14 ms·

Is El Salvador Up?

180 points by belltaco 4y ago

drKarl 4y ago
They just need to keep buying the dip
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  Yes, and soon a hedge fund can go and acquire the full country at bargain basement rates!
  - kevinak 4y ago
    Most definitely. Bitcoin has never gone up 10-20x in a short timespan before. It will never happen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
      Also GameStop.
      - lottin 4y ago
        Not to mention the lottery. A lottery ticket can go from $1 to several millions in a split second.
    - px43 4y ago
      I love how that video is from 2015 when the price was $200. Two major bubble expansions later, and literally 100x higher BTC price, and people are still saying the same dumb thing. I would never suggest that anyone gamble on cryptocurrency that they can't afford to lose, but all of these El Salvador buys are less than a year old. People in this thread are ridiculing buys that wouldn't even qualify for long term capital gains. This is the kind of short-term short-sighted thinking that causes people to make terrible financial decisions, like panic selling. Warren Buffet has the famous saying "The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." If you can't think in terms of 10 year horizons for your investments, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
      - k__ 4y ago
        Yes. I'm no fan of BTC, but this is BS. The last dip lasted 2 years, if you bought at the wrong time. In 2-5 years we can talk, lol
        kelnos 4y ago
        > if you bought at the wrong time. That's the problem; no one can predict when the right and wrong times are.
        incrudible 4y ago
        Buying at all time highs after a parabolic move upwards is the wrong time to buy and hold, not because a loss is certain, but because it is probable.
        px43 4y ago
        For sure, going all in on anything when the price is within 5-10% of the all time high is just crazy. Maybe doing regular small buys to Dollar-Cost-Average your way in isn't so bad. Better than not holding anything of something you like, but the closer to ATH the buy is, the riskier it is.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    And that hedgefund is called, the International Monetary Fund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund).
- a_shovel 4y ago
  If they buy the dip enough times, eventually they'll hold a monopoly on the world's supply of dip. All the other countries will come begging as their dip reserves run dry and the prices of their goods, unable to decrease, succumb to hyperinflation. We'll see who's laughing then!
  - simonsaysso 4y ago
    I tried this once when I was little, but dip tends to go bad pretty quickly so you need even more dip to cover up the older dip and soon you've spent all your money on dip but no one wants your old dip
    - thfuran 4y ago
      You just weren't repackaging your old dip in enough layers of sufficiently abstruse financial instruments to convince people that they did want it. It's all about marketing.
    - worik 4y ago
      "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Probably applies. Except that "rationality" is not a part of the BTC market....
  - WalterSear 4y ago
    This is good for dipcoin.
- glitchc 4y ago
  Sour cream and onion, thanks!
- ransom1538 4y ago
  No they need to buy BBBY.
baxtr 4y ago
Great. Finally we found a proper crypto use-case. Decentralized “Steal from the poor and give to the rich.”
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- giaour 4y ago
  You'd think there'd be a lot of pushback from incumbents in that space.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pimlottc 4y ago
Could use some context on that page.
- PcChip 4y ago
  it seems like there is an "is xyz up" webpage, so someone jokingly created one for El Salvador , however meaning "up" as in their BTC holdings in US Dollar amounts
  - Jolter 4y ago
    That’s the obvious part. But what the heck is El Salvador (the country)’s relation to Bitcoin?
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      > El Salvador became the first country in the world to use Bitcoin as legal tender, after having been adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
    - fosefx 4y ago
      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57398274 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57398274
    - gamegoblin 4y ago
      In 2021 they adopted it as legal tender [1]. Finance observers such as patio11 have commented "Tether's interactions with El Salvador might be the boldest Bond villain plot ever executed in real life. [..] They're using a sovereign nation as the cash-based business to intermix their dirty funds flows in, and daring the feds to see what happens if they cut them off." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador [2] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1493033725524799489 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1493033725524799489
fzfaa 4y ago
This looks bad, but I assume that with time the price will recover. I mean, bitcoin will eventually reach the point where it doesn't recover ever again, but that point hasn't necessarily been reached yet.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >This looks bad, but I assume that with time the price will recover. This is a fallacy that leads to holding poor investments. There's an opportunity cost to every dollar invested beyond the drop in price.
  - fosk 4y ago
    You are also running with an assumption that whatever investment they may have used the same funds for, would have netted a gain (or a lower loss). The opportunity cost argument is only valid if in the alternative investment you actually end up in a better spot, that's not a given.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Yeah, especially given that the risk-free rate is currently pretty strongly negative in real terms.
- quickthrowman 4y ago
  Buying the dip works every time, until it doesn’t.
- rideontime 4y ago
  Can you explain the thought process behind that assumption?
  - fzfaa 4y ago
    Historically bitcoin has gone up and down in cycles. There is no reason to think it won't come up again. But I may be wrong as I know very little about crypto.
tinalumfoil 4y ago
A stronger currency isn't necessarily a good thing.
- aaronharnly 4y ago
  One or both of (a) sovereign control over monetary supply (b) a stable currency are, though?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
huangc10 4y ago
DCA
dpedu 4y ago
This recent episode of Crypto Critics' Corner podcast talks about the current situation in El Salvador and what difficulties the country is facing that led them to make this investment. https://cryptocriticscorner.com/2022/03/29/episode-63-we-need-to-talk-about-el-salvador-feat-mario-gomez-and-oscar-salguero/ https://cryptocriticscorner.com/2022/03/29/episode-63-we-nee...
cruano 4y ago
45.89% down, that's insane I always thought it wasn't such a bad idea, it's a country reliant on remittances, and wire transfers and alternatives are expensive (I used to work at Xoom/PayPal) The other thing is that it never was well adopted by the public. I visited the country in January and some restaurants mentioned which items you could and couldn't buy using bitcoin on the menu
- rr888 4y ago
  > country reliant on remittances This is the big thing. #1 foreign income source is expat workers. Make it easier for people to send money home, send more people to USA, and its good for the economy that has no other resources.
  - bigbonch 4y ago
    Just say immigrant. No need to make sure people know you're talking about the white kind.
    - vaidhy 4y ago
      I believe rr888 was making a point in the other way.. calling brown people like me expats :)
    - bregma 4y ago
      Immigrants stay in their new forever home. Expat workers have plans to return to their own home some day. They're not the same thing.
      - amluto 4y ago
        Also, even if they plan to stay forever, the people in question would be El Salvador’s emigrants, not immigrants.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      What? Your comment doesn't make any sense. We are talking about El Salvadorian expats earning money in the US and sending it back to their families in El Salvador. Is El Salvador majority white somehow now? And second, race is entirely irrelevant here. A person earning money temporarily in a guest country with full intent to go back to their home country is an expat. If they, instead, intend on staying in that new country permanently, then that person is an immigrant. White or not makes exactly zero difference here.
MintDice 4y ago
Geee 4y ago
This won't age very well, just like all the other "bitcoin is dead" posts made during bear markets. Also, El Salvador seems to be "up" if their whole economy is measured, and that's mostly because of their Bitcoin strategy. Especially, their tourism is up 81% compared to pre-pandemic levels. https://cointelegraph.com/news/tourists-flock-to-el-salvador-despite-bitcoin-bear-market https://cointelegraph.com/news/tourists-flock-to-el-salvador...
- Wata2 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kelnos 4y ago
  How is their tourism related to their Bitcoin strategy. I expect this site, and those like it, will age quite well. Frankly, it doesn't matter if BTC is up in 10 years. Remember the saying: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Nation-states aren't immune to this phenomenon.
  - rcoveson 4y ago
    > How is their tourism related to their Bitcoin strategy. Why are we talking about El Salvador right now? What's getting it in the news? What's getting people to read its Wikipedia page? What's reminding people it exists?
    - cr__ 4y ago
      They could probably get in the news by lighting a pile of cash on fire too
  - otto_ortega 4y ago
    As a Savadorean: It is not... the RECOVERY on tourism is most likely due the relaxation on rules regarding COVID-19, a negative COVID-19 test or even proof of vaccination is no longer required to enter the country. You no longer are required to use a mask to enter restaurants or pretty much any public place. That alone was enough motive to entice enough people (particularly Antivax Salvadoreans leaving abroad) to come visit and cause that rebound on pre-pandemic levels. But that serves no good to the agenda of the pro-bitcoin, maxis and the goverment itself, so...
0xbadc0de5 4y ago
Someone's gotta hold the bag. Might as well be the El Salvador government.
jfasi 4y ago
I’m about as far from a crypto defender as you can get, but I think this page misses the point. If El Salvador is planning to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which by all accounts they are, their being “up” or “down” must be measured by the size of the economic activity that Bitcoin allowed them to facilitate. That figure is harder to get at. Viewed this way, the additional purchases which seem foolish and laughable might even be signs of success: perhaps Bitcoin business is booming so hard they need to expand their reserves? To be clear, I highly doubt that’s the case here, but if we’re going to assess success we should at least try to steelman their position. There’s plenty to mock about this change without taking cheap shots.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  Maybe the larger point is that bitcoin is too volatile a currency to be used as a medium of exchange? Surely they must be holding on to a decent amount of BTC and as such lost value, if not the government itself, then at least the country as a whole.
- audessuscest 4y ago
  How Bitcoin really facilitate anything ?
- lawn 4y ago
  They're not trying to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. They're trying to funnel people into their own centralized crypto app, where people may (or may not) be allowed to send Bitcoin via the Lightning Netowrk.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  They're investing FX reserves in Bitcoin. Their imports are not priced in Bitcoin. Bitcoin going down relative to the currencies they import in hurts El Salvador's ability to finance them. Which raises borrowing costs [1]. Which leads to exporters demanding earlier payment [2]. San Salvador has less than three months' imports in reserves [3][4][5]. Their Bitcoin experiment has scared off crisis lenders [6]. There is no good ending for them right now. [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-el-salvador-with-no-easy-exit-worsening-crisis-2022-05-19/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-e... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLVBCAGDPBP6 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLVBCAGDPBP6 [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/imports https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/imports [4] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/foreign-exchange-reserves https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/foreign-exchange-re... [5] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.CD?locations=SV https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.CD?location... [6] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/02/15/cf-el-salvadors-comeback-constrained-by-increased-risks https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/02/15/cf-el-salvad...
branon 4y ago
Referral links to FTX and Binance are present on the webpage. Takes a special kind of person to try and capitalize on the schadenfreude of _other people_ with respect to the results of an entire nation's landmark financial decision (whether the results be good, bad, or indifferent).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- standyro 4y ago
  seems like you've never met a crypto evangelist. pretty sure they're in it for the tech </sarcasm>
globalreset 4y ago
In times of huge global economic downturn, El Salvador's economy is growing, crime is down, tourism is booming, president has the highest approval rating in the whole world, country attracts investments thanks to Bitcoin, citizens save on remittances and can safely store savings in something that isn't that easy to steal as cash and yet all that Bitcoin-haters can think about is the dip in Bitcoin's price (caused by all the shitcoin scammers). Fiaters have a time horizon of a gold fish.
- literallyWTF 4y ago
  At what level of HN Karma are you able to delete someone else’s post?
- coolspot 4y ago
  > president has the highest approval rating in the whole world Not true. Putin has 146% approval rating.
- cristal_lake 4y ago
  I really dont get why the majority of HN is so harsh on bitcoin
  - shyn3 4y ago
    Just bet against HN. I remember people here hated Dropbox. I've realized bet on everything against people here because they suck at making money. Basically inverse HN and you will be rich. I tried it with Tesla but a bit late. This place has a hive mind and that's the best part. So crypto and cbdc coins
lolsal 4y ago
It's only up or down if they are planning on exchanging it for USD, instead of using it as a currency.
- literallyWTF 4y ago
  No one is using Bitcoin as a currency.
  - lolsal 4y ago
    Some folks are using it to buy stuff, does that not count? This link says that it's considered "legal tender" in El Salvador: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Not if they're not buying/selling things from/to outside the country in BTC.
      - lolsal 4y ago
        Why does that not count? I could use bottle caps as currency with my neighbors if we all agreed to it.
    - leesalminen 4y ago
      Things are still priced in dollars though with btc acting as the medium of exchange. You see a pupusa for $2. You type $2 into your wallet which converts it to btc based on the current exchange rate. The recipient receives that btc and ideally converts it back to USD immediately. Both ends of the transaction are valuing things in dollars but uses btc (perhaps over Lightning network) to transfer the value. In this scenario, there is little to no exposure to the volatility of the price of btc. Western Union is the only option for so many people around the world still. There definitely seems to be a need to disrupt cross border remittances.
  - 4y ago
superb-owl 4y ago
To put the numbers in context: - El Salvador has spent $104M on BTC - They have lost about $47M on their investment - They have a GDP of about $28B [1] - They have an annual government budget of about $5.6B [2] So they've blown about 1% of their annual budget on BTC. Far from catastrophic. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/gdp [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/government-spending https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/government-spending
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > So they've blown about 1% of their annual budget on BTC. Far from catastrophic The Bitcoin decision is single handedly marching San Salvador into a currency crisis [1]. Food and fuel are among their top imports, so that likely leads to political crisis. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487630
  - defgeneric 4y ago
    > The Bitcoin decision is single handedly marching San Salvador into a currency crisis This is an extreme oversimplification. The issue is that decision to make Bitcoin legal tender has put El Salvador at odds with the IMF. Arguably they would have been at odds anyway, and the IMF is simply using this issue as leverage (as well as to foment internal political divisions). The issue is primarily political (not economic!), especially considering the small amount of money invested in relation to the country's overall finances.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      When your lender of last resort tells you to jump, you say “how high?” or starve. El Salvador needs the IMF more than the IMF needs El Salvador. It’s political in the sense that the IMF doesn’t want to throw fiat at an irresponsible government that is gambling away sovereign dollars. Good money after bad and all that.
      - 4y ago
rafaelturk 4y ago
Keep me thinking about this quote: 'When the stock is up 30% in a month, don't feel 30% smarter', by Jeff Bezos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_OZKf_-w4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_OZKf_-w4s
stevedekorte 4y ago
Economics is more complicated that a short term price move. If there is sufficient unpayable dollar denominated debt, the central banks and governments will be forced to once again print trillions to re-inflate the debt bubble, incentivizing exponentially more bad debt. How do you suppose this process ends?
- upupandup 4y ago
  doesn't seem complicated to me when they bought bitcoin at ATH
- davidgerard 4y ago
  the important fact about El Salvador is that it uses the US dollar and cannot print money. I and other hypothesise that the Bitcoin thing was an attempt to handwave some fresh dollars into existence, as numbers in the Chivo app. This didn't work because Chivo was incompetent rubbish.
munk-a 4y ago
There was an article a few days ago about avoiding "cute" error messages and I think this is a great example of a site that really needs to take that to heart. Loading this page without JS enabled results in "aghhhh i'm evalyooooooating" and similar messages that really show quite poorly.
- mypastself 4y ago
  It’s the “oopsie whoopsie” part of the message that reminded me of the same article.
programmarchy 4y ago
Perhaps they should've taken more IMF / World Bank loans instead to reduce the majority of their population to poverty and allow multinational corporations to steal their natural resources.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
maerF0x0 4y ago
recalling from early 2021 readings... as I understood it they took on BTC to help break the backs of the FX / Money Transfer racket. A lot of their cashflow comes from foreign workers sending money back to their families. [1] [1]: here's a hit from google https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/remittance-costs-key-take-up-salvadoran-bitcoin-plan-development-bank-2021-08-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/remittance-costs-ke...
skinnyasianboi 4y ago
Fun little project. Author added 5 different wordings for current gains: 1.">= 10%" 2."> 0% AND < 10%" 3."0%" 4."< 0% AND -10%" 5."< -10%" Bitcoin is very volatile and will eventually go above 10% gains again. I wonder if the author will keep the website and keep paying for the domain if it stays above long term.
johnyzee 4y ago
Welcome to HN, where posts about bitcoin price are banned, unless it is down.
numbers 4y ago
I wonder what went through their heads when they chose BTC over a lot of other cryptos. ETH, BTC, LTC, and others from early crypto days might have baggage but I believe there's a healthy amount of cryptos that are stable-ish (more stable than some national currencies) and could be good store of value. This might be analogous to the adoption of socialism by countries as well, well-intended but horribly executed.
lvass 4y ago
About the same rate as Argentine peso (blue) over the last 11 months. Considerably better than Turkish lira.
jinpa_zangpo 4y ago
A fair analysis of El Salvador's bitcoin experiment would have to include the foreign investment and international travel that it stimulated.
- otto_ortega 4y ago
  Which so far is close to ZERO... I live here and I can tell you that so far no big business has opened operations in here "thanks to bitcoin". Our beauty pageant contestant turned US ambassador Milena Mayorga has organized several excursions to the country for "bitcoin investors" including some Thether funders and her now best buddies/cheerleaders Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert. I still have to see the payoff of those excursions aside from free helicopter rides for the assistants [1] ... [1] https://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/negocios/bitcoin-criptomonedas/940249/2022/ https://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/negocios/bitcoin-criptom...
t_mann 4y ago
Not defending their Bitcoin decision, but I think an important bit of context that is easy to miss is that small developing countries with not too many relevant exports (besides tourism) or financial sector, especially those close to the US, don't have an enviable set of options when it comes to FX regimes. Either you try to exercise 'fiscal discipline', meaning that you effectively have to answer to Washington pundits and Wall Street Bankers wrt to your economic policies, or you try to sustain an unmaintainable dollar peg and eventually have to ask for an IMF bailout, or you let your currency float and risk a spiral of devaluation and inflation. Argentina has gone pretty much full circle on those options, ask them how it feels.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pydry 4y ago
  You can peg low rather than pegging high - this helps develop your exports industry.
  - t_mann 4y ago
    Even just speculating about a peg substantially below the current exchange rate sounds like a great way to send your exchange rate downwards. And low exchange rates only help with exports if you have an export industry (tourism reacts to a lot more factors than just prices - the instability coming from a currency crisis may not help, eg). And higher prices for imports don't help with industrial development. Countries rich in natural resources face a different set of problems, which is why I excluded them in the first post.
    - pydry 4y ago
      If you dont have an export industry pegging low is even more critical. It means you can develop one. It also means you can build up a foreign exchange reserve that will let you weather crises. Most of the asian tigers + China did this and it was pretty successful in all cases - they followed a path from poor to rich. Floating is fine if you're a big country who is substantially self reliant and with lots of exports but it's riskier if you're small fry at the mercy of international markets.
birracerveza 4y ago
Poor financial decisions aside, I have to say I absolutely love simple, minimal pages like these. It only needs a (+-)% for each buy and it's perfect.
fsociety999 4y ago
Now compare the $47 million they are down in dollars to how much the Government in the United States wastes on absolutely useless stuff. Ridiculous to gloat about their decision to purchase Bitcoin and how it is bad. It is a long-term investment. You could make this same site for people who invested in pretty much any tech stock over the same time period as most have declined by even more than 45%.
fleddr 4y ago
Next, do tech stocks. No matter your position, you have to be pretty bitter to actually develop and pay to host such a lame "told you!" site in a bear market. "Oopsie woopsie! They're very down! Would you also like to irresponsibly gamble away your country's finances?" It's 47 million in unrealized losses, even for a tiny nation absolute peanuts. It's a fraction of a fraction of the budget. Even the worst case is manageable, and there's a significant chance that it strongly bounces when the macro condition improves. Should a nation put their entire treasury into BTC? Absolutely not, but diversification of assets is sane. Big lumps of low risk/low return, small lumps of high risk/high return potential. Business as usual.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Next, do tech stocks If the central bank of a cash-strapped nation started buying tech stocks with their foreign reserves, they’d rightfully be called out as loonies. It’s why countries with surplus cash go through a lot of trouble to segregate their sovereign wealth funds from FX reserves. If the former goes down, it’s embarrassing. If the latter crashes, it’s existential.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    "If the central bank of a cash-strapped nation started buying tech stocks with their foreign reserves, they’d rightfully be called out as loonies." It's all optics. Because the above is exactly what happens, stocks got pumped 13 years in a row due to central bank policy. Do they own the stock? No, but they fully control the macro. But anyway, my main point was to give a little pushback to the narrative, which seems driven by hate, a superficial "told ya", followed by dubious claims. It does not reek of a person that actually cares about any humanitarian issue at all.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      You're comparing a reserve-currency central bank to one on the periphery. Thought about this for a while. That seems your singular mistake.
mdrzn 4y ago
"it's loading dude calm down" on refresh made me laugh

Is El Salvador Up?

180 points by belltaco 4y ago

drKarl 4y ago

They just need to keep buying the dip

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
Yes, and soon a hedge fund can go and acquire the full country at bargain basement rates!
- kevinak 4y ago
  Most definitely. Bitcoin has never gone up 10-20x in a short timespan before. It will never happen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    Also GameStop.
    - lottin 4y ago
      Not to mention the lottery. A lottery ticket can go from $1 to several millions in a split second.
  - px43 4y ago
    I love how that video is from 2015 when the price was $200. Two major bubble expansions later, and literally 100x higher BTC price, and people are still saying the same dumb thing. I would never suggest that anyone gamble on cryptocurrency that they can't afford to lose, but all of these El Salvador buys are less than a year old. People in this thread are ridiculing buys that wouldn't even qualify for long term capital gains. This is the kind of short-term short-sighted thinking that causes people to make terrible financial decisions, like panic selling. Warren Buffet has the famous saying "The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." If you can't think in terms of 10 year horizons for your investments, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
    - k__ 4y ago
      Yes. I'm no fan of BTC, but this is BS. The last dip lasted 2 years, if you bought at the wrong time. In 2-5 years we can talk, lol
      - kelnos 4y ago
        > if you bought at the wrong time. That's the problem; no one can predict when the right and wrong times are.
        incrudible 4y ago
        Buying at all time highs after a parabolic move upwards is the wrong time to buy and hold, not because a loss is certain, but because it is probable.
        px43 4y ago
        For sure, going all in on anything when the price is within 5-10% of the all time high is just crazy. Maybe doing regular small buys to Dollar-Cost-Average your way in isn't so bad. Better than not holding anything of something you like, but the closer to ATH the buy is, the riskier it is.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  And that hedgefund is called, the International Monetary Fund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund).
a_shovel 4y ago
If they buy the dip enough times, eventually they'll hold a monopoly on the world's supply of dip. All the other countries will come begging as their dip reserves run dry and the prices of their goods, unable to decrease, succumb to hyperinflation. We'll see who's laughing then!
- simonsaysso 4y ago
  I tried this once when I was little, but dip tends to go bad pretty quickly so you need even more dip to cover up the older dip and soon you've spent all your money on dip but no one wants your old dip
  - thfuran 4y ago
    You just weren't repackaging your old dip in enough layers of sufficiently abstruse financial instruments to convince people that they did want it. It's all about marketing.
  - worik 4y ago
    "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Probably applies. Except that "rationality" is not a part of the BTC market....
- WalterSear 4y ago
  This is good for dipcoin.
glitchc 4y ago
Sour cream and onion, thanks!
ransom1538 4y ago
No they need to buy BBBY.

baxtr 4y ago

Great. Finally we found a proper crypto use-case. Decentralized “Steal from the poor and give to the rich.”

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
giaour 4y ago
You'd think there'd be a lot of pushback from incumbents in that space.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pimlottc 4y ago

Could use some context on that page.

PcChip 4y ago
it seems like there is an "is xyz up" webpage, so someone jokingly created one for El Salvador , however meaning "up" as in their BTC holdings in US Dollar amounts
- Jolter 4y ago
  That’s the obvious part. But what the heck is El Salvador (the country)’s relation to Bitcoin?
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    > El Salvador became the first country in the world to use Bitcoin as legal tender, after having been adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
  - fosefx 4y ago
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57398274 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57398274
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    In 2021 they adopted it as legal tender [1]. Finance observers such as patio11 have commented "Tether's interactions with El Salvador might be the boldest Bond villain plot ever executed in real life. [..] They're using a sovereign nation as the cash-based business to intermix their dirty funds flows in, and daring the feds to see what happens if they cut them off." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador [2] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1493033725524799489 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1493033725524799489

fzfaa 4y ago

This looks bad, but I assume that with time the price will recover. I mean, bitcoin will eventually reach the point where it doesn't recover ever again, but that point hasn't necessarily been reached yet.

itsoktocry 4y ago
>This looks bad, but I assume that with time the price will recover. This is a fallacy that leads to holding poor investments. There's an opportunity cost to every dollar invested beyond the drop in price.
- fosk 4y ago
  You are also running with an assumption that whatever investment they may have used the same funds for, would have netted a gain (or a lower loss). The opportunity cost argument is only valid if in the alternative investment you actually end up in a better spot, that's not a given.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Yeah, especially given that the risk-free rate is currently pretty strongly negative in real terms.
quickthrowman 4y ago
Buying the dip works every time, until it doesn’t.
rideontime 4y ago
Can you explain the thought process behind that assumption?
- fzfaa 4y ago
  Historically bitcoin has gone up and down in cycles. There is no reason to think it won't come up again. But I may be wrong as I know very little about crypto.

tinalumfoil 4y ago

A stronger currency isn't necessarily a good thing.

aaronharnly 4y ago
One or both of (a) sovereign control over monetary supply (b) a stable currency are, though?
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huangc10 4y ago

DCA

dpedu 4y ago

This recent episode of Crypto Critics' Corner podcast talks about the current situation in El Salvador and what difficulties the country is facing that led them to make this investment. https://cryptocriticscorner.com/2022/03/29/episode-63-we-need-to-talk-about-el-salvador-feat-mario-gomez-and-oscar-salguero/ https://cryptocriticscorner.com/2022/03/29/episode-63-we-nee...

cruano 4y ago

45.89% down, that's insane I always thought it wasn't such a bad idea, it's a country reliant on remittances, and wire transfers and alternatives are expensive (I used to work at Xoom/PayPal) The other thing is that it never was well adopted by the public. I visited the country in January and some restaurants mentioned which items you could and couldn't buy using bitcoin on the menu

rr888 4y ago
> country reliant on remittances This is the big thing. #1 foreign income source is expat workers. Make it easier for people to send money home, send more people to USA, and its good for the economy that has no other resources.
- bigbonch 4y ago
  Just say immigrant. No need to make sure people know you're talking about the white kind.
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    I believe rr888 was making a point in the other way.. calling brown people like me expats :)
  - bregma 4y ago
    Immigrants stay in their new forever home. Expat workers have plans to return to their own home some day. They're not the same thing.
    - amluto 4y ago
      Also, even if they plan to stay forever, the people in question would be El Salvador’s emigrants, not immigrants.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    What? Your comment doesn't make any sense. We are talking about El Salvadorian expats earning money in the US and sending it back to their families in El Salvador. Is El Salvador majority white somehow now? And second, race is entirely irrelevant here. A person earning money temporarily in a guest country with full intent to go back to their home country is an expat. If they, instead, intend on staying in that new country permanently, then that person is an immigrant. White or not makes exactly zero difference here.

MintDice 4y ago

Geee 4y ago

This won't age very well, just like all the other "bitcoin is dead" posts made during bear markets. Also, El Salvador seems to be "up" if their whole economy is measured, and that's mostly because of their Bitcoin strategy. Especially, their tourism is up 81% compared to pre-pandemic levels. https://cointelegraph.com/news/tourists-flock-to-el-salvador-despite-bitcoin-bear-market https://cointelegraph.com/news/tourists-flock-to-el-salvador...

Wata2 4y ago
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kelnos 4y ago
How is their tourism related to their Bitcoin strategy. I expect this site, and those like it, will age quite well. Frankly, it doesn't matter if BTC is up in 10 years. Remember the saying: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Nation-states aren't immune to this phenomenon.
- rcoveson 4y ago
  > How is their tourism related to their Bitcoin strategy. Why are we talking about El Salvador right now? What's getting it in the news? What's getting people to read its Wikipedia page? What's reminding people it exists?
  - cr__ 4y ago
    They could probably get in the news by lighting a pile of cash on fire too
- otto_ortega 4y ago
  As a Savadorean: It is not... the RECOVERY on tourism is most likely due the relaxation on rules regarding COVID-19, a negative COVID-19 test or even proof of vaccination is no longer required to enter the country. You no longer are required to use a mask to enter restaurants or pretty much any public place. That alone was enough motive to entice enough people (particularly Antivax Salvadoreans leaving abroad) to come visit and cause that rebound on pre-pandemic levels. But that serves no good to the agenda of the pro-bitcoin, maxis and the goverment itself, so...

0xbadc0de5 4y ago

Someone's gotta hold the bag. Might as well be the El Salvador government.

jfasi 4y ago

I’m about as far from a crypto defender as you can get, but I think this page misses the point. If El Salvador is planning to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which by all accounts they are, their being “up” or “down” must be measured by the size of the economic activity that Bitcoin allowed them to facilitate. That figure is harder to get at. Viewed this way, the additional purchases which seem foolish and laughable might even be signs of success: perhaps Bitcoin business is booming so hard they need to expand their reserves? To be clear, I highly doubt that’s the case here, but if we’re going to assess success we should at least try to steelman their position. There’s plenty to mock about this change without taking cheap shots.

stingraycharles 4y ago
Maybe the larger point is that bitcoin is too volatile a currency to be used as a medium of exchange? Surely they must be holding on to a decent amount of BTC and as such lost value, if not the government itself, then at least the country as a whole.
audessuscest 4y ago
How Bitcoin really facilitate anything ?
lawn 4y ago
They're not trying to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. They're trying to funnel people into their own centralized crypto app, where people may (or may not) be allowed to send Bitcoin via the Lightning Netowrk.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
They're investing FX reserves in Bitcoin. Their imports are not priced in Bitcoin. Bitcoin going down relative to the currencies they import in hurts El Salvador's ability to finance them. Which raises borrowing costs [1]. Which leads to exporters demanding earlier payment [2]. San Salvador has less than three months' imports in reserves [3][4][5]. Their Bitcoin experiment has scared off crisis lenders [6]. There is no good ending for them right now. [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-el-salvador-with-no-easy-exit-worsening-crisis-2022-05-19/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-e... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLVBCAGDPBP6 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLVBCAGDPBP6 [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/imports https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/imports [4] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/foreign-exchange-reserves https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/foreign-exchange-re... [5] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.CD?locations=SV https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.CD?location... [6] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/02/15/cf-el-salvadors-comeback-constrained-by-increased-risks https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/02/15/cf-el-salvad...

branon 4y ago

Referral links to FTX and Binance are present on the webpage. Takes a special kind of person to try and capitalize on the schadenfreude of _other people_ with respect to the results of an entire nation's landmark financial decision (whether the results be good, bad, or indifferent).

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standyro 4y ago
seems like you've never met a crypto evangelist. pretty sure they're in it for the tech </sarcasm>

globalreset 4y ago

In times of huge global economic downturn, El Salvador's economy is growing, crime is down, tourism is booming, president has the highest approval rating in the whole world, country attracts investments thanks to Bitcoin, citizens save on remittances and can safely store savings in something that isn't that easy to steal as cash and yet all that Bitcoin-haters can think about is the dip in Bitcoin's price (caused by all the shitcoin scammers). Fiaters have a time horizon of a gold fish.

literallyWTF 4y ago
At what level of HN Karma are you able to delete someone else’s post?
coolspot 4y ago
> president has the highest approval rating in the whole world Not true. Putin has 146% approval rating.
cristal_lake 4y ago
I really dont get why the majority of HN is so harsh on bitcoin
- shyn3 4y ago
  Just bet against HN. I remember people here hated Dropbox. I've realized bet on everything against people here because they suck at making money. Basically inverse HN and you will be rich. I tried it with Tesla but a bit late. This place has a hive mind and that's the best part. So crypto and cbdc coins

lolsal 4y ago

It's only up or down if they are planning on exchanging it for USD, instead of using it as a currency.

literallyWTF 4y ago
No one is using Bitcoin as a currency.
- lolsal 4y ago
  Some folks are using it to buy stuff, does that not count? This link says that it's considered "legal tender" in El Salvador: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Not if they're not buying/selling things from/to outside the country in BTC.
    - lolsal 4y ago
      Why does that not count? I could use bottle caps as currency with my neighbors if we all agreed to it.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    Things are still priced in dollars though with btc acting as the medium of exchange. You see a pupusa for $2. You type $2 into your wallet which converts it to btc based on the current exchange rate. The recipient receives that btc and ideally converts it back to USD immediately. Both ends of the transaction are valuing things in dollars but uses btc (perhaps over Lightning network) to transfer the value. In this scenario, there is little to no exposure to the volatility of the price of btc. Western Union is the only option for so many people around the world still. There definitely seems to be a need to disrupt cross border remittances.
- 4y ago

superb-owl 4y ago

To put the numbers in context: - El Salvador has spent $104M on BTC - They have lost about $47M on their investment - They have a GDP of about $28B [1] - They have an annual government budget of about $5.6B [2] So they've blown about 1% of their annual budget on BTC. Far from catastrophic. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/gdp [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/government-spending https://tradingeconomics.com/el-salvador/government-spending

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> So they've blown about 1% of their annual budget on BTC. Far from catastrophic The Bitcoin decision is single handedly marching San Salvador into a currency crisis [1]. Food and fuel are among their top imports, so that likely leads to political crisis. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487630
- defgeneric 4y ago
  > The Bitcoin decision is single handedly marching San Salvador into a currency crisis This is an extreme oversimplification. The issue is that decision to make Bitcoin legal tender has put El Salvador at odds with the IMF. Arguably they would have been at odds anyway, and the IMF is simply using this issue as leverage (as well as to foment internal political divisions). The issue is primarily political (not economic!), especially considering the small amount of money invested in relation to the country's overall finances.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    When your lender of last resort tells you to jump, you say “how high?” or starve. El Salvador needs the IMF more than the IMF needs El Salvador. It’s political in the sense that the IMF doesn’t want to throw fiat at an irresponsible government that is gambling away sovereign dollars. Good money after bad and all that.
    - 4y ago

rafaelturk 4y ago

Keep me thinking about this quote: 'When the stock is up 30% in a month, don't feel 30% smarter', by Jeff Bezos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_OZKf_-w4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_OZKf_-w4s

stevedekorte 4y ago

Economics is more complicated that a short term price move. If there is sufficient unpayable dollar denominated debt, the central banks and governments will be forced to once again print trillions to re-inflate the debt bubble, incentivizing exponentially more bad debt. How do you suppose this process ends?

upupandup 4y ago
doesn't seem complicated to me when they bought bitcoin at ATH
davidgerard 4y ago
the important fact about El Salvador is that it uses the US dollar and cannot print money. I and other hypothesise that the Bitcoin thing was an attempt to handwave some fresh dollars into existence, as numbers in the Chivo app. This didn't work because Chivo was incompetent rubbish.

munk-a 4y ago

There was an article a few days ago about avoiding "cute" error messages and I think this is a great example of a site that really needs to take that to heart. Loading this page without JS enabled results in "aghhhh i'm evalyooooooating" and similar messages that really show quite poorly.

mypastself 4y ago
It’s the “oopsie whoopsie” part of the message that reminded me of the same article.

programmarchy 4y ago

Perhaps they should've taken more IMF / World Bank loans instead to reduce the majority of their population to poverty and allow multinational corporations to steal their natural resources.

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maerF0x0 4y ago

recalling from early 2021 readings... as I understood it they took on BTC to help break the backs of the FX / Money Transfer racket. A lot of their cashflow comes from foreign workers sending money back to their families. [1] [1]: here's a hit from google https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/remittance-costs-key-take-up-salvadoran-bitcoin-plan-development-bank-2021-08-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/remittance-costs-ke...

skinnyasianboi 4y ago

Fun little project. Author added 5 different wordings for current gains: 1.">= 10%" 2."> 0% AND < 10%" 3."0%" 4."< 0% AND -10%" 5."< -10%" Bitcoin is very volatile and will eventually go above 10% gains again. I wonder if the author will keep the website and keep paying for the domain if it stays above long term.

johnyzee 4y ago

Welcome to HN, where posts about bitcoin price are banned, unless it is down.

numbers 4y ago

I wonder what went through their heads when they chose BTC over a lot of other cryptos. ETH, BTC, LTC, and others from early crypto days might have baggage but I believe there's a healthy amount of cryptos that are stable-ish (more stable than some national currencies) and could be good store of value. This might be analogous to the adoption of socialism by countries as well, well-intended but horribly executed.

lvass 4y ago

About the same rate as Argentine peso (blue) over the last 11 months. Considerably better than Turkish lira.

jinpa_zangpo 4y ago

A fair analysis of El Salvador's bitcoin experiment would have to include the foreign investment and international travel that it stimulated.

otto_ortega 4y ago
Which so far is close to ZERO... I live here and I can tell you that so far no big business has opened operations in here "thanks to bitcoin". Our beauty pageant contestant turned US ambassador Milena Mayorga has organized several excursions to the country for "bitcoin investors" including some Thether funders and her now best buddies/cheerleaders Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert. I still have to see the payoff of those excursions aside from free helicopter rides for the assistants [1] ... [1] https://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/negocios/bitcoin-criptomonedas/940249/2022/ https://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/negocios/bitcoin-criptom...

t_mann 4y ago

Not defending their Bitcoin decision, but I think an important bit of context that is easy to miss is that small developing countries with not too many relevant exports (besides tourism) or financial sector, especially those close to the US, don't have an enviable set of options when it comes to FX regimes. Either you try to exercise 'fiscal discipline', meaning that you effectively have to answer to Washington pundits and Wall Street Bankers wrt to your economic policies, or you try to sustain an unmaintainable dollar peg and eventually have to ask for an IMF bailout, or you let your currency float and risk a spiral of devaluation and inflation. Argentina has gone pretty much full circle on those options, ask them how it feels.

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pydry 4y ago
You can peg low rather than pegging high - this helps develop your exports industry.
- t_mann 4y ago
  Even just speculating about a peg substantially below the current exchange rate sounds like a great way to send your exchange rate downwards. And low exchange rates only help with exports if you have an export industry (tourism reacts to a lot more factors than just prices - the instability coming from a currency crisis may not help, eg). And higher prices for imports don't help with industrial development. Countries rich in natural resources face a different set of problems, which is why I excluded them in the first post.
  - pydry 4y ago
    If you dont have an export industry pegging low is even more critical. It means you can develop one. It also means you can build up a foreign exchange reserve that will let you weather crises. Most of the asian tigers + China did this and it was pretty successful in all cases - they followed a path from poor to rich. Floating is fine if you're a big country who is substantially self reliant and with lots of exports but it's riskier if you're small fry at the mercy of international markets.

birracerveza 4y ago

Poor financial decisions aside, I have to say I absolutely love simple, minimal pages like these. It only needs a (+-)% for each buy and it's perfect.

fsociety999 4y ago

Now compare the $47 million they are down in dollars to how much the Government in the United States wastes on absolutely useless stuff. Ridiculous to gloat about their decision to purchase Bitcoin and how it is bad. It is a long-term investment. You could make this same site for people who invested in pretty much any tech stock over the same time period as most have declined by even more than 45%.

fleddr 4y ago

Next, do tech stocks. No matter your position, you have to be pretty bitter to actually develop and pay to host such a lame "told you!" site in a bear market. "Oopsie woopsie! They're very down! Would you also like to irresponsibly gamble away your country's finances?" It's 47 million in unrealized losses, even for a tiny nation absolute peanuts. It's a fraction of a fraction of the budget. Even the worst case is manageable, and there's a significant chance that it strongly bounces when the macro condition improves. Should a nation put their entire treasury into BTC? Absolutely not, but diversification of assets is sane. Big lumps of low risk/low return, small lumps of high risk/high return potential. Business as usual.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Next, do tech stocks If the central bank of a cash-strapped nation started buying tech stocks with their foreign reserves, they’d rightfully be called out as loonies. It’s why countries with surplus cash go through a lot of trouble to segregate their sovereign wealth funds from FX reserves. If the former goes down, it’s embarrassing. If the latter crashes, it’s existential.
- fleddr 4y ago
  "If the central bank of a cash-strapped nation started buying tech stocks with their foreign reserves, they’d rightfully be called out as loonies." It's all optics. Because the above is exactly what happens, stocks got pumped 13 years in a row due to central bank policy. Do they own the stock? No, but they fully control the macro. But anyway, my main point was to give a little pushback to the narrative, which seems driven by hate, a superficial "told ya", followed by dubious claims. It does not reek of a person that actually cares about any humanitarian issue at all.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    You're comparing a reserve-currency central bank to one on the periphery. Thought about this for a while. That seems your singular mistake.

mdrzn 4y ago

"it's loading dude calm down" on refresh made me laugh