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?

The post you're replying to is about Bitcoin being "used", not specifically "used for everyday transactions". Bitcoin has so far been a decent asset to hold as a store of value if you don't want to or can't store your money in the traditional financial system. Lots of everyday people in countries with high inflation or strict controls or how people can store money hold Bitcoin (or perhaps more commonly, stablecoins) for a very practical purpose other than speculation.

Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.

BTC cash has lower fees I believe, I wonder if it could actually work as a currency for day to day payments.

It can work as a day-to-day currency, but it compromises the decentralization that is key to Bitcoin's usefulness as a store of value:

+ By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast.

+ Because BCH uses the same hash algo as Bitcoin, but is much less popular, it's at risk of 51% attack.

+ Because there is no pressure on block sizes, fees are very low, which means that as halvings continue the block rewards for BCH will get extremely small. This will result in hashrate continuing to decrease, putting it at even greater risk of 51% attacks. Bitcoin's high fees allow it to remain profitable for miners even without inflation. Miners have to be paid to keep the network secure, and that's either going to come from tx fees or from inflation. BCH aims to have neither and that puts it at risk.

And anyway, there are much better solutions for day to day payments, such as Monero and Ethereum.

> By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast.

This has always felt like a completely weaksauce argument to me. Even with Bitcoin, very few people other than dedicated miners download a full blockchain (like it or not). 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop, but 8TB is at most a minor inconvenience on a server or dedicated mining rig. What's the demographic where a measly factor of 8 makes a difference?