@Doan9269. I shake my head that you are trying to make it appear that the future of El Salvador's economy would depend on the price of bitcoin. Does that imply that president Bukele is gambling? Also, the mock is not about the bitcoin investment. The mock is he is using taxpayer's money to gamble on bitcoin while a worldwide economic recession is going to occur. Should we continue cheering for him if there began a social unrest calling for Bukele to step down? Will bitcoin fix this?
Depending how bitcoin price going on for several years later? will be as gambling what did by president Bukele because he don't give positive impact with investing on bitcoin and price keep going down at the future, just speculation if bitcoin price at the future keep on the lower price than with first time price invested by El Savador president. I think become weakness because how much fund invested in bitcoin could use for other needed and become as capital for El Savador how to give their country with productive economic. All contrast side with Bukele will made it as black campaign on the next presidential election because he was failed give profit with how much money waste by investing in bitcoin.
Since none of us know the future in advance, the mere fact that an investment goes down rather than up does not mean it was a bad investment at the time that it was made or that there should be any meaningful change in the practice down the road.. including potentially keeping on dollar cost averaging, buying on dips and lump sum investing over many years and even across administrations.
Of course, with politics there frequently are goals to get friendly administrations elected in subsequent terms in order that previous investments/policies can continue to be followed, so of course, there are no guarantees that future administrations will be bitcoin friendly in their policies, practices and investments.
The idea of hedging is like an insurance for a variety of possibilities, so something that serves as a hedge (such as bitcoin) might not have gone up but it still served as an insurance. There are theories that seem to have a decent amount of factual support in which bitcoin is amongst the best of hedge investments because it seems to be a non-correlated asset... Sure folks make claims that bitcoin is correlated to various macro assets, but in the longer term that does not seem to be the case.
I don't want to go in the political direction, but I want to convey a little understanding that I know about the purpose of Bitcoin.
The main purpose of Bitcoin in general as I read in
bitcoin.org or other article is to facilitate transactions. The first decentralized per-to-per-payment network that is only fully controlled by each user. It will automatically be completely opposite to the basic purpose of Bitcoin if anyone values Bitcoin at its price.
*Please correct if I am wrongWell, I glanced at your profile aylabadia05, and I see that you have been registered on the forum since mid 2017, and maybe I can infer from that about your learning about bitcoin and wanting to learn about bitcoin since that time (so right around 5 years of learning, no?)
I started in bitcoin in late 2013, so I am a bit more than 8.5 years of learning about bitcoin, yet I also had a decent amount of living back ground that included personal investing prior to my getting into bitcoin, too.
Each of us comes to bitcoin with our own set of experiences, and sure if we are younger, then we might not even have had any exposure to bitcoin at all, but bitcoin continues to grown in the world, and so more and more people are learning about bitcoin and learning about different ways that bitcoin might be helpful to their lives on an individual level and so those kinds of learnings have been moving into the spheres of various kinds of institutions and even countries too with the El Salvador example that only goes back a little more than a year for when El Salvador (as a country) announced that it had a plan to get into bitcoin more BIGGEDly by passing laws to make it legal tender and other developments that are associated with that (including but not limited to that El Salvador would spend some of its resources to buy bitcoin, too ... for its treasuries and also for some balancing of funds purposes too.. I don't claim to know the various ways that El Salvador is merely HODLing the bitcoin it bought or using some of that bitcoin in working ways to facilitate some exchanges that might end up going back and forth to dollars or stable coins).
In some sense your summary of what bitcoin is, and your rendition of its "main purpose" comes off as overly-simplified, even though you are providing an intro to bitcoin link, and sure if you are attempting to figure out some of the differences between bitcoin value and bitcoin price, then surely you are correct with any implication that you were making that people might not even be sure about whether bitcoin is overvalued or undervalued at its current price, and those assessments of value versus price can sometimes motivate people in terms of whether they believe that it would be fruitful for them to get involved in bitcoin through purchasing bitcoin or maybe trying to earn bitcoin.. or on the other hand to sell or to purchase items with whatever bitcoin that they have if they believe that the value of bitcoin is less than the current price.
For the past 8.5 years that I have been learning about bitcoin, I have also attempted to incorporate bitcoin into my life in terms of allocating a portion of my investment portfolio into bitcoin, and then considering that bitcoin has various kinds of value and potentially increases some of my options in terms of how I have attempted to balance my various bitcoin strategies and practices and ongoing learning more about bitcoin at the same time - while sharing some of the learnings in the forum or even getting some of my information and ideas about bitcoin through the forum.
Part of my point remains that you are not necessarily wrong in your attempted basic description of what is bitcoin aylabadia05, but your seeming reliance on getting a description from a basic introductory links gives me some sense that you may well have not been spending a lot of time building experiences around bitcoin in the last 5 years or so, which could possibly help you with your own attempts to summarize what bitcoin is from your perspective and how that might relate to topics being discussed in this thread (and surely every thread on the forum may well have deviance from its topic, but it seems to be the responsibility of members to attempt to stay on topic or to bring their deviations back to the topic of the thread, if possible).
Yes, technologically there might be difficulties in verifying which transactions might be attributable to El Salvador and then whether some of the transactions might be done on the main chain or over lightning network or a combination of various ways that bitcoin transactions might be carried out on the base layer or on second and/or third layers.. and sure the further out, the more likely that there are going to be centralized dependency points that are not exactly the same as bitcoin, even though the values might get resolved on the main bitcoin layer from time to time... and for sure, I think that any of us should be skeptical regarding claims that transactions are being made and sometimes we cannot really verify the truth of the matter or even if we might be being mislead in one way or another regarding how closely the transactions (and interactions) are related to bitcoin or pegged back to bitcoin or even sufficiently collateralized if they happen to be further out on the layers and really no longer bitcoin transactions.
I personally wonder about how some of the monetization matters work in terms of services like Strike..what are the costs of transactions and who's paying for the costs (and at some point are there interactions with legacy systems), so is the whole systems what it claims to be and are various aspects sustainable and backed up by adequate collateral too. Sure if there is some system that is being built, then maybe it does not need to be profitable and/or sustainable right away, but surely we need to be skeptical if there is some system that ends up being like Luna/Terra/ DoKwon (scammer dweeb) that is using bitcoin in one way or another, but then really not even sufficiently backed up by collateral or has various centralized points of failure - while holding itself out and claiming that it does not.. Those can end up being tragic failures and then have some system wide negative ramifications when those systems end up failing and then causing folks to either sell a lot of BTC or lose confidence in BTC which may end up contributing to further cascading negative affects on BTC... Regular BTC holders do not likely appreciate when those kinds of systematic events happen and seem to contribute to the lessening of the BTC price (and even lessening of the perceived value of BTC).
Sure, if this is the concern i can completely understand it. When people use it they should put in the same mentality as with any centralized service and never trust it, no matter what.
Currently, I hold right around 10% of my various BTC value on various third-party platforms/exchanges, and there were times that I held quite a bit more through various third-parties, and when I first got into bitcoin, I had not realized the various ways that it would be better to hold some of the value separately, and I even had some value on blockchain.com (blockchain.info back then), and had not completely appreciated that I had generated my first wallet backup through them and kept that in my e-mail, and then I had some subsequent back up seeds that were in e-mails that I had ended up archiving - but still not even clear about the extent that some of those back ups had been vulnerable, too (even though in theory the third-party was not really holding those keys).
Surely there is a bit of a gradient in terms of how any of us might choose to hold our keys and/or to keep them with third parties, and there are trade-offs and even some governments and/or institutions may have requirements to hold their keys through 3rd parties which can create vulnerabilities, too.
I have frequently asserted to newbie bitcoin adopters that they should not be too preoccupied in the very beginning of their starting to get exposure to bitcoin in terms of learning how to hold and manage their own keys, even though it should be an aspiration for each of us, and especially the more value that we put into bitcoin....
Let's say for example, a BTC HODLer in 2015 was not very worried about having had bought $2,500 worth of bitcoin in 2015.. (which would have been about 10 BTC for $250 each), so that HODLer was not keeping track of his her bitcoin security and how his keys were held, but then pretty soon in early to mid 2017, those BTC have become worth way more than $25k and then currently they are worth $250k, and they had gone up to $690k in November 2021.. , so sometimes there could end up being justification to start to pay way more attention to how much value is in the bitcoin based on changes in the price, and there might be some needs to rethink security and even rethink the various locations that the coins (private keys) are held. Are all the coins in one place or are they in different spots? Are the coins connected to each other in terms of privacy? Various kinds of concerns can develop if either the BTC changes in price or if more value is invested into BTC.
There also can be questions about what storage locations are available and how frequently is it expected to use those coins and are there advantages to attempting to have some kind of multi-sig set up or how much work and learning is needed to run a node for even better potential for privacy. The various tools and options continue to develop, and some of the need to learn more might have to do with how much exposure is going into bitcoin , and surely some normie newbies into bitcoin in El Salvador might start by just various basics in using various lighting wallets.. but then advance into feeling some needs to keep some coins in cold storage and/or as long term savings - even if they might have economic circumstance that ONLY allow them to save $10 per week or even less sometimes.
This is something not unique to chivo and many people are still using centralized services for various practical reasons. But we also gotta look at the unique situation El Salvador was in, with 70% of the population being unbanked and not having access to easy financial services at all. Now he introduced a state banking like app, that gives people access to fiat, bitcoin main layer and lightning payments for people that had nothing beforehand. Then there’s practical reasons that make it necessary to convert between all these and make them interoperable.
We seem to be somewhat on the same page here, tadamichi, and in that regard, you and I are acknowledging the existence of both centralized and non-centralized services while at the same time recognizing and appreciating that some of these are more tied to directly being pegged to bitcoin than others, so for sure there are needs to start somewhere - including that some advantages are likely coming to a large number of people in El Salvador - even if some of the various services might only be tangentially connected to bitcoin - while at the same time, just having more options and opportunities increases the potentiality that El Salvadoreans are going to be able to learn more about bitcoin and maybe even to be able to move some of their value into completely self-custodian options.. but they have to start somewhere in their process of learning about bitcoin and learning about bitcoin-related services and even learning about various differences and risks that might associated with each in terms of privacy or convenience and other possible trade-off factors that they might consider to be potentially relevant to their circumstances and/or whether they benefit in the present or might they also consider possible future benefits too.
And people here are complaining about gambling and centralisation for using money and building infrastructure to introduce these services, what do they expect politicians to do? What more practical solutions could a central entity have offered in this situation, as they can’t even build something decentralized?
I don't have any problem with throwing out various criticisms, but of course, in this thread we get naysayers who harp upon the negative, so many of them do not really have any intention to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion regarding what is really happening in El Salvador in terms of various kinds of systems and options that are being built and surely seem to be good investments from a bitcoiner perspective... including potentially being very empowering to a lot of El Salvadoreans.. even if it may well take a decent amount of time for them to learn about bitcoin and some of them might not want to learn, too.
Put emotions to the side and this is a huge opportunity he gave to people, who didn’t have access to anything beforehand. This is actually their opportunity to even use decentralized services easily in the first hand, as they now have access to the main layer and lightning, even if chivo wouldn’t use these in their daily operations. It’s just another side network.
Yep.. surely a lot of innovation has happened and becomes possible by the sheer creation of space for private sector to attempt to develop in El Salvador and the El Salvador government putting resources and focus in the direction of various kinds of bitcoin investments and developments too.
People can only use decentralized services themselves, this a burden the state can’t take from them.
The state is attempting to be bitcoin-friendly.. so sure the state could do the opposite, too.. and create burdens on the citizens in regards to bitcoin, but they are not.. and in some sense we are lucky that Bukele is not distracted into shitcoins and exerting a large number of controls in regards to how people can or cannot use bitcoin.. Sure some additional burdens could develop later - but the way Bukele seems to have a pretty decent grasp of what is bitcoin probably would not happen under Bukele .. and it will be interesting to see if there is a transition of the leadership and then how will the bitcoin matter be handled during and after such a transition in the leadership.
It’s also important to have realistic expectations and look at how/ why things are being used. The state will do its job, and people need to do their own. Not your keys, not your coins. If we’re concerned, we should maybe teach El Salvadorians how to store their Bitcoin safely/ run nodes and not use centralized services when they don’t need to.
It seems space is present for those kinds of teaching to already be happening and ongoing in El Salvador, and even some of the government promotion of bitcoin seems to be ok. with the development and promotion of various bitcoin services that are not necessarily connected to the services that the El Salvador govt is providing, such as the Chivo wallet.
Chivo might still offer utility, in the same way bank accounts and central exchanges still offer some kind of utility and we’re using one of the two too, without complaining to our politicians that these services are centralized, what else should they be? Should they start lying to us and just make it seem like it’s decentralized, when it can never be, to make us feel better?
It does make sense that a government wallet would retain several centralized aspects, and yeah maybe like a traditional bank that is not compulsory but just is there in case people want to use it or find some convenience in using it.
Of course, we have a variety of wallets that are available and a variety of ways that bitcoin transactions are being done in El Salvador and other places. I would not proclaim to have had studied the details of the matter - and I do understand that there are some possible centralized points that could contribute to various kinds of failures and even ways that folks are being mislead about either how transactions are being made and the extent to which people have options.
We do know that people do have options, but at the same time, it is quite likely that some newbies might end up getting stuck using various kinds of custodial services, and surely some of them will also learn how to hold their own coins at the same time, and we know that holding your own coins is a preferable way of attempting to protect yourself on a personal level.. and even if there might end up being some systematic risks that come through various unknown third-party custody risks, then those might be valid concerns - even though they do not validate the case for bitcoin and they even justify why more and more user-friendly self-custody systems should be built and used.. Surely there are going to be some losers in this whole process too, and some of those are likely attributable to some of the growing pains of ongoing development and early stages in bitcoin. .which can also be considered as exciting times, too..
I completely agree, like i said, people shouldn’t get too comfortable with any centralized service and we should try to teach them now, to prevent further damages. The criticism on the state specifically are unjustified tho now, as no one before this government had made any considerable attempts at banking this huge part of the population, and the app is there to solve this task. It’s easy to bash anything without context, like some people here do again and again.
Well, so far, there do not seem to be very many jurisdictions that even come close to El Salvador in terms of both bitcoin-friendliness and trying to embrace a kind of comprehensive approach in terms of covering a whole country, and El Salvador even seems to have a decent sized population.
In this thread, we have been getting a lot of seemingly vacuous proclamations to bash on El Salvador, yet at the same time, we are still waiting to see if any other countries might go down some kind of a similar path in order that we might be able to engage in a bit more comparing and contrasting - and again, I am not opposed to criticizing various ways that maybe improvements could be made or if their might be some problematic aspects in terms of how bitcoin is being implemented in El Salvador - and surely more and more information is coming available with the passage of time, so there might also sometimes be criticisms that El Salvador is not sufficiently sharing some of its bitcoin related information, and how much they decide to share is discretionary too.
By the way, I am not even going to get upset about arm-chair criticisms, even though it does seem that El Salvador has been attracting quite a few more bright and innovative folks who are challenged in both their wanting to see the building of bitcoin infrastructure and systems, and to share information in public ways, and a decent number of those kinds of people and companies are going to El Salvador temporarily or even more permanently to invest, investigate and innovate in regards to these kinds of matters, and a decent amount of that information is going to end up getting shared in wider ways because even if there are some possible proprietary ways that bitcoin can be developed, there are also a lot of open source aspects in the various ways that bitcoin continues to be developed, built and information shared.
The simple question in the end is, would El Salvador have been better off without making Bitcoin legal tender and introducing Chivo? If yes, how and why weren’t they better off before? Constructive proposals are the only thing that could help them.
I doubt that we need to entertain those kinds of stupid frameworks. Of course, there are dumb fucks in this thread and in other parts of the forum who propagate those kinds of mostly dumb ideas, and sure they have the burden to produce evidence and also the burden to persuade that their evidence supports their points, and we already know that a lot of times they do not bring very good facts and/or arguments, and bitcoin's ongoing growth and performance largely negates their overall points even if from time to time, they might be providing some concerns that are worthy to address.
In other words, it seems to me that everyone has a right to participate and even to bring some lame game facts and arguments to the table, but we should not allow those lame game facts and arguments to distract us from understanding and appreciating what is more likely going on presently and how the future seems to be more likely to play out.
So for example the dipwit trolls and bitcoin naysayers (or shitcoin pumpers or fiat pumpers) frequently want to get caught up on what about this and what about this and what about that., and sure sometimes they make decent points, but frequently they bring up pie in the sky bullshit that is very detached from reality and they want to present a 1% or 10% scenario as if it were a 95% scenario. So sure, we may well want to consider the various 1% or 10% scenarios, but not be giving them way more weight and/or attention than they deserve, unless the dipwit trolls can actually show us that the thing deserves more weight and attention.. so the burden is on them to present evidence and arguments to show those outlier scenarios in terms of having more weight than we had considered them to have... and sure there is no problem with giving them some attention, but we can also tell them to fuck off with their nonsense because I would rather be focusing attention on this thing that has a 60% scenario rather than the various lame 1% scenarios.
