 Feb 25 03:19 UTC] No.42927390[source]▶
Fame is part of it, but it's more that it's IMO probably the only truly decentralized cryptocurrency. Not just in terms of the nodes and miners being well spread out between organizations and parts of the world, but also in terms of its development and governance. Sure, there's a relatively small group of core contributors to Bitcoin, but they don't have much fame or personality cults around them like Ethereum's Vitalik does. They are really just restricted to maintaining and adding well-agreed-upon new features to Bitcoin. Eg when Segwit happened, a lot of miners held out on supporting it for a long time becasue it was a bit controversial. Meanwhile with Ethereum, if Vitalik really pushed for some controversial change, it would probably happen. Once you go further down the list than Ethereum, things get really bad, with many cryptos' development being entirely driven by a small group of people in a for-profit company, with miners and users that will blindly update to the newest version regardless of what's in it.
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2. 2030ai ◴[04 Feb 25 03:38 UTC] No.42927563[source]▶
Eth famously forked and reversed txns due to someone getting scammed.
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3. markasoftware ◴[04 Feb 25 03:51 UTC] No.42927661[source]▶
the fact that eth classic was created from this incident and still exists does inspire some confidence that ethereum's governance is somewhat decentralized also, to be fair.

And IIRC it wasn't a "scam", it was a bug in a smart contract.

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4. 2030ai ◴[04 Feb 25 05:43 UTC] No.42928499{3}[source]▶
Yes a smart contract bug. Hacked might be a better word. Or outsmarted?
5. 127 ◴[04 Feb 25 07:38 UTC] No.42929317[source]▶
ETH forked because the contract was poorly written and they didn't want to honor the contract because their buddies would have lost a lot of money and the project would have gotten an egg to their face.