El Salvador Says It's Going To Legalize bitcoins

Eureka CA

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According to a real news service, that really covers international events: El Salvador is taking steps to become the first sovereign nation to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, alongside the US dollar, potentially setting the stage for other nations to reduce central-bank influence over their economies. A bill enabling El Salvador to recognize bitcoin as legal tender will be submitted to the country's Legislative Assembly next week, President Nayib Bukele said in a video message that was shown on Saturday at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami. Bukele's political party has firm control of the assembly. “In the short term this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy," Bukele said. Strike, a Bitcoin Lightning Network payment application, is working with Bukele's administration to implement the cryptocurrency plan. "This is the shot heard 'round the world for bitcoin," Strike founder Jack Mallers said in a statement. "What's transformative here is that bitcoin is both the greatest reserve asset ever created and a superior monetary network." Holding bitcoin can help protect a developing nation's economy from fiat currency inflation, Mallers said. Central banks also have manipulated money supplies to trigger recessions. About 70% of El Salvadorans don't have a bank account, according to Strike. El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America and one of the poorest nations in the western hemisphere. Use of bitcoin will make the country's financial system more inclusive and allow people to send money home without remittance services taking out fees, Strike said. What's it all about? Many people think Bitcoin is just a way to avoid paying taxes. But that's just fearmongering, straight from the mouths of useless feeders supping at the trough of public funding. If you're old enough, you may remember a time when ATMs did not exist and everything had to be done in person between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, if you were lucky, with a human bank teller. You may even know what the acronym 'ATM' stands for - 'automated teller machine'. You may remember the outcry when banks insisted that they were not replacing human beings with robots, after which, of course, they closed banks, and laid off human beings, and replaced them with robots. But it wasn't all bad, because ATMs popped up everywhere, and many of the older bank branches, located in downtown locations, still had enough foot traffic to make it cost-effective to keep their doors open, so, on the balance, ATMs led to more employment opportunities and more economic activity - consequences that nobody had predicted. I'm here to tell you that Bitcoin is the same thing, except, instead of replacing the teller, they're replacing the bank. And, banks like it about as much as tellers did. But, hey, what goes around, comes around... and now, it's the banks' turn. When *I* say 'Bitcoin', I am actually referring to all of these cryptographically based monetary exchanges, not to Bitcoin, specifically. So maybe I should say 'bitcoin', for the generic product. There are many bitcoins. There are also three or four different variations on Bitcoin itself - Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Wrapped Bitcoin, Bitcoin SV, etc. Distinguishing between bitcoins is not always easy. The devil is in the details. Two coins may differ only in a small detail of interpretation of a blockchain that they both honor. Or a coin may have its own blockchain. Coins may be related by development history, or by source code. Dogecoin, for instance, is said to have been copied from the source code for the original Bitcoin, and published, with very few changes, mostly name changes of files to reflect its new Doge-centric identity. This is a very turbulent marketplace right now. But the intent in the long run is to eliminate the role of banks in the exchange of money. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Monetary policy may be too important to leave in the hands of governments. Efforts to force populations to slavishly believe in the value of fiat money usually ends badly. And when all is said and done there is not a lot of difference between an encrypted electronic credit card transaction, and an encrypted electronic bitcoin transaction. Mind you, that does not mean that governments cannot or should not dabble in creating and maintaining electronic encryption-based currencies. Governments stand to benefit from seeing private banks eliminated from the equation of public funding. Governments benefit from seeing counterfeiting stopped. Governments benefit from seeing robberies eliminated, too. The only people who don't benefit from this evolution of public policy are bankers. That reminds me of a story... About five years ago, I saw an ad, on Craigslist. Someone in Ferndale was looking for a CIO - a chief information officer. I'm a systems analyst. My family was up here in Fortuna. I spent most of my time in Silicon Valley, working, and only saw my kids on weekends, after a 250 mile drive. I was eager to find a job, locally. So I applied. The owner of the company seeking a CIO had his offices in the ground floor of the newer multi-story office building located behind the No Name Burger Bar. During the interview, he and his wife indicated that they owned a trucking company. He and his current computer guy - a recent HSU graduate - were making Big Plans To Get Rich Quick by generating Dogecoin, they told me. At the time, I didn't know much about Dogecoin, although I knew quite a bit about cryptography, having worked extensively with public key encryption infrastructure in Silicon Valley over the previous twenty years. A few days later, this guy's wife told me that I was the top candidate for the CIO job... then, a week later, she stopped talking to me. In the meantime I had rejected another job offer, down in the Bay Area, and, it turns out, that was the last job offer I've seen, for over five years... during which time, Silicon Valley tilted heavily in the favor of H1-Bs... and I had a lot of time to think about cryptocash, and trucking companies. Did his wifey do the background check on me using her copy of 'When In Doubt, Check Him Out'... discover that some withered, childless, psychotic bitch had fraudulently acquired one of those hearsay-based temporary restraining orders against me, three decades and three hundred miles away in space and time... and decide, with her inspired feminist wisdom, that a 30-year-old civil action, based on hearsay, constituted probable cause for an anticipatory termination of a candidate that hadn't even been hired yet? Probably. This is Humboldt County; I've learned to expect amateurish backwoods bungling, followed by amateurish lying, where one would normally expect to see white collar professionalism. And, to be honest, that's just about what I would expect from a third-rate trucking company, even in the Bay Area, if the owner had outsourced his company's HR function to his half-his-age wife... some sort of relentless political correctness, backed by economic privilege and emotional disconnects, disguised as virtue. The relevance of these events will be seen, shortly. More recently, a friend expressed serious interest in Bitcoin - the real Bitcoin - and so I did a deep dive into Bitcoin, to do a feasibility study on Bitcoin mining in Humboldt County. The long and the short of it is, Bitcoin mining uses an algorithm that is friendly to people who care enough about Bitcoin mining to build dedicated circuitry to do nothing but mine Bitcoins. You can read all about miner ASICs and the GPU marketplace somewhere else; suffice it to say that these market-warping events led some people to try and design a small-b bitcoin that could not be mined faster using ASICs, so as to democratize the marketplace and insure that small-b bitcoins were being distributed into the miner economy evenly. All this stuff about ASICs made me wonder what those guys in Ferndale with their trucking company had REALLY been up to. If we assume that they were telling the truth, and they planned to mine Dogecoin... and if we assume that Dogecoin, as a direct ripoff of Bitcoin, was similarly demanding of electrical power... where did Trucking Company Guy and his Droog plan to get the electricity to mine their fortune in Dogecoin? Did they embed a couple of GPUs, surreptitiously, into every one of their truck drivers' onboard computers, and let it run 24x7, mining Bitcoin, while dunning the truck drivers for failing to operate their vehicles, economically; or, more likely, was someone pilfering fuel to run a generator, up in the hills, and deducting the purchase of the fuel, as a business expense? After all, the trucking company did fuel deliveries. You can see how a fella might wonder. Because the electricity had to come from SOMEWHERE. And it doesn't matter whether they were mining Dogecoin or if they were, ah, not telling me the truth, and they were actually mining Bitcoin - they all need electrical power. That is the vulnerability of cryptocash. Just as it is of every other electronic banking network. Frankly, if Bozo had employed me to manage his information technology activities, I would have recommended using the Bitcoin source code to create our own cryptocash, for Humboldt County. Dude would have owned the friggin' bank - not wasted his time mining Doge bones. Humboldt County would have been in a stronger position, too. Pity. That's what you get when you seek your technological guidance from twenty-somethings. Shallow experience, no imagination, and no sense of what's possible. If you're interested in learning more about cryptocash, a good place to start, is https://cointop.sh/. Read my lips, brothers and sisters and transgender alienated in-betweens: outlawing honest cryptocash makes about as much sense as outlawing honest stock brokerages. It would have the same effect on the economy. And your chances of success are the same, too. Jesus !@#$ing Christ, your local governments can't even be bothered to inspect rental properties - to make sure that the property manager installed new window screens, to keep out house flies, and didn't corruptly pocket the tenant's entire cleaning deposit, while stealing the new electric stove, for his own use - and you want to regulate the ECONOMY? Good luck. I'm still wondering just what a trucking company would want to do with cryptocash. In my experience, cryptocash tends to attract only two kinds of people - rogue mathematicians, and people with money to hide. And in Humboldt County, there aren't too many rogue mathematicians...