[esens]

I understand the money transfer problem. Cryptocurrency seems like a good idea in that case.

I question though why choose Bitcoin? I guess a lot of people support it. But it is far from stable, so no one in the right mind, especially poor people should hold significant Bitcoins because it is speculative rather than stable.

I guess stable coins do not have the wide acceptance that bitcoin has? Why not USDC or similar to solve the money transfer problem?

Your respond suggest that Bitcoin is going to the moon, but that suggests you want it to stay the speculative instrument it is now. But if it is going to work in El Salvador you want it to be stable no?

[xiphias2]

USDC is controlled by US, which has been playing geopolitical games with El Salvador (and other countries) already.

People El Salvador didn't get the $1200 checks that US citizens got from printing more USD, even though they both use USD in theory. The president tried to get a deal with the IMF, but they couldn't agree on the terms, so he decided to give a choice to the people between a safe but inflating currency and a volatile / experimental but deflating currency.

Luckily there are enough market makers in both countries that transferring USD and recieving USD through the Bitcoin / Lightning network is cheaper and faster than using the traditional banking infrastructure.

I have a girlfriend in Colombia, and in addition to the 10% remittance fee she always has to go to the city from her village (1 hour bus ride) just to get money. I wish I could just send her money through Lightning network (she has internet + iPhone, so installing an app is not a problem).

[esens]

The rest of your comment makes sense, but this sentence is disconnected from reality:

"People El Salvador didn't get the $1200 checks that US citizens got from printing more USD, even though they both use USD in theory."

Are you seriously saying that 5% inflation a year, maybe a bit more worse case, is bad compared to Bitcoin just lost 40% of its value in the last 2 months? Oh no, better not use USD then and switch to Bitcoin!

Maybe we need a stable coin that is a mix of the major currencies if you are against USD in particular? It could be pegged to some ratio of Chinese, US, Euro (and UK or Japanese?) dollars? This would be quite nice and stable.

[lowkey]

As most Bitcoin advocates would say Zoom Out. Yes Bitcoin looks volatile if you look at the past 2-3 months. However if you zoom out to 1 year Bitcoin is still up almost 300% y/y. Zoom out 2-3 years and the numbers look even better. As for USD, depending on what you want to buy inflation is 3-30% y/y - think asset price inflation.

Zoom out further and USD looks even less attractive as a store of value. In 1933 $20usd bought 1oz of gold. Today it would take $2000usd/oz of gold, netting out to a 100x decrease in purchasing power in ~90 years. Bitcoin meanwhile has grown in purchasing power by 200% per year on average since inception.

What El Salvador has done is brilliant.

Citizens can chose between a short-term stable unit of account that loses most of its value over a long time period (USD) or a short-term volatile but long term deflationary currency designed to increase purchasing power over the long-term (BTC).

Remember that no traditional bank in the world will ever again pay you sufficient interest on savings to preserve your purchasing power over time - not one. Fiat is a terrible long-term store of value.

Bitcoin gives users the option to fix this.

[jmcqk6]

>As most Bitcoin advocates would say Zoom Out. Yes Bitcoin looks volatile if you look at the past 2-3 months. However if you zoom out to 1 year Bitcoin is still up almost 300% y/y.

Either you don't understand what volatility means, or you think volatility only matters when it's towards the down position. Either way, you're wrong.

Volatility in a currency is not a good thing. Even if some people are making money, other people are losing money due to the volatility. Value stability should be one of the top goals for any currency.

[lowkey]

A currency that constantly loses value in terms of purchasing power over time is not stable.

Again, zoom out and the picture looks different.

The US Dollar loses approximately 100% of it’s value per century.

Bitcoin maintains or increases its purchasing power by many orders of magnitude per decade.

While the market rate on offer for Bitcoin at a given moment fluctuates, sometimes wildly, over a multi-year period the value always tends to go up.

This is by design as Bitcoin is the scarcest asset ever invented - giving it the property of hard money which unlike fiat is immune from debasement.

> Value stability should be one of the top goals for any currency.

Per my comment above the US dollar’s value is not stable. It falls by ~100% per century and because of the Fed’s 80 year long policy of continuous debasement the value of US dollars will never be stable over time and will always go down.

By contrast, while Bitcoin is volatile today, as it matures in its price discovery Bitcoin is likely to become more and more stable (read less volatile) in the future.

[verall]

The point of a fiat is that it slowly loses value, so wealth holders can't get bigger and bigger just by holding the fiat, they are forced to invest to break even.

Bitcoin is not "fixing" anything here, a currency that deflates forever is a dumb idea.

[lowkey]

So you consider it a feature of fiat that it is impossible for a saver to maintain their purchasing power over time unless they risk their capital on volatile assets such as stocks or real estate?

Why is is a good thing that widows, orphans, those living in poverty or on a fixed income have no way to save without having to Risk their principal?

The only ones who benefit from inflationary fiat currencies are those closest to the new spending - via the Cantillon effect - namely bankers, politicians and their friends in the military industrial complex.

[dragonwriter]

> So you consider it a feature of fiat that it is impossible for a saver to maintain their purchasing power over time unless they risk their capital on volatile assets such as stocks or real estate?

Some cryptocurrencies may (in some cases, based on past performance) be good on average as long term stores of value, but even those that are good at this are extremely volatile assets, much more so than, say, blue-chip stocks. So they certainly don’t solve any problem of “you need exposure to volatile assets to not lose value of savings” that you might imagine exists.

> Why is is a good thing that widows, orphans, those living in poverty or on a fixed income have no way to save without having to Rick their principal?

People without surplus income have no way to save by definition, with or without risking their income. That people with surplus income need to participate in wealth generation to recurve additional wealth from storage of their surplus income is obviously a feature.

[verall]

> widows, orphans, those living in poverty or on a fixed income have no way to save

This has got to be the laziest rebuttal - think of the orphans!

Those living in poverty, definitionally, have less money than the not-impoverished. A deflationary currency gives value proportional to whomever is holding it. There is no incentive to loan money, as holding this deflationary currency is risk free growth.

Certainly, the government printing fiat could direct those funds in undesirable or corrupt ways, but this is possible whether the fiat currency is deflating or inflating. A currency that is always deflating will be subject to the tyranny of wealth holders, who now have no incentive to put any of that wealth back into the economy, absent a wealth tax or something.

Fiat already has momentum, it can purchase goods and services, which can be used to create value. It can pay taxes. It does not also need to be self-compounding through deflation.

[xiphias2]

5% inflation a year (which is closer to 20% for people who want to own their own house) is devastating long term.

People in the US can just buy S&P stock in their 401K to defend against it, but most people in the world don't have that privilege.

I agree that volatility of bitcoin is really hard to stomach (I have been through 85% downturns and it sucked, and people have made fun of me many times, I just got used to it). But there are enough people who have so bad pension systems in the world, that they see the huge volatility of bitcoin as a better option than trusting their government.

[landemva]

I have been learning more about DAI. Synthetic peg to $1usd. Interesting possible uses here.

[sadness3]

Network effects. No better option which is universally agreed as the _next_ best option. It will get easier and faster to send. Email used to need a C compiler and 2 days to send.

[x4e]

Bitcoin is more just used to refer to cryptocurrency in general. I think most people seriously using cryptocurrency these days do not use bitcoin.

[xiphias2]

No it isn't. When I'm sending money to Colombia and WorldRemit app takes 10% of my money, it means 10% less food to cook for my girlfriend and her family. She can't get a job since the pandemic, and I have other friends in Colombia with the same problem, they are desperate... some times I just send $40, and they say that it saves their life, it's so bad there right now.

[haskellandchill]

Money is a just a row in an SQL table. We can update it for less than a cent. Everything else is a social problem, Bitcoin does nothing to help here. Exchanges over Bitcoin are no better or worse in principle than existing financial infrastructure.

The reason for high fees are the risk in sending the money across borders. Due to fraud there are risks. Bitcoin does nothing to fix this and seems to even enable more scams.

[lowkey]

> The reason for high fees are the risk in sending the money across borders. Due to fraud there are risks. Bitcoin does nothing to fix this and seems to even enable more scams.

Bitcoin eliminates counter party risk and international transfer risk. Lightning eliminates cost, latency and transaction volume limits. In every way that matters, Bitcoin via Lightning eliminates high fees and addresses all your concerns.

As for the idea that Bitcoin enables more scams, please provide citations. I am not aware of any scams introduced by Bitcoin or Lightning.

[haskellandchill]

> Bitcoin eliminates counter party risk and international transfer risk

citations are a two way street buddy

[lowkey]

Fair enough ..

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network that does not rely on any third party to function - hence no counter-party risk. Bitcoin operates based on rules, but has no rulers, only participants of various flavors.

Bitcoin doesn’t understand or recognize borders. There is no country-code input field in a bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin doesn’t care if you are sending Bitcoin to your friend across the street or North Korea, Iran, <insert scary nation here> - international transfer risk is non-existent for Bitcoin as Bitcoin does not recognize political borders.

Any human anywhere with a computing device and internet connectivity can create an address and transact with anyone else in the network.

Bitcoin is a censorship resistant monetary network open to all 7.5 Billion humans. No bank can compete with Bitcoin on this dimension.

[lowkey]

> Exchanges over Bitcoin are no better or worse in principle than existing financial infrastructure.

In principal maybe not but in reality, Bitcoin for international exchanges is a game-changer especially if you can keep the money in Bitcoin and spend it as the recipient.

Fees on remittances to El Salvador were up to 50% in some cases. With Bitcoin they are effectively zero.

Bitcoin fixes this.

[x4e]

If you are sending 40$ over Bitcoin the fees will Be far more than 10% (4$). Checkout Nano or Stellar Lumens if you want to send small amounts of money without fees.