Originally published at: El Salvador Is Building A Volcano-powered Bitcoin City with No Taxes | Boing Boing
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The physical currency the city will use is going to be discarded juul pods.
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The new Mayor…
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VAT and sales taxes being some of the most regressive forms of taxation of course, since it’s the poorest people who spend the largest portion of their income on buying physical goods like food and clothing while the richest people get richer still by investing their (now entirely untaxed) extra income elsewhere.
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Nayib is a professional bullshit artist, he’s the worst thing to happen to El Salvador 
.
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This episode will be covered fully in several of the books about how the global economy imploded under the weight of bitcoin, NFTs, Trumpism, Q, and other rampant insanity. One of those books will be by Michael Lewis, that’s all we know for certain at this point.
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Those bonds are a scam. (Is anyone surprised?) You can buy a mix of regular El Savador government debt with higher interest rate and bitcoin directly and do better than this regardless of how the price of Bitcoin changes.
(Matt Levine gives the numbers in his newsletter).
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El Salvador’s economy could end up well and truly forked.
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is bitcoin really fit for everyday transactions? wouldn’t they need their own bitcoin vault/bank? and with all the “gas tax” that implies, it makes the 2-3% tax visa/master(*)card imposes seem almost quaint.
also can’t imagine the banks and card companies being happily shut out of all that money in transactions and debt payments the scheme implies
(* esh. mastercard. there’s a regressive name well past its prime )
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What could possibly go wrong? I look forward to the movie Libertarians vs. the Volcano. Probably won’t end well for them. I mean a bear defeated their first Libertarian utopia in New Hampshire.
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“Libertarians exit, pursued by a lava flow.”
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I wonder how much privilege-blind techbro wishful thinking is involved in this venture because that always goes so well. Don’t sweat the small stuff (sewage disposal, clean water, food etc) but make sure those crypto server farms are up and running from day one, the rest will just fall into place.
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A place to gather some of the toxic people in the world with the chance of re-enacting Pompeii - such is the stuff of dreams…
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I also fail to see how a system which takes 10 (or more minutes) to process a transaction has any benefits for small transfers when the credit card systems function orders of magnitude faster.
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I looked into bitcoin when it first started to hit the radar which by that point it was probably already too late. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how it worked so I passed.
I still have no idea how it works or interest in figuring it out.
And NFT? Wtf is that?
I did call my financial person and told her to buy me some GameStop, of course I was days late.
Oh well. At least I can retire before I die, I think.
I was rereading the Hornblower books recently (set in ~1800) and in one story they capture a Spanish flota carrying gold from the new world. This was obviously a good thing because it would provide lots of money to the British government. Stopping and thinking about that for a moment highlighted the absurdity of the position. Essentially it’s saying that the ability of a government to wield resources is restricted by its ability to acquire lumps of a pretty useless metal.
In a world in which states (mostly) have a monopoly on violence and wield full control over laws, there are much better strategies to garner actual resources and, here’s a hint, it isn’t by digging up gold (metaphorical or otherwise).
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Apparently it doesn’t even take direct military or CIA intervention to get bits of South America that definitely can’t afford it to set up playgrounds for the fever dreams of international capital anymore.
Kids these days… we had to fund fascist death squads(uphill both ways, mind you) to get results like this.
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GALT'S CYBERGULCH IS PROOF POSITIVE THAT THIS VERSION OF THE NEOTWENTIES IS THE WORST VERSION
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that’s why there are banks or vaults that transfer the bitcoin around from account to account. the vault really has the ownership the whole time and it never changes hands, they just charge you for changing their database and for the storage
what id imagine is the government plans to setup their own vault and the government owns the money the whole time until you try to do a transaction in another country
just don’t hack the bank please because there’s no insurance or government
and hope that the bank if they privatize it, doesn’t turn out to be a ponzi scheme for the same reasons
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/us/cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme-nj.html
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Electronics, computers, aerospace, medicine and dentistry, and glassmaking are contemporary practical uses for the material.
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