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Comment by cruano | Hacker News Reader

45.89% down, that's insane

I always thought it wasn't such a bad idea, it's a country reliant on remittances, and wire transfers and alternatives are expensive (I used to work at Xoom/PayPal)

The other thing is that it never was well adopted by the public. I visited the country in January and some restaurants mentioned which items you could and couldn't buy using bitcoin on the menu

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That's nothing in bitcoin world. It routinely gains more than few hundreds percent in 3 years. It is also know to drop below 20% of previous peak price.

It hasn't been around long enough to "routinely" do anything on a three-year period. There have been 4 such periods. That's not enough samples to say anything is routine.

How many would you want to see to call it routine?

I'm an `n=30` man, myself!

20-25, when kids born after Bitcoin emergence will start dying of old age.

For something with this effect size, I feel like people can start making a case in the mid-teens, but you're probably at 20+ before you can make a strong case.

Edit: That's cycles. So I'm saying it's 2055+ before any case can be made and it's 2070+ before a strong case can be made.

Actually, during the gold standard there were booms and busts every four years. Bitcoin might be on a different cycle but the constant inflation and deflation are actually expected with a fixed supply currency.

During the gold standard the boom/bust cycles were closer to a decade. Also, gold was a currency and Bitcoin is a speculative asset currently used for sending money to other countries and for illegal purposes.

I think it's important to notice that periodicity of bitcoin is not some emergent phenomenon happening for unknown reason. It's build into the bitcoin in form of reducing the rate of supply by half roughly every 4 years.

So do you really have to be hit in the head 20 times before you notice it spins?

So your claim is that a three year cycle is driven by a four year cycle?

Besides, the bust shouldn't be driven by the mining of new coins anymore. When a huge number we're being mined as a percentage of the total btc supply you could make that case. But now, the difference between generated btc now and after the halving is negligible.

But your overall point that causality linked to external factors is correct. It's just "the mechanism is halving the rewards" hasn't happened enough times to be valid because halving isn't reliable enough yet.

I didn't say it's on 3 year cycle. I said it can gain a lot in 3 years.

The cycle is 4 year, peak to peak.

Busts are not causing by mining more. Busts are caused by greed burning out. Greed that was caused by appreciacion due to more limited supply.

Reducing supply by half is never negligible because supply balances the demand so halving it leaves half of the demand unfulfilled.

Also half of the bitcoins are worth more than double that from before the halving.

> country reliant on remittances

This is the big thing. #1 foreign income source is expat workers. Make it easier for people to send money home, send more people to USA, and its good for the economy that has no other resources.

Just say immigrant. No need to make sure people know you're talking about the white kind.

Immigrants stay in their new forever home. Expat workers have plans to return to their own home some day. They're not the same thing.

Also, even if they plan to stay forever, the people in question would be El Salvador’s emigrants, not immigrants.

I believe rr888 was making a point in the other way.. calling brown people like me expats :)

What? Your comment doesn't make any sense.

We are talking about El Salvadorian expats earning money in the US and sending it back to their families in El Salvador. Is El Salvador majority white somehow now?

And second, race is entirely irrelevant here. A person earning money temporarily in a guest country with full intent to go back to their home country is an expat. If they, instead, intend on staying in that new country permanently, then that person is an immigrant. White or not makes exactly zero difference here.

If it wasn't clear I meant El Salvadorians working in the USA and sending money back.

> I visited the country in January and some restaurants mentioned which items you could and couldn't buy using bitcoin on the menu

What exactly is the thinking there? Was it just a price limit or something more involved?

and in 6 months when they are 50% up?

> in 6 months when they are 50% up?

Irrelevant. San Salvador has less than 3 months' imports in foreign reserves on hand (about 2 years' on a net basis [1][2]) and an $800mm bond payment due in January it can't afford. This is the stupidity of their Bitcoin play. They don't have the time horizon to handle something this volatile.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.CD?location...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FI.RES.TOTL.CD?location...

lol

Where is the next batch of greater fools coming from?

capitulating deniers finally realizing they were wrong ;)

Only way I would ever invest in bitcoin is if I had a time machine

If it goes up 50% up in 6 months it will still be down 18.4% overall.

Stock market tanked 80% this year. It’s partially recovered. Being down 45% at this point isn’t even that bad, regardless of which asset you’re talking about.

BTC is/already has entered a macro bear market for the next 2-4 years. If El Salvador can stick it out, they’ll end up very well off during the next bull run.

> Stock market tanked 80% this year.

Which stock market is that? Certainly not US.

Which indices of the stock market showed an 80% loss from peak value?

Which stock market? The S&P 500 was down maybe like 23% from all time highs this year, and currently trending upwards

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