Your open-mindedness is astonishing, to say the least. “they are poor and small, who cares”.
Actually, the fact that you call them a banana republic is funny, could the petrodollars/US politics have something to do with that 
?
Anyway, Paraguay is expected to be next, give them a few days/weeks. Paraguay has a better football team, maybe you will appreciate that.
Have you ever been there? How is he a wanna-be dictator?
Edit: After reading the Wikipedia article about Nayib Bukele you seem to have a point.
Why are you downplaying this? Salvador has over 6 million inhabitants and a GDP larger than Iceland and Estonia combined. I was expecting that if any country embraces Bitcoin, it will be a bottom-up initiative, with people de facto using Bitcoin because they don’t trust their local currency. But here it’s the government that wants to try it. It’s a risky attempt, but since Salvador does not have its own currency and only uses dollar, and they do not replace the dollar, but simply supplementing it with BTC, then it looks like the perfect place to give it a try.
I’m not convinced if BTC is capable of being used as currency. I’m also wondering if powerful people in other countries will allow it. If one country embraces BTC, it increases the chance that more countries will follow. So there could be some resistance. I would not be surprised if we soon discover that there was a coup, or this president supports terrorism or drug smuggling and has to be taken down.
This president doesn’t seem to shy away from using the military to push his wishes through; if his adversaries would do the same, I doubt BC has anything to do with it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/americas/el-salvador-nayib-bukele.html
It’s paywalled. I found this instead:
I’m sure I’m not really up to date with Salvadorean politics, I didn’t say he’s a good guy or that everything he does is right. It’s definitely a fascinating story to a bystander. He wins popular election, breaks so many rules, yet the people still support him. I wonder how BTC fits into this picture. Maybe he doesn’t want to use the USD anymore, because they’re printing too much of it and Salvador is getting none of it?
As far as I know, they don’t have a relevant oil producing economy.
Not according to World Bank:
| population (07/2021 estimate) | GDP nominal (mln USD), 2019 | GDP per capita (USD), 2019 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Salvador | 6,528,135 | 27,022.64 | 4,187.30 |
| Estonia | 1,220,042 | 31,471.10 | 23,717.80 |
| Iceland | 354,234 | 24,188.04 | 67,084.10 |
I have got nothing personal against El Salvador. But here’s the thing: With a per-capita GDP of less than 400 USD/month more than half of the population “unbanked”, it’s macroeconomically just pretty irrelevant - let alone a blueprint for more developed societies - of which Iceland and Estonia are both at the forefront of digitalisation.
PS: Also, every article about this refers to this Jack Mallers guy that we’ve touched upon before. And as I’ve said before, I’m not impressed of that guy. He rathers weirds me out in a way. To me, it seems like a publicity stunt that will quickly fizzle.
Indeed, I just heard that 70% of the population does not have a bank account. But someone will probably say that crypto will enable more people to access to financial services…
"El Salvador… depends heavily on remittances sent by Salvadorians from abroad. Around a quarter of the country’s citizens live in the US, and in 2020 they sent home more than $6 billion in remittances … making up more than 20% of the GDP. …a big chunk of those 6 billion dollars is lost to intermediaries. By using Bitcoin, the amount received by more than a million low income families will increase in the equivalent of billions of dollars every year.
Bukele also said that Bitcoin will help increase financial inclusion in El Salvador, where 70% of the population does not have a bank account and relies on the informal economy. “Financial inclusion is not only a moral imperative, but also a way to grow the country’s economy, providing access to credit, savings, investment and secure transactions,”
“…some crypto experts have criticised the move saying that El Salvador could have looked at crypto options that would work better as a currency than Bitcoin, whose three transactions-per-second processing rate is seen as too slow compared to other virtual tenders such as Bitcoin Cash or Monero.”
OK, so they’re pretty comparable in nominal terms. On PPP basis Salvador comes out on top. 6.5 million is 0.1% of World population, which is a nice start.
The bill was passed this morning!
I know I am a fan boy but I truly believe the historical importance of what is happening is huge. They could have created their own digital currency, but no, they went with bitcoin.
Also a point that some may be missing, but the implementation of the bitcoin wallets will be immediately on lightning (thank you Jack Mallers) , this is a massive step forward for this technology and to make bitcoin a currency.
I was not expecting country adoption this cycle and yet, in just 6 months we had:
Truly mind blowing.
Next 6 month could be fun
Too bad I’m out of cash, won’t sell VT to buy crypto 
.
By the way, since many btc owners are HODLers, who try not to look at the price, I guess the most coins being traded come from short-term speculators. There was some chart to demonstrate it.
What I wonder is, how does velocity of money influence the price of BTC? What would happen if the number of possible transactions increased significantly? Would this have any effect on the price?
Oh, and the nominal GDP of Salvador is $27 billion, compared to the market cap of BTC, that’s just a few percent. That is actually incredible, that BTC has become so big, that its market cap dwarfs the GDP of many countries.
You mean El Hodlador
No problem: You have enough TSLA to sell, don’t you?
This would be Germany.
Photovoltaik Steuer: Auf Eigenverbrauch Steuern zahlen? - Finanztip
So if you use the energy completely on your own, you are still good. For now. Lets see in 5 years, when the state needs more money for “corona” or some other placeholder.
I mean it is ridiculous, just seeing how complicated this article is about such an easy topic. It shows you that german beaurocrats have nothing better to do.
Regarding tax.
For a lack of mention in the forum as of now, a possible fair tax is already around:
Georgism - Wikipedia
Land value tax - Wikipedia
Has been around for ages, was proposed by multiple Nobel prize winners and still is not even mentioned in todays politics. Probably it is too easy and complete and cannot be used against the population or for the power advancement of the government.
Which makes me think that crypto tax is just their next victim, sadly. Also the talked-about international minmum taxation of IT companies is becoming way broader than expected. First it was Facebook and Google, now it is about every company that has >750mil revenue. So “industry giants LOL” like Huber+Suhner – Wikipedia with 4.000 people will also be hit.
Wait 10 years and it is international minimum taxation for natural persons.
Actually, I forgot I am not bullish on Bitcoin. Here’s why:
TLDR: Bitcoin is slow and has expensive fees. “Lightning” network, Coinbase etc are just layer 2 components, which is what regular money used to be for gold (until it detached from it). It does not offer privacy and is not fungible.
Now, time to figure out how I can buy some Monero… not possible via Coinbase. Any tips?
Binance
Putting LN and centralised exchanges like Coinbase in the same basket is quite a bold statement.
In order to open a channel on the LN you’d need to deposit some BTC in a wallet first. This initial deposit transaction is validated on the base layer and acts as a limit on the amount of funds that can be exchanged on the layer-2. I have a hard time to see how one could be able to create more “paper Bitcoin” with this system.
On the opposite, exchanges like Coinbase could indeed create more paper Bitcoin if they really wanted to. But they could do the same with XMR, DOT, ADA or any other coins.
