[gjulianm]

But then why use Bitcoin if you're going to use what is essentially a bank?

[grey-area]

Not just a bank but an unregulated bank tied to all sorts of shady currencies like USDC, Doge etc which has regular outages. That's also ignoring the wild volatility in the value of bitcoin.

What could possibly go wrong!

[willnz]

Once you have BTC you can choose to store it outside of a bank as a non-inflationary asset. No one can remove it from your wallet.

[ben_w]

I can do that with gold.

Gold is less volatile, and the value of the volume of a €2 coin in gold is 9 months of El Salvador nominal GDP per capita.

Or the gold could be stored elsewhere and accessed via an app, with exactly the sort of database every bank already uses.

Either way, BTC adds nothing. Apps might, depending on the banking infrastructure, but BTC itself? Nada.

[el-salvador]

This is a new unit of measure! Now I need to know my monthly salary in eurocent volume of gold.

[ben_w]

€0.01 coins have a volume of ~0.346ml, gold has a density of 19.3g/ml and a current price of 60.89 USD/g, so a eurocent-sized gold coin would be worth 407.02 USD :)

[el-salvador]

Thank you :) I'll look at those coins differently now.

[gjulianm]

Yeah, but you're still having to pass through Coinbase or any other exchange, and they can remove it from you there. That's the point, if Bitcoin needs an exchange to be functional you're losing all the differential features that Bitcoin has.

[willnz]

Yes, but you can still protect your wealth once it’s out of the exchange.

I guess the answer to the exchange problem is to have a decentralised exchange.

[koheripbal]

So the modern version of keeping gold under my mattress?

[wereHamster]

Ease of access to and exchange with global marketplaces. I can transfer/trade directly from/to El Salvador without any bank being involved in that transaction.

[willeh]

A bank by any other name is still a bank. Sure there is definitely a legal difference such as deposit insurance and access to their lender of last resort. For the customer however it doesn't matter they still need KYC, the cops can still see their transactions, they still have to ask where the money is from, they can still knock on your door and put your hands in handcuffs. Many of the advantages to people in El Salvador with BTC is avoiding extreme inflation in the national currency. However one does well to note that inflation woes in the Atlantic world actually correlated with a partial deflation of the Bitcoin bubble, so if you're in the EU/US bitcoin is an investment when money is cheap, not a hedge for your money becoming cheap.

[el-salvador]

Our currency is the USD since 2001. The SVC our former local currency has been pegged for 20+ years to the usd [1].

The SVC is no longer used day to day and is usually kept as a collectible item, it can still be exchanged at banks at 8.75 SVC per 1 USD.

[1] https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...

[gjulianm]

If you need to keep your money on an exchange to be able to do transactions, you'll probably still need to go through a bank or exchange or the same thing by any other name.

[pochamago]

The only other legal tender in El Salvador is the US Dollar. If, for any reason, you have qualms about the US financial system, especially as someone foreign to the US with little priority in its decision making processes, it might be desirable to opt for a different currency. Is BTC the right currency for their government to bend to that purpose? I guess we'll find out.

[echelon]

To make the bitcoin investors rich.

Also to stick it to the man.

Nevermind the unprecedented new level of randomware hacks.