Panama unveils bill to make Bitcoin legal tender

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/panama-unveils-bill-to-make-bitcoin-legal-tender/

by danaos • 5 years ago

46 76 5 years ago

dotcoma• 5 years ago

But Switzerland to stick to the Swiss Franc, strangely ;-)

mkl• 5 years ago

Are there any successful cryptocurrencies that aren't based on proof-of-waste? El Salvador's and Panama's moves seem like the start of a bad trend.

almavi4• 5 years ago

I read a interesting take on this, in case you're interested: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/daa93b9686f554ac7097158383b...

stavros2• 5 years ago

That article performs some sleight of hand, where nodes "control" the currency. Nodes sign transactions publicly, they don't control anything. They can't covertly pick the wrong transaction to sign, if they do it will be very visible.

ackbar03• 5 years ago

Well I guess bitcoin remains the most established. I guess they could switch to ether at some point if it goes well, but I remember something about ether not being fully decentralized? I'm not even a crypto nut but these are pretty interesting developments

almavi4• 5 years ago

Indeed: https://bitcoinera.app/arewedecentralizedyet/

qecez12• 5 years ago

Why would anyone look beyond Bitcoin defeats me

em3rgent0rdr2• 5 years ago

Ethereum is right now in the process of migrating to proof-of-stake.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

Miners are already staking using the more energy-efficient validation.

qecez12• 5 years ago

Running a T-account in Excel is even more energy-efficient.

jazzyjackson8• 5 years ago

nano is interesting to watch. it is one of those DAGs/lattices, like stellar. they were vulnerable to spam and got written off after a couple exchange scams soured the early adopters and ddoses brought the network to a halt, but years later they’ve patched the place up and maybe it’ll work

there’s even a cute/terrifying faucet app, “wenano”, where people can setup a geofence and disburse funds to anyone who shows up, pokemon go style

mostly a dollar or two for being in a certain city, but I can imagine the chaos that allowing more specific geofences and higher bounties can cause.

on the other hand, humanitarian crisis on the turkish border? some benevolents can set up a free-money faucet right in the middle of the refugee camp, people around the world can “top off” the faucet and keep the the funds flowing

freaky future coming up quick

luckylion• 5 years ago

there’s even a cute/terrifying faucet app, “wenano”, where people can setup a geofence and disburse funds to anyone who shows up, pokemon go style

How does that work, can't you just fake the location service on your phone and "be" there? Or do they require 24/7 tracking and checking whether you've been a the airport etc?

mypastself5• 5 years ago

If you count market cap as success, the PoS protocol Cardano (ADA) is currently at #3, right behind the two big ones (BTC and ETH).

If you mean successful adoption as a currency, there is no such thing yet, PoW or PoS.

qecez12• 5 years ago

Market cap is a useless metric. All altcoins without exception are a leveraged way to play Bitcoin.

johanneskanybal3• 5 years ago

My money is on Ethereum getting there first while pointing out it's unfair to call something creating value pure waste. Siding with gold miners and bloated corrupt banking systems as the future on a tech site seems weird.

skinnyasianboi2• 5 years ago

There are many alternatives to the proof of work concept. Cardano uses proof of stake with a fraction of energy cost and is academic proven with 100+ peer reviewed papers. Beautiful project

basch• 5 years ago

Solana has had quite a month.

https://www.notboring.co/p/solana-summer

Solana uses a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism plus Proof of History, a decentralized source of time that Solana Labs CEO and founder Anatoly Yakovenko told me is “the implementation of the arrow of time in math.” Sounds mind-bending, and it is, but what it means is that transactions on Solana are verifiably ordered without all nodes needing to agree simultaneously. That’s what makes it so fast.

At the rate it's been growing, relative to other major coins, it could be a top 4-5 coin very soon. It currently sits right behind Binance Coin and Tether at #6. https://www.coingecko.com/en

nl2• 5 years ago

Yes.

There are a number of "Level 1" blockchains[1] that are proof-of-stake.

Ethereum is moving to PoS. Algorand was just announced as the level 1 chain for the El Salvador[2], while Cardano and Solana are both pretty big chains. Other contenders include NEAR.

[1] https://medium.com/the-capital/layer-1-vs-layer-2-what-you-n...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/el-salvador-develop-blockchai...

satronaut• 5 years ago

Can you define proof of waste? I haven't heard of that protocol?

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

What does "legal tender" mean in this context? Normally, as i understand it, it means you must accept it for payments of debts. So will El Salvadorans be required to accept bitcoin? Can your employer suddenly announce your salary is now paid only in it?

larrysalibra• 5 years ago

In the El Salvador law, Article 7 goes beyond the typical definition of legal tender - the recognition by courts as payment for debts - and requires everyone to accept Bitcoin.

soco• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm just a cranky skeptic but I can't stop wondering, what's in it for the panaman (and salvadorian) government? What kind of money this switch will bring in their vaults/pockets? What kind of control does it enable? What kind of business will the move bring?

jazzyjackson8• 5 years ago

If a population really did adopt a single payment network, the goverment could issue a blacklist of accounts that you can be punished for transacting with.

think of the power the US government has to freeze the funds of russian oligarchs - blockchain allows at least a version of this: not to freeze the funds, but to prohibit sending or receiving funds from a certain address

vendors could happily subscribe to this blacklist to ensure legal compliance (an RSS feed will do but thats just me)

qecez12• 5 years ago

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible, if you know what you're doing. Even beyond this, there are no "accounts" or "addresses" on the Lightning Network - its privacy is superb.

woutr_be• 5 years ago

Wouldn’t that be incredibly easy to circumvent? Just create a new address for each transaction?

ghego13• 5 years ago

My best bet is that they hope to attract BTC whales that need to liquidate some of their otherwise unspendable fortunes (I'm talking of wallets that on paper are worth billions of USD, but in practice are difficult to liquidate).

For example you could go there, buy a watch worth 100000 USD with Bitcoin, come back and resell it.

tgv• 5 years ago

BTC whales

Enabling ransomware criminals, you mean.

But I still find it hard to believe that would bring the Panamanian or Salvadorian jeweler any benefit, let alone the rest of the population. The problem of converting the BTC rests with them after the purchase.

conistonwater2• 5 years ago

Doesn't that undermine the argument the Bitcoin is a good store of value, if that's the trouble you have to go to with an "unspendable fortune"?

qecez12• 5 years ago

What are you talking about? Bitcoin's daily trading volume is well into billions of dollars.

notahacker• 5 years ago

Both of them are small US Dollar economies, so their central bank doesn't lose influence it never had and hopefully Bitcoinisation brings with it a few wealthy tax exiles and offshore businessss.

But maybe looking at what's in it for the government from the POV of the country's financial stability is the wrong question anyway... one might also want to look at the personal financial stakes of some of the individuals involved...

johanneskanybal3• 5 years ago

"Silvia said that the bill had the potential to create jobs, attract investment and foster greater government transparency"

Seems like good reasons to me, short term the first two are probably the important part, longer term the last one could be massive for countries struggling with massive corruption. Like any good idea it can be subverted or corrupted though so let's see.

Quarrelsome2• 5 years ago

the cynic in me says money laundering.

kragen• 5 years ago

Because much of El Salvador's population lives abroad and supports their families back home with remittances, 4% of El Salvador's GDP goes to remittance companies like Western Union. If they can cut that by a factor of 4 or more by using Bitcoin instead, they can boost their effective GDP by 3-4% in a single year, which will help a lot with getting re-elected. (I have no idea what the corresponding numbers are for Panama; probably not so urgent.) Also, like their predecessors Wikileaks, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis, they become immune to possible future US sanctions (official or secret) that try to cut them off from international trade.

Gys• 5 years ago

For one thing: emotion. El Salvador previously depended on the USD and generally I assume those kind of countries do not like to depend on a currency controlled by a 'big neighbor'.

But better: now the authorities can instantly see all financial transactions? Using their special app (El Salvador) which connects each ID to a BTC address makes it possible to know exactly who is doing what and where. Yes BTC can be used to pay taxes. But much more important they can now probably see much better how much taxes should be paid in the first place. This might schrink the dirty money part of the economy immensly.

timbit42• 5 years ago

They avoid the inflation caused by the US printing massive amounts of USD.

In El Salvador, they avoid up to $400 million in bank transfer fees when citizens working in other countries send their earnings back to their families.

nathias• 5 years ago

why, they should just run their own PoS so they can have all the benefits of crypto and all the benefits of having sovreign monetary policies

Pinegulf• 5 years ago

This may be silly question, but what does official status actually mean?

Bitcoin wasn't illegal in Pananama. It's not like they can print more nor guarantee value of the coin with other goods, is it?

alephnan• 5 years ago

Government payments and certain civilian contracts have to be settled on legal tender. Utilities, hospitals, have to accept it as payment. Taxation purposes.

drexlspivey• 5 years ago

If a currency is legal tender in a country it means that everyone in the country are required to accept it as means of settling a debt.

itsoktocry• 5 years ago

You can accept it as a means of debt repayment in the eyes of the law . No one is "required" to accept anything.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

Why do they all choose BitCoin? Its arguably the worst cryptocurrency by all means but the price. It has ridiculously high transaction costs in money, time and energy, easily becoming nearly unusable this way. Doesn't it?

Quarrelsome2• 5 years ago

mindshare.

TekMol• 5 years ago

- Highest Market Cap (Large buys do not impact price much)

- Highest chance to still be around in 50 years

- Hardest to manipulate (50% attack is extremely expensive)

- Proven technology (Ethereum gets overhowl with ETH 2)

- Great track record of trustworthyness (No DAO fork)

- Defined inflation (Ethereum changes inflation often)

- Popular second layer tech (Lightning Network)

johanneskanybal3• 5 years ago

Without trust and network effect value doesn't exist and most of what you see as problems is a direct result of its success and popularity. With these new more relevant metrics of success in mind it becomes simple to see why it's undisputed for now. There's 1-2 competitors maybe but none with a track record of standing a chance over the long haul.

skinnyasianboi2• 5 years ago

I always find it fascinating how HN dis-acknowledges the crypto movement. I admire both and wish they would go hand in hand

georgeecollins• 5 years ago

There are lots of places to go to hear cheerleading and doom saying. I would like HN to be a place where people ask questions and get thoughtful answers.

Panama unveils bill to make Bitcoin legal tender

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