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.
Yes, it's good business. Better business than them trying to foist Bitcoin transactions on their citizens, which are extremely expensive and extremely slow.
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. Of course people who don't want the exposure to Bitcoin's voletility can and do use Tether. Personal choice which nobody has a problem with...and a good illustration of why some people get rich (e.g., Bitcoiners) and others not so much (e.g., Shitcoiners).
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So you don't have a "problem" with other people's choices, but you still call them "shit". Fascinating.
L2 absolutely, positively IS Bitcoin. It's pegged out of the Bitcoin Blockchain one-to-one and verifiably so.
The thing you are buying is some currency that isn't Bitcoin. It has none of the purported benefits of Bitcoin. It's no different than buying a Bitcoin ETF, which is no different than buying any other stock on the NYSE. This is as far from the original concept of Bitcoin as one can get.
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.
I'm not here to defend Tether--I really don't know much about them. All I know is that El Salvador has learned they cannot solve their needs with Bitcoin and is looking at alternatives--and such a thing is a bad sign for Bitcoin.
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.
You really need to pick a lane here. On one hand you "have no problem" with somebody using something besides Bitcoin (so you are not a "Bitcoin maxi"), but on the other hand you deride everything that is not Bitcoin as a "shitcoin" (so you ARE a "Bitcoin maxi"). I hope you can see why it's hard to have a conversation this way

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Huh? Since when is Tether... Bitcoin? This is demonstrating an evolution away from Bitcoin, not towards it.
Of course, Tether is and has been related with bitcoin since at least around 2014, and for sure it is not bitcoin directly, but it has been involved in various bitcoin related battles and facilitating some of the on and off ramps related to bitcoin.
Um... Tether is not Bitcoin. It is a completely different network, and like most non-Bitcoin currencies it is defacto centralized.
You sound lost @legiteum. Bitcoin is a protocol that is still getting built upon in a large number of ways that may or may not make sense, and at the same time, bitcoin is not getting any weaker even if you might not agree with some of the directions that it is being built - and/or it does not fit into some kind of convenient way of your wanting to frame it.
Yes, Bitcoin is not getting "weaker" anymore than a 1987 IBM mainframe is any "weaker" than it was the day it was purchased.
And Bitcoin hasn't changed for years, and there are no plans to do so, nor does anybody want it to change. What are you talking about?
Your overall assessment seems correct, in that bitcoin is going to eat the dollar's lunch and also eat the lunch of all of the various fiats, yet at the same time it could take 50-200 years for that lunch eating to play out.
Do you think that the dollar or other various fiat institutions are going to go down (or get transitioned) without any kind of a fight?
What are "fiat institutions"? Why would any financial institution especially care about what mechanism they use to transfer value?
Bitcoin cannot just take over the dollar without systems building and people getting used to it.
Yes, people need to "get used to" transactions taking up to 30 minutes to transact, and cost up to $30.
In my opinion, nobody is going to "get used to" that. Bitcoin is absolutely inappropriate for 99.99% of the world's transactions.
Sure, tether is going to El Salvador, yet that does not mean that Tether is replacing bitcoin, even though tether could provide some transactional and interaction options.
El Salvador has admitted that Bitcoin can't handle it's needs, so it is starting to use alternatives. This is a bad sign for the future of Bitcoin. There is no sugar-coating this.
In regards to legiteum's assertion that cash is disappearing, he is correct, yet largely seems to be just spouting out some central banker wet dream ideas about the supposed disappearance of cash..
It's not anybody's dream, it's just fact. I don't see why it's even up to debate.
even though surely there are a lot of efforts all over the world for people to become more and more cashless.. and yeah, if everyone could be tracked and their spending and/or money could be controlled that would also be great... .. so each of us do have to be careful about those kinds of developments an not assume that we lost the privacy battle in regards to phsysical cash too, as legiteum would like to presume to be the already deteriorated status of the world.
Going cashless doesn't necessarily mean being non-private (although using Bitcoin makes you trackable, but that's another subject).
And physical cash is controlled and tracked in all kinds of ways, and has been for decades, so I'm really not seeing what the point is here...