El Salvador Plans to Buy More Bitcoin Every Day Despite Losing Millions Already | Hacker News Reader

El Salvador Plans to Buy More Bitcoin Every Day Despite Losing Millions Already

gizmodo.com

15 pointsmikece8 comments

Ignoring whether buying BTC right now is a good idea or not, I have a fundamental problem with state governments using taxpayer dollars to gamble on crypto. If El Salvador wants to encourage BTC investment, they should provide some sort of tax incentive to citizens who choose to do so. Going into the "invest other people's money" business is not something governments should be doing.

State governments already buy and sell gold. All financial assets are a gamble.

I like what El Salvador is trying to do but isn’t BCH better suited as an every day medium of exchange because of the larger block size and the ability to process more transactions per unit time?

Also, it seems to me that we should be settling to a BTC/BCH price that is at least loosely coupled to the energy costs of mining, no?

I don't think there's any point or future in the forks that simply change the block size or other similar parameters when the Lightning Network [0] exists (i.e. state channels).

In fact, I can't think of a better choice than Bitcoin. All PoS blockchains I know of are fundamentally broken in at least one way (however that might change with [1]), Bitcoin is good enough for payments, and the alternatives that support smart contracts usually utilise a broken ledger model (account model [2]).

The remaining blockchains are very niche, hence there isn't any viable alternative to Bitcoin AFAICT.

Disclaimer: I work with Cardano

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1448

[2} https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/chimeric-ledgers-..., https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/utxo-vs-account-b..., if you want to know about the differences

It’s using a lightning network for quick transactions.

There is a long history of the "Block Size wars," and there are many arguments that I won't repeat or summarize here.

Two of the most important (IMO) however, are:

1. Small blocksize permits anyone to run a full validating Bitcoin node with minimal consumer hardware (including a Raspberry Pi).

2. As the block subsidy decreases, fees will become more and more important component of miner revenue; gigantic (or taken to the logical absurd, unbounded) block size means no fee market will emerge.

Garbage article

Buying BTC at an all time high was dumb, but stopping now that it's low would be dumber.

Saying that they lost millions is incorrect - they haven't lost anything because they haven't sold any of their BTC yet. And it's only been a couple years. We won't know if this was a good or bad investment until 2050.

Yet, it would have been a way wiser decision to hold on to fiat until now then buy the same btc amount for way less or buy way more btc with the same fiat.

So, I'm not sure this way of saying that technically "unrealized loss isn't loss" has any meaning or utility. Pointless debate anyway.

It's actually pretty funny to read Nayib's comments each time he buys more at a lower price, and he thanks people for "selling for cheap" while he's "buying the dip"/"oh no last one was not the dip, this one is"/etc and so on and so forth. Wonder if it'll continue that way, and he'll stay delusional forever even if BTC continues to plunge. Comedy gold.

https://nayibtracker.com/

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