A volatile currency with direct transaction fees ranging from $0.05-60 [edited per FreeRadical - thanks!] and indirect transaction fees of roughly $90 (socialized block reward). Whose value dropped 50% in a month then went up 50% in a month (which of course still leaves it 25% below its near-term highs). I don't think even the Cuban Peso performs like that. Think about both of those in terms of the average salary of a Cuban national. How about the minimum wage? $0.44 per hour.
[edit, and while I'm in here] And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the worlds 25th largest automaker decided it was a bad medium of exchange for buying electric cars.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in Venezuela, they decided to go the other way, dollarizing. They moved 66% of all transactions to the USD, forcing the Maduro government's hand, and leading to their major banks offering USD deposit accounts. [1]
If anything they need USDC not BTC. This is just gambling in a regulatory and legal void. The Mad Max of finance.
> A volatile currency with direct transaction fees ranging from $0.05-60 [edited per FreeRadical - thanks!]
You don't need to transact on-chain (i.e. settlement layer). There's a lightning network, where transactions are instantaneous, and fees are a few satoshis.
It's amusing how most Bitcoin critics focus on on-chain fees and pretend that lightning doesn't exist.
> And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the worlds 25th largest automaker decided it was a bad medium of exchange for buying electric cars.
That wasn't the main reason. It was the China FUD and the lack of Grayscale's neutral arbitrage, which took out the biggest buyer off of the market.
> You don't need to transact on-chain (i.e. settlement layer). You can use a lightning network, where transactions are instantaneous, and fees are a few satoshis.
Sure, however LN is not sufficient because it requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel. To open a channel for everyone on earth would cost up to a third of a trillion dollars and take over 75 years, plus or minus deaths and births. Like getting a phone line in the Soviet Union. Further, complexity of routing is quadratic and will quickly exceed our patience.
> It's amusing how most Bitcoin critics focus on on-chain fees and pretend that lightning doesn't exist.
Well, that's because the underlying that LN is strapped to is so incredibly inefficient LN is a rounding error at the limit.
By how much do you think it would reduce the L1 load? That article suggests if you can get 10 people together it would reduce the load to 1/10, so still almost a decade. And that's iff you happen to find 10 people who fit the specific shape exactly. That's still wildly unacceptable if true, and also unbelievably unlikely.
LN has always been a "but wait! we've got a solution just around the corner - please don't give up!" feature - but there's nothing around the corner. There never has been. Not to mention it does nothing to address the quadratic routing criticism.
> By how much do you think it would reduce the L1 load? That article suggests if you can get 10 people together it would reduce the load to 1/10, so still almost a decade.
If I understand correctly the maximum number of people involved in a channel factory creation is the same as the maximum number of keys involved in a multi-signature transaction. The limit is currently 15 or 20[1] but with Shnorr signatures (that will be enabled in the protocol with taproot in November) I think there is no limit to that number.
> And that's iff you happen to find 10 people who fit the specific shape exactly.
I'm not sure what specific shape you're referring to. At the end they all need to sign a specific transaction but that transaction can easily generated by a wallet software or a service provider given all the participants' key and UTXO. They don't need to all send the same amount to the factory.
> LN has always been a "but wait! we've got a solution just around the corner - please don't give up!" feature - but there's nothing around the corner.
The problem itself (on-boarding the whole population) doesn't exist yet either. It doesn't look like a problem impossible to solve by the time it needs to be solved. And if it needs to be solved first then the whole population can probably wait for that to happen.
Reading this article (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-lightning-network-vulnerabi...) is one of the reasons why I sold my Bitcoin. There are at least four protocol-level security flaws in Lightning, which can cause the theft of funds. I also find it hard to believe that these are the only four. If you're in a restaurant and see a cockroach, you don't conclude that that's the only cockroach there. Being issues at the protocol level, these may be unfixable.
Your link doesn't mean much, as after all 66% of all transactions in Venezuela are USD denominated now per my link. The people of Venezuela had the choice: BTC or USD. They spoke, and they said USD.
Likely only the wealthy laundering money, probably connected to the Maduro government are playing BTC. Only certain entities and individuals connected to the Maduro government are under sanctions, not everyone in Venezuela - which is why USD remittances are possible in the first place. Folks are using USD because Bitcoin is wildly inappropriate for use as a currency.
[edit] Consider that at the time that article was written the average BTC transaction fee with multiple months minimum wage for the average Venezeulan.
> Bitcoin was a saviour for many ordingary folk in Venezuela during the hyperinflation crisis.
During a hyperinflation crisis everything that isn't money appreciates rapidly by definition. This means the often touted usefulness of bitcoin as "inflation hedge" is rather meaningless, because literally any asset that isn't money is an "inflation hedge". The shoes that I'm wearing right now are an "inflation hedge" just as good as bitcoin. In fact they're a better inflation hedge than bitcoin because their price is more predictable.
Because Venezuelans have been buying and selling things locally in black market dollars for decades, and even if they want to hold their dollars in offshore accounts, the US isn't interested in stopping them unless they're a regime insider (quite the opposite actually)
As for Maduro, he's just trying to stop capital flight.
They could also use a decentralized stablecoin that doesn't rely on fiat backing, like RAI, if they fear potential regulatory crackdowns on USD-backed stablecoin use in their country.
Though so far US government authorities have been supportive of USD-based stablecoin use by people living under repressive anti-US governments, even going as far as facilitating transfers of USDC, via Ethereum, to medical and humanitarian groups in Venezuela: https://www.coindesk.com/circle-usdc-venezuela-airtm
[edit, and while I'm in here] And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the worlds 25th largest automaker decided it was a bad medium of exchange for buying electric cars.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in Venezuela, they decided to go the other way, dollarizing. They moved 66% of all transactions to the USD, forcing the Maduro government's hand, and leading to their major banks offering USD deposit accounts. [1]
If anything they need USDC not BTC. This is just gambling in a regulatory and legal void. The Mad Max of finance.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/venezuela...