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by n4r9 1378 days ago
> Nullifies what claims exactly?

Bitcoin seems to be intended as a decentralised payment system that bypasses any third party institutions. My gut feeling is that: in order for a state to provide legal recourse, bitcoin addresses need to be linked to a centralised personal/business identity that can be tracked down and sued or prosecuted if necessary. For Bitcoin to feel safe for the normal person, it would have to introduce centralisation and third parties. My gut may be wrong, of course.
2 comments
upsidesinclude 1378 days ago
You might be right.

The important thing is that the person must accept the responsibility of owning all aspects of their wealth.

No one can remove it from you, but you can make the mistake of giving it away. Then you bear the responsibility for losing it.

That's not a very big trade off for some people.

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n4r9 1377 days ago
Yeah, I think most people find consumer protection regulations very reassuring. It's natural that they're reluctant to transition to a system that does not (and arguably cannot) have any.
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spiralx 1377 days ago
Ironically the Chivo wallet is a centralised system that only touches the wider BTC network when transactions are made to a non-Chivo address.
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n4r9 1377 days ago
Thank you for the info, I didn't know about Chivo. This may well be the government's attempt to address the issue of legal recourse. Interesting though that it still was barely used, at least partly because of security issues:

> Though around half of the Salvadorans surveyed have downloaded Chivo to date, with 40% of those downloads happening in September 2021, around 61% of those have abandoned it after withdrawing the $30 dollar sign-up incentive, the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Only 1.6% of all remittances were received in bitcoins via digital wallets in February 2022, according to El Salvador’s Central Bank.

> Chivo download numbers have been negligible in 2022, suggesting that the push has run out of steam. Some of those who have stuck with the application are using it for transactions unrelated to Bitcoin. The median active user does not send or receive a single Bitcoin payment a month nor make any Chivo ATM withdrawals, the survey found.

https://restofworld.org/2022/el-salvador-chivo-bitcoin-walle...

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