yea. I have always said that I cheer for the El Salvador experiment, but the bitcoin community shouldn't totally hitch their ride to this. Basically, ES needs bitcoin way more than bitcoin needs ES. ES is a poor, crime-ridden country with a dictator president (even tho he calls himself a "cool" dictator) haha. Maybe it's the government trying to get more control, I don't rule out that possibility. I would say tho that the government here HAD to do some kind of wallet app to make this go. You cant just ask a bunch of poor ES people to start running full nodes and using their own digital wallets. You need an on-ramp for any kind of adoption. For the remittances ... I would add the "did you receive through chivo in USD" as a win for bitcoin as well. As a use case - if an El Salvadorian is say working in the US and getting pain is USD and they send their USD back to ES via Strike (or something like it) and the recipient received it in USD ... it's still using the bitcoin network. It's still not using western union and their huge fees. What happens is the USD gets converted to BTC ... zipped over to ES with very little cost and instantaneously, then converted back to USD for the recipient to use. This is a great example of bitcoin the monetary network as opposed to bitcoin the asset. And one reason I am so bullish, this network offers many advantages even if you never want to hold or use actual bitcoin. Basically, you can still use the bitcoin rails/network. Will read the full paper later.
Chivo is centralized, so there is that. Also if I were to pick a crypto for actual payments, BTC wouldn't even make the top 20. Thinking about it, I would have created their own Salvadorian stablecoin, so nobody has to worry about price fluctuations.
I assume you mean a stablecoin pegged to the USD? (almost all are). That doesn't do much for them tho. They already use the USD because they are too weak economically to support their own currency. To use a stablecoin you typically need a bank account to convert the fiat to stablecoin and most of them dont have bank accounts so... This doesn't really solve anything.
@Pekelo I know you very much dislike bitcoin, but honest question what do you think of my comments above re. using the BTC network and not the asset? Can you see the value of using the BTC network/rails, even if you never own or pay for anything with it? I can take USD and send it to you through the bitcoin network. You never see the USD-->bitcoin-->USD conversion and you never have to own or even use bitcoin ... it's just a way for me to send you USD on a network with much lower fees that cant be shut off and works 24/7. Remittances are the first obvious use case for this, but there are many others.
It would solve fast transfers and not going poor quickly. Or worrying about fluctuations. Most normal Salvadorians don't keep their capital in BTC. If they use it, they just use it for money transfer, for what purpose BTC is a very inferior product. If you like the Bitcoin name and association, at least use Bitcoin cash.
OK let's pull on the string then. Why don't people use bitcoin cash then? Why is bitcoin cash's market cap 5BB while bitcoins market cap is 800BB? Why is the value transferred over the bitcoin cash network a small fraction of what moves through bitcoins? Why do you think this is? Please don't just say greed, that's a weak cope out.
Also you are concerned about bitcoin going down in value "not going poor quickly" so you say you bitcoin cash. Here is the bitcoin cash chart priced in bitcoin. This is what you want people to hold???
Alright, let's \educate a crypto fan: 1. People generally don't use crypto for payment. So they don't use any particular crypto either. 2. Martket caps are irrelevant and useless measuring tool. I can create a crypto with 100B market cap in an hour. It only need 1 trade to establish market cap. 3. Because people are not adopting it for all the wrong reasons? Because there are technologically even better cryptos? (I just picked it for your sake) Because idiots like the Salvadorian pre... I mean dictator don't pick it for payment? Because nobody is into cryptos for the technology, only for the profits? BCash can handle 112 txs instead of the pathetic 7 like BTC. Still not a lot, but at least a step in the right direction. Any payment tool should be able to handle in the 1000s per second, by the way. Also, have we mentioned wastefulness? Don't even get me started...
Nope, for that I said stablecoin. I picked BCash, because of you, in case you love the name. I tried to show that even among old coins there are plenty of technologically improved ones. Look, you not going to win this debate. BTC is bad for payments, bad for environment, end of story.