El Salvador President says, ‘It’s game over for dollar, Bitcoin is future’ | Hacker News Reader

El Salvador President says, ‘It’s game over for dollar, Bitcoin is future’

indianexpress.com

19 pointsmgh224 comments

What is revolutionary about Bitcoin? It is just the digital equivalent of the gold standard and the gold standard (within a country) ended many times because of a lack of gold. The "Bitcoin standard" will end because of a lack of Bitcoin.

It's exactly the same system with the same flaws. Some parameters are different which means it will just progress through the problematic stages faster than the good old dollar.

>According to Bukele, the residents of Bitcoin city won’t have to pay any income, property, capital gains or even payroll taxes. The city would be built with attracting foreign investment in mind.

Well, it would have been a good idea if this plan wasn't inherently based on speculation or resource exports (e.g. Bitcoin mining). It could still be a good one if he kept property taxes and only taxed land value.

> According to Bukele, the residents of Bitcoin city won’t have to pay any income, property, capital gains or even payroll taxes. The city would be built with attracting foreign investment in mind.

More importantly, this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. You could just as easily make a city that is paid in normal currency, but has none of those taxes. It's literally why Dubai is how Dubai is (virtually no income tax)

Dubai has oil. And slaves.

Dubai doesn't have oil. It's a tax haven that specifically focused on tourism, trade and finance (and now tech) because of a lack of oil. Compare that to Abu Dhabi which has massive oil reserves, is largely bureaucratic and is still long oil.

On a tangential note, Dubai is heavily burdened with debt post 2008, largely to Abu Dhabi, so that's one data point going counter to the premise of the article.

How do you run out of something that is infinitely divisible?

Exactly, I'm totally pro bitcoin because once I've started to look at how the system works it is quite beautiful. The uses of energy to self regulate a system of decentralized workers is crazy

Divisibility has nothing to do with it. A currently standard backed by an asset depends on how much of that asset is in reserves.

A gold IOU is also infinitely divisible

So you won’t run out of them. But they are not knowably finite or trustless, so not inherently great money.

Hi! I used to live in El Salvador.

> It could still be a good one if he kept property taxes and only taxed land value.

El Salvador's central government does not charge yearly property taxes. Property taxes are paid when a property is sold or transferred.

There is also a monthly "fee" [1] payable to the local government (county/alcaldía) based on the area of the property, for providing local services like garbage collection, road lightning, CCTV, and annual local festival of each town.

The difference between tax and fee is something particular from El Salvador law. Only the central government can charge taxes (impuestos), while local governments (like a city or town) can charge fees (tasas). I'm not a lawyer, so I may not be 100% correct, but I think the difference is that "fees" are paid for services directly provided, while taxes are not linked to an specific service.

> What is revolutionary about Bitcoin?

the carbon footprint

>lack of bitcoin

so just submit a pull request

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/feedb9c84e72e4fff489...

i'm half joking and half not :)

Bitcoin the word is an overloaded term. I think when people say Bitcoin, they really mean all cryptocurrencies taken together. You can watch all cryptos go up and down relative to what bitcoin is doing. So, in that respect, there is no upper cap to "Bitcoin" since there are tons of coins and they all tend to balance out (of their relative worth).

I think there are fair number of revolutionary things that you discount:

1) You can send it to anyone, anywhere without involving a middleman or needing financial infrastructure. How can you do this with gold?

2) You can "program" it via smart contracts to execute fairly complicated logic without trusting individual actors to carry out their part of the deal. How can you do this with gold?

1) You can't send it to someone without a btc address. You can't send it to somewhere without internet, or rather, someone somewhere without internet can not use their newly received btc. Every transaction requires a middleman that you pay and you can't even choose which one you would like to use.

Gold: can send it to anybody with an address, doesn't need internet. Can actually be used without middleman and in instances where you want one you can actually choose which one you want to use. Also doesn't need financial infrastructure. On paper gold seems better.

2) This only works for on chain stuff. Want to program a smart contract that pays out building contractors as they finish stuff around your house? Congratulations, now you have additional work of programming the smart contract. Simpler to use gold.

You cannot send gold securely to anyone with an address. Even in advanced, stable countries, mail theft is common. In countries with high corruption, you are very likely to have your gold stolen. Sure, you need the internet to send BTC, but that’s not that big of an ask in this day and age.

Regarding smart contracts, yes they only work for on chain stuff. What do programmatic contracts using gold work on? Answer: nothing. Even if you used tradition contracts, you would need to hire a lawyer and still worry about how they’re written. You’d also need a strong legal system to enforce them.

Your criticisms are weird. You’re like “yes btc enables new things, but they aren’t 100% perfect so we should keep using this old thing despite its limitations.”

> You cannot send gold securely to anyone with an address. Even in advanced, stable countries, mail theft is common. In countries with high corruption, you are very likely to have your gold stolen.

Yes, you can send gold securely to anyone with an address. You just need to choose an appropriate middleman.

> Regarding smart contracts, yes they only work for on chain stuff.

So then, what is so revolutionary about them?

> What do programmatic contracts using gold work on? Answer: nothing.

Did I say anything about gold smart contracts? Did anybody compare Bitcoin to Gold? No. It is always easier to argue strawmans.

> Even if you used tradition contracts, you would need to hire a lawyer and still worry about how they’re written.

How is that any different than having to hire a programmer and still worrying about how they've written the smart contract?

> You’d also need a strong legal system to enforce them.

That is because those contracts can be about things other than the ones on chain.

> Your criticisms are weird. You’re like “yes btc enables new things, but they aren’t 100% perfect so we should keep using this old thing despite its limitations.”

I wasn't criticizing Bitcoin and I have no idea why you'd think that. I was criticizing your "revolutionary things BTC did" list. At least you dropped the middleman thing.

I’m not even sure what you’re trying to say. How would you, personally and right now, send gold to someone in the DRC? Using Bitcoin, I would just ask them to give me their Bitcoin address via email.