The Biden admin is using the specter of "national security" to try to regulate bitcoin.  Their real goal is to protect and preserve the security state and protect the oligarchs like Bezos, Buffett, Soros et al who fund them.  They used to pay lip service to looking out for the little guy, but it is about money and power.  Bitcoin threatens both since it is outside their control.

If you scratch a liberal, you'll find a fascist, socialist or communist.

I would also add that I think the issue also goes even deeper:  the issue is that many of the policies that the IMF espouses are not pro-liberty, but pro-authoritarianism or anti-freedom.  Things like taking on huge amounts of debt by a country, not having a stable currency, having high tax rates, huge regulatory states, etc are bad ideas for a country.  Countries that have all those things will have low growth rates leading to the people of the country suffering forever.

I think you are right.  The move was about freedom and choice.  Let people have the liberty to make a decision for themselves as opposed to having it forced upon them from some centralized entity:  the citizens of El Salvador can figure out what is the safest way to store the value that they produce.

Who wants a digital version of a constantly inflating rupee?  Really, if people wanted fiat, they'd want something that can't be immediately seized or blocked like a digital version would be? 

And that answers the question as to who wants it:  the authoritarians in charge in India who want to skim a little bit off of every transaction and who want to be able to shut down the finances of any person who dares to disagree.  It would then be just a simple push of a button if someone spoke out against them: sorry, your money is frozen and you have no recourse.  Not to pick on India, since the same urge is beneath all the people who want to shut down bitcoin and replace it with digital fiat.

It is all about choices. I told some friends of mine about it in November 2010, and then at various points since then. People chose to spend $5/day on Starbucks or $15/ month on Netflix or $1000 on a wedding trip for mutual friends. Or replacing a phone that is 12 months old instead of waiting for another year or two.  Or deciding to play video games instead of getting a part time job to buy some or to pay for electricity to mine. Or to decide to go out and drinkinstead of spending time figuring out how to set up a CPU - or later a GPU miner. Including a few quite techie people in between spring 2012 and March 2013 who did nothing.

None of them are "rich" but they could've been with a little self discipline and buying just a few hundred or a thousand dollars worth in 2010-2013 or spending the time to set up their own computer to mine..

It is like everything else in the world, everyone gets to make choices for themselves and live with the consequences.

For example, get someone's parents or grandparents to invest $40/month from 11-18 instead of getting that cell phone. (Or get them to start at birth) and by the time you are retired you'll have more than a $ million even if you stopped at 18. Keep it up and increase it and you'll be even better.  

It is the ant and the grasshopper every time.

As far as OP, I'm with you, eventually it may hit fiat equilibrium and then you won't need to sell, just transact in bitcoin.

The IMF and the cronies running it are scared.  Of course they want El Salvador to drop bitcoin because it takes control from the surveillance state kleptocrats and puts it in the hands of people.  Does El Salvador want to eventually be free of the international control freaks or does it want to be under their thumbs in perpetuity?

The answer should be: keep bitcoin and give it time.  The IMF has destroyed countries world wide with the insane policies it has recommended, trusting them now is like trusting any fiat currency to retain value.  As inflation in the US showed last year, they can't do it.  Bitcoin can over time.

It sounds like the IMF is running scared.  Of course they want El Salvador to drop bitcoin because it takes control from the surveillance state kleptocrats and puts it in the hands of people.  Does El Salvador want to eventually be free of the international control freaks or does it want to be under their thumbs in perpetuity?


The CNBC article:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/25/drop-bitcoin-as-legal-tender-imf-urges-el-salvador.html

IMF:
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/01/25/pr2213-el-salvador-imf-executive-board-concludes-2021-article-iv-consultation

Did anyone who has been paying attention ever think it was exactly 21 million bitcoins?   People just use that as an approximation.

I hadn't heard of it either.  If he scammed people though, I am glad he was caught and extradited. 

The old website even looks scammy.

I wasn't arguing with you, just adding my own $0.02.  :-)   People will talk a good game, but they expect someone else to actually pay for whatever it is.

The people who are private jetting around the world with multiple huge homes while arguing that "global warming" (or climate change) is a huge problem.   The people (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates for example) who are saying "taxes should be higher" and yet not voluntarily paying more AND then using things like private foundations to shelter their wealth.

They all talk a lot but actually do the opposite of what they want everyone else to do.  They are insincere, lying, hypocrites who are using things like taxes and climate issues to attempt to control other people and curtail liberty.

You are right, but people rarely put their money where their mouth is. Low prices from China seem to trump things like clamping down in Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan, the plight of the Uyghurs, and lack of basic freedoms. Just look at a lot of the big tech companies that assemble there. People couldn't afford a $2000 base iPhone assembled by unionized workers in Detroit.

Tim Cook talks a good game, but the $ win. Not to pick on Apple, they are one of many.

The 2008 depression was caused by gigantic, monopolistic government involvement in private decisions so that private actors no longer were allowed to use good judgement in evaluating the credit risk of some borrowers.  Then at that point, they needed to unload these bad mortgages and so they did.  The White House had called on Congress to pass legislation to regulate it more every year from 2001 through 2008 and yet Congress required companies to lend to unqualified buyers.

The current Congress and administration are calling for similar reforms in the name of "equity" - a notoriously amorphous, subjective, and evil term that is the opposite of equality under the law - which may eventually have similar consequences.

It says pretty much all you need to know about his morals and intelligence if he is praising an authoritarian regime on banning something that promotes freedom.  He should be ashamed of himself for supporting a communist (or socialist or fascist) regime. Talk about evil.

It certainly could be a parallel system for payments over time.  As time progresses and people see the value of their fiat holdings inflating away, it could take more and more of the market for it.  It really is a simple question:  who do you trust to store the value of your assets?  Math or a corrupt centralized fiat based central bank that is beholden to politicians?


People are not stupid regardless of what the so-called "elites" tend to think (e.g. Bette Midler).  They can figure out pretty quickly that the politicians only have the politician's best interest at heart, not the people's best interest.  Sure they can fool a lot of people for a while - look at AOC, Bernie, Chavez, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their ilk - but long term people realize that they are purely selfish authoritarians who are hoodwinking them.

That is my thought on it too.  The NFT craze seems to be a lot of hot air.

Regarding RU, he certainly took a big chance with SR and is paying the price, probably an excessively steep one.  He doesn't have as much of the potentially positive, obvious, motivations that Snowden or Assange has since both were/are attempting to stop abuses. Deeper down he does in terms of his devotion to "free adults being able to live their lives without being controlled" but that is a much harder sell than their motives. They have then"we're not doing this for profit" angle too.  Unless he gets a pardon, he is stuck and I doubt any of the three would be pardoned by Biden.

It is only superficially the banks that she wants to protect.  The fear is that if the authoritarians lose control of the currency, they lose their power over money and consequently over people.  Sure, that would hurt the banks, but the root fear goes much deeper than that:  free people not controlled by them.

Exactly.  Bitcoin's value proposition also partially relies on the fact that it is secure and stable. You don't have one person who can say "we are doing this upgrade on December 1, 2021" - and consequently you have a much more secure ecosystem since there isn't a single point of pressure to force, blackmail etc. 

Do you want your smart contracts or defi running on the most secure crypto or one that some of the larger bitcoin holders could buy up for a few hundred coins?

Exactly.  The court isn't going to prove anything or unmask anyone.  The number of weasel words in the article is astounding.

Perhaps their goal, if they are in cahoots, is to attempt to claim the keys are lost and there should be a fork to allow them access to the keys.  (e.g. like the ethereum nonsense with ethereum classic).  Of course they'll be on the fork by themselves, but I am not sure if a court will comprehend that. 

Of if they aren't in cahoots, then Kleiman is attempting to prove that CSW is lying about being SN because after a huge judgment his choice will be to access the bitcoins (which he clearly can't) or sell other assets. 

Either way, I don't really see how it turns out to be a positive for CSW.

What they mean is that they want to be able to control everyone and everything and so they need to track everything.  

Like the "transactions in a bank account more than $600" or the second proposal, "transactions in a bank account that in aggregate add up to more than $10,000 in a year" - so in short anyone who has a bank account will have every transaction shared with the collectivist authoritarians that is occupying DC right now.  And they want this imposed worldwide, talk about a prison planet.

Something to consider is that taproot/tapscript/schnorr is coming in about 2-3 days and it does improve the smart contract capabilities of bitcoin.  Not to mention the privacy and efficiency improvements.  Sidechains aren't a bad thing, but they aren't the be-all-and-end-all for scaling.  One problem is the notion of federated sidechains implies that there may be a finite group of signatories which implies trust.  This is one nice thing about bitcoin, people can implement and activate things without asking for permission.