Is Tether the shitcoin, sorry, altcoin that you guys are referring to as where El Salvador is shifting their attention to? If yes, I don’t see that as completely abandoning bitcoin and shifting to something else; rather, they are embracing what will bring more advantage to them in the market. More tether means enough to buy bitcoin with; I don’t know which area you are picturing the attention shifting from, but I don’t see the era of bitcoin ending with El Salvador, even if tether replacing is a fallacy to their vision.
Then why is El Salvador going into Tether? That's the whole point of that story.
It's good business which will bring in a lot of workers and money. It's about that simple. Tether is a friend to the USD. Whether El Salvador will collect data for the international banking powers through mandates on businesses operating at the pleasure of their government remains to be seen.
Just FYI, L2 Bitcoin such as Liquid and Lightning work beautifully in El Salvador as exchange currencies.
Then why doesn't everybody (including El Salvador) use those?
And an L2 is absolutely, positively,
not Bitcoin because they completely isolate the user from the underlying asset: they could replace the backing with any other asset if they wanted to and the users would not be exposed to the change. It's rather bizarre to call a non-Bitcoin currency a "shitcoin", but an L2 that is functionally
the same exact thing is somehow, "okay".
L2 BTC (esp, lighting) is about all people use at the street and vendor level (e.g., Walmart) use because it works so well.
L2 absolutely, positively
IS Bitcoin. It's pegged out of the Bitcoin Blockchain one-to-one and verifiably so. Properly implemented wallets are also non-custodial so the individual user can peg in or out at their discretion without permission. Of course and exchange can refuse to perform the operation but one can just go to an exchange who will perform the operation.
Contrast this with Tether who has had years-long struggles to prove to both the people and the courts that they are in fact solvent.
A new more highly controlled shit-coin would offer nothing toward a solution.
Tell that to El Salvador and the millions of people and thousands of people who use non-Bitcoin digital currencies every single day, and have invested over one trillion dollars in these assets. I guess it could be that all of these people are fools, but personally I'm going to bet they aren't.
In the case of Tether, nobody has a problem with anyone using it. Nobody (who knows anything about it) will shed to many tears when a shit-coiner gets burnt. It happens all the time and will continue to happen until the earth stops cooling. Not saying it will happen with Tether, but if it did I would not be terribly surprised.
As for El Salvador, I'm telling them right here. The people who have invested 'over a trillion dollars in these assets' have 'over a trillion dollars' to invest. They didn't 'earn' it working at a car wash. Goes back to my statement above about why El Salvador, and any sensible country who has the magnetic attraction to do so, would welcome a piece of that pie.