El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

IMF gave them 1.4 billion to abandon the “experiment”:

> The IMF made this a condition for a loan of 1.4 billion US dollars (1.35 billion euros). In December of last year, the IMF reached an agreement with President Nayib Bukele’s government on the loan of the stated amount to strengthen the country’s “fiscal sustainability” and mitigate the “risks associated with Bitcoin,” as it was described.

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I dislike cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy but this was clearly something else than a failure of the currency itself

Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…

Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.

Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?

100% this.

Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin.

The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.

It is highly divisible though, there’s 2.1e15 satoshi and 2.3e14 cents in the world (re google). It can lose 90% of itself before being unable to replace cents. Also, the network can just agree to change the protocol to fix this issue, should it arise. Countries do redenominations all the time.

How can anything ever be changed once 51% is abandoned?

I also think there will be a gold rush of hacking old wallets one day when the encryption is broken. Not sure if that will happen before or after btc failure though. You can’t upgrade security on lost wallets.

I think you're confusing proof of work with proof of stake. The integrity of the Bitcoin network is enforced by the miners agreeing on the rules, not by anyone staking their ownership for governance.

What about if you hack a lost wallet and then you transfer the coins to yourself. No proof of work needed then. It is just there, in your wallet.