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El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

(ticotimes.net)
927 points smallerfish | 1 comments | 04 Feb 25 00:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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ptero ◴[04 Feb 25 00:17 UTC] No.42925410[source]▶
That's heavy editorializing:

El Salvador keeps buying the Bitcoin for its strategic reserve. Businesses and citizens can keep using it.

But for getting an IMF loan, IMF (which, to put it mildly, doesn't like Bitcoin) required the end to Bitcoin legal tender status.

Now the businesses are free to accept it or not instead of being required to accept it. That's all. The government plans to keep buying and using it.

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georgeecollins ◴[04 Feb 25 01:14 UTC] No.42926067[source]▶
There seems to be two concepts that are getting conflated. One concept is that BTC is a good investment. Historically that is undeniable.

The other concept is that it is a good medium of exchange. I think that is not so true because 1) its neither cheap nor easy to buy a lot of things with it 2) a thing that goes up in value is not a good medium of exchange because people don't want to spend it, they want to hoard it.

If you accept that BTC is a reasonable investment, but not a great medium of exchange then what is happening makes sense.

I am not saying that a decentralized token couldn't be a good medium of exchange -- honestly I don't know. But so far BTC is not that.

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agumonkey ◴[04 Feb 25 04:53 UTC] No.42928146[source]▶
Makes me wonder why the BTC original design tilted toward deflationary, since allegedly, 'satoshi' was trying to create currency, not speculation. Was it a two phase idea ? Attract people for 80 years as investment then when it's stable, use them as stupid coins ?
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1. toenail ◴[04 Feb 25 06:59 UTC] No.42929014[source]▶
Deflation is the natural state of the economy because progress makes everything cheaper. We only have an inflationary system because central banks print money. Putting a central bank into code and micro-managing the money supply was not possible, so bitcoin is more like a commodity, like gold for example. Gold has worked just fine as a money for thousands of years.