Please stop asking for "legal tender status"

[legiteum]

I said yes and no -- there are plenty of laws that are never enforced. My own country has the death penalty for several offences, never carried out, never even used to threaten -- okay outside the point but in this case, there isn't even a stated penalty for this law. Not jail, not fines, nothing. Show me, cause I couldn't find it.

Show me one El Salvadoran who's been told the law penalises them for not accepting Bitcoin or one who said the law will penalise people for not accepting it (that's making your life easy, because we're not looking for anyone who's been penalised).

We've definitely beaten this to death though... so I'll say no more too.

I've said this several times in this thread: El Salvador's law is not enforced. Indeed, El Salvador's law is, practically speaking, a joke.

I began this topic by trying to tell people to not ask for legal tender status for Bitcoin because it's not what you want for multiple reasons, and it's usually not what people think it is.

I suspect that the El Salvador law was initiated by politicians who didn't understand what the term specifically meant, and then the lawyers wrote the law according to actual legal definitions. Probably all the politicians understood was that the value of their personal Bitcoin holdings would go up in value if they passed this law, so they did it.

But some people actually understand the exact legal definition of "legal tender" and would necessarily find people clamoring for this status for Bitcoin rather appalling, going against everything Bitcoin has ever stood for and being unfair and impractical all at once. That's all I'm saying...

[tabas]

You're right, once Bitcoin has been said as a legal tender and already made into law then all citizens are forced to adopt it. But what's good with most of the governments that don't have any stance against making it a legal tender or using it as a payment is that they don't ban it. IMHO, that's a better thing to accept than seeing them banning Bitcoin but even with that, we're seeing citizens that still use Bitcoin whether as a payment choice or an investment/asset. So, regardless of what is the government stands for with Bitcoin, as long as they won't ban it. Then, that's the favor that they can do to us and of course, to Bitcoin.

You are constructive enough, Bitcoin is such that has been active even as many governments of the world ban it. Even the citizens in the country where it is banned are still using it due to the decentralization of the coin, and thanks to the P2P initiative as well. This is why I know that the government of the world will not be able to legalise Bitcoin as a sole means of payment and others, and this is because of its decentralization characteristic, it is too dangerous to rely on it. I wonder why people would think that if the government legalizes Bitcoin, they will now believe that their citizens will rely on it only, no, that will never happen.

Even if they legalise Bitcoin, it will only co-exist with fiat, just like what we see in El Salvador, it can't be more or less than that. And nobody will be forcing either it or fiat on anyone, it will solely depend on the choice of the person in question to use it for payment, trading or investment. But the citizens, private and government institutions will be obliged to accept it as a means of settlement whether they like it or not. Only that they will try to plan their risk with it effectively, and life goes on. But still, I do not think this will be possible in most countries of the world as Bitcoin will only continue to exist just like how it is now but with more countries legalizing it.

We're all optimistic about the adoption of Bitcoin and going back several years ago, many of us were telling that it is going to replace cash or fiat system. But as time gets by, we get to see how these governments react to these changes and what matters now is that they're not going to stop any way of adoption into their jurisdictions. Bitcoin doesn't have to be a legal tender for everyone to use, as long as there is no law that stops its people from using it, we all good with that. So with that, using it as an asset, investment or payment for any transaction is just the same. But we know that majority of us are going to use it more with being as a store of value than of currency but we're all free to do that and no one can stop its growth even these governments.

[jaberwock]

Actually, the op is kind of right. According to Merriam-Webster, legal tender is "money that is legally valid for the payment of debts and that must be accepted for that purpose when offered". I've also seen similar definitions in other dictionaries, including a Google prompt based on Oxford dictionaries that you'll get if you google the meaning of legal tender. If something is legal tender, it means that it must be accepted as payment. So it's not obligatory for customers (if there's a different legal tender as well), but merchants are obliged to accept such payments, meaning, in case of Bitcoin, that they must have some wallets, at the very least, to accept such payments. So there is an element of force here, and it's understandable that some might be against such policies.

The "definition" based on dictionaries obviously matters, but at some situations the words could have different meanings in different industries as well. So in crypto, "hodl" is a thing, "moon" means something else, "lambo" is different than just the car, there are stuff that do not mean anything similar as it used to. This is one of them, legal tender of "forcing" people to use, or not use, those are all very valid reasons.

Basically, as long as the other person you are talking to understands what you are saying, then I do not think that it means anything, it should not be a problem, we could very well do whatever we want. I hope that we could see something that changes eventually, but if people understand each other, life is fine.

[franky1]

again and finally
legal tender status is not about forcing only use of that currency and to not accept anything else..
if it were true that "force" was there.. bitcoin would be illegal be default

however legal tender status is a higher tier/standard/level of trust in a currency to such a higher standard that courts, banks, treasury accept it
but what comes with achieving this higher tier standard.. are conditions of use. such as needing to audit who/where funds came from/going to. taxation of said currency and many other things like limitations on spending amounts before certain levels of reporting of suspicious behaviour are triggered.

[Easteregg69]

again and finally
legal tender status is not about forcing only use of that currency and to not accept anything else..
if it were true that "force" was there.. bitcoin would be illegal be default

however legal tender status is a higher tier/standard/level of trust in a currency to such a higher standard that courts, banks, treasury accept it
but what comes with achieving this higher tier standard.. are conditions of use. such as needing to audit who/where funds came from/going to. taxation of said currency and many other things like limitations on spending amounts before certain levels of reporting of suspicious behaviour are triggered.

Tron is legal tender.

[legiteum]

The "definition" based on dictionaries obviously matters, but at some situations the words could have different meanings in different industries as well. So in crypto, "hodl" is a thing, "moon" means something else, "lambo" is different than just the car, there are stuff that do not mean anything similar as it used to. This is one of them, legal tender of "forcing" people to use, or not use, those are all very valid reasons.

Basically, as long as the other person you are talking to understands what you are saying, then I do not think that it means anything, it should not be a problem, we could very well do whatever we want. I hope that we could see something that changes eventually, but if people understand each other, life is fine.

This isn't the case in politics. In fact, the very opposite is true in that context.

In fact, this is the way bad laws get put on the books that cause disasters and end up accomplishing the opposite of what people intended.

My guess is that politicians in El Salvador wanted to pump their Bitcoin holdings, and heard the term "legal tender" thrown around in casual discussion, not knowing what the term actually means when you pass a law making a trading instrument "legal tender".

Then lawyers needed to draft an actual law and thus had to understand the real legal meaning of the term and they basically put a law on the books in that country that cost them a ton of money to implement and isn't actually followed by over half of the population because it makes no practical sense.

Indeed, this is the whole reason I started this thread :-).

I would rather people say, "I hope the government uses taxpayer dollars to promote my favorite investment instrument so it will go up in value!" rather than asking their elected reps for a legally loaded term like "legal tender".