El Salvador’s Historic Digital Asset Securities Law Passes
blog.bitfinex.com
blog.bitfinex.com
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/print/stop-drinking-the-elites-k...
Also, mining bitcoin can be considered as a form of energy export.
There are no easy paths for countries like El Salvador. This might be bad too, but at least its a different attempt.
1- https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/10/13/el-salvadors-bitcoin-hol...
Certainty, or at least a level of high confidence, is when businesses invest and consumers spend.
> From 1992 to 2005, foreign investment increased 316.9%, and India's gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $266 billion in 1991 to $2.3 trillion in 2018[6][7] According to one study, wages rose on the whole, as well as wages as the labor-to-capital relative share.[5]
> As an effect of the liberalisation in 1991, extreme poverty reduced from 36 percent in 1993-94 to 24.1 percent in 1999-2000.[8]
Too often despots and their cronies get countries into economic trouble, countries that have been taken advantaged by Western interests for hundreds of years.
When the country collapses, the IMF and World Bank subjugate the country to Western interests further often to the destruction of the environment and detriment to upward mobility of the population.
Using statistics like reduction of extreme poverty or wage growth when not taking into account other factors like inflation or mortality for example does not help when discussing the complex topic of the IMF and the World Bank and if these institutions are a net benefit to the impoverished.
Agreed.
> When the country collapses, the IMF and World Bank subjugate the country to Western interests further often to the destruction of the environment and detriment to upward mobility of the population.
Can you give me any concrete examples of IMF reforms making a country worse off economically?
> Using statistics like reduction of extreme poverty or wage growth when not taking into account other factors like inflation or mortality for example
Okay, mortality in India has fallen steadily from 1% in 1991 to 0.7% in 2020. And inflation doesn’t have a clear pattern but it’s never returned to its 1991 peak of 13.5%.
I’m not just cherry-picking stats here! India has actually gotten way way better in the last few decades, and the rate of improvement rose dramatically after the 1991 reforms!
It also makes sense that this would happen. Despot takes loan from IMF, spends it on random crap that doesn't benefit the citizens. Despot gets thrown out. IMF still wants its money back. Cue austerity, making the citizens pay for what the despot did.
Note: I'm not the GP commenter and I'm not trying to start an argument or denounce the IMF, if there's good reasons why these aren't good examples that's totally OK :)
"Here, have this big pile of money to pay for your more urgent and higher-interest-rate debts, and here are some policies for you to implement so you stop having inflation once and for all. But it's ok if you cook the books, or don't comply with the policies, you're a big economy anyways so we have to keep you going and not catastrophically fail anyways".
Alex Gladstein (Chief Strategist at Human Rights Foundation) has written and spoken about this and provides examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnHOxZgvdWM https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/imf-world-bank-repress-p...
The fact that this core infrastructure - law, higher education, political systems - hasn't changed that much since 1991 (the best colleges in 1991 are still the best colleges today, for instance) is proof that India's foundations were solid.
That can't be said for most countries.
Those fuckers purport to be helping when they are really doing a lot more harm than good.
That's the last I heard of it, have they turned it around at all?
Unless you expect Bitcoin to return to this valuation, the money is as good as lost.
So you could say his investing skills measured in either bitcoin or dollars are poor to date.
The reason it is "unrealised" until that point, is that you could instead simply hold until/if the price of Bitcoin (priced in fiat) rises past the level you bought it at, and still sell at a profit (in real terms if you account for inflation, or in nominal terms if you don't).
Then that would be a realised profit.
Hence the distinction between unrealised and realised.
In truth, thing is much worst, because you wont get 1 US dollar anywhere (nor banks, financial orgs, or privates will sell it for that price). On the market is close to
1 US Dollar = 360 Argentinian Pesos.
But any way you look at it it's a plus for crypto since once one country does it other countries will follow just so they don't get left behind. I expect other small countries to move forward with legal crypto frameworks.
I thought part of the value proposition of “crypto” was that it doesn’t require such legislation? The ecosystem seems to (slowly, painfully) re-discover everything that is useful about fiat currencies.
In the case of Bitcoin and its Lightning Network, that remains true. It doesn't need legislation to continue operating. Has done so for 14 years without any interference or intervention from law makers, and will continue to operate just fine without their influence. However, legislation can help with trust and adoption though (depending on the legislation of course), because for better or worse, many people trust their governments and look to them for guidance on what's "safe".
And no, that's not the value proposition of Bitcoin. The value proposition of Bitcoin was stated clearly by Satoshi Nakamoto.
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
That's the core value proposition. The issuance policy of Bitcoin has been rock solid for the last 14 years and all indications say that should continue to happen indefinitely. There's not a single fiat currency on Earth that can claim the same.
> The ecosystem seems to (slowly, painfully) re-discover everything that is useful about fiat currencies.
There's nothing "useful" about fiat currencies, at least not useful enough to counterbalance the tradeoffs.
Perhaps you're confusing "fiat" currency with the more general idea of state-issued money, which hasn't always been "fiat" in its implementation e.g. commodity monies like those minted from valued metals, or certificates backed by gold reserves. Legislation, institutions, processes, and businesses were built up around state-issued monies to help the financial plumbing and grease the wheels of the economy, but that has nothing to do with whether the nature of the money is "fiat" or not. Fiat just means "by decree" i.e. this money has value because we says it does. Commodity money has value because of its scarcity. The source of Bitcoin's value is similar to commodity money i.e. it's provably scarce.
Fiat is a relatively new phenomenon in the technology of money and probably a small blip in its ~5000 year history (so far). The question is how long will that blip be?
You're right. Fiat has been tried many times before, and ultimately fails. I should've said it was relatively new in its current iteration.
> neither is the concept of money. Earliest writings are for accounting and bookkeeping.
I did say there was a ~5000 year history, alluding to the Sumerian clay tablets/ledgers, like the famous "Kushim" tablet.
> The idea that money was minted only from precious metals, notably gold and silver is false.
Correct, but that's not what I was saying. I was simply providing the most well-known examples of commodity money.
Without some regulation we will see a never ending cycle of fraud. FTX over and over again. The real shame is that Crypto was gaining a bit of respectability only to be brought down again. Also, how easily it was for a 30 yr old business neophyte had so many people fooled since there was no clarity on his dealings.
Blind trust has not worked and will never work as long as humans are involved.