Panama unveils bill to make Bitcoin legal tender (opens in new tab)

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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)

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...

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.

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.

"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.

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.

the cynic in me says money laundering.

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.

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

- 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)

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.

mindshare.

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.

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.