SOB: On National Adoption of Bitcoin
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
El Salvador’s decision to make bitcoin legal tender shocked the world. Earlier this week the rapidly-developed and adopted bitcoin law went live, kicking off what seems primed to be an era of accelerated change unlike anything seen in our lifetimes.
Join hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Stephanie Murphy for a quick three part discussion on the launch challenges, implications and listener comments from our previous show on the topic.
First, the launch: It was messy, but it happened. Alex Gladstein had an insightful twitter thread in the days leading up to it. Matt Ahlborg dug into the day-1 government issued wallet and found a mixed bag. He found extra controls on the money given out at launch but a fairly robust technological package including native SegWit support and a functional lightning network integration
Second, the implications: This path towards adoption was not what we expected. What El Salvador's move to use bitcoin directly suggests is that dollarized nations, or those who use another countries currency and in doing so become subject to their monetary policy decisions, may prefer bitcoin's non-monetary policy to either domestic or imported control. That's in sharp contrast to nations like India, China and the US who use their currencies and controls over it to accomplish policy goals. These powerful players see central bank digital currencies as a way to supercharge their monetary policy compared to their influence today over physical banknotes.
And finally, the local perspective: We had two listeners write in with corrections to our prior episode (We were incorrect about the reason why El Salvador "dollarized" their economy in 2000, it was billed as a move to lower the cost of borrowing, not because of elevated inflation) along with the many concerns and questions which are still unanswered. You'll find both listeners comments in full linked below.
Links from the episode:
Have any questions or comments? Send us an email at [email protected]
Today's show featured Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy and Adam B. Levine. This episode was edited by Jonas, with music by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats. Our album art is based off a photo by Photo by Wilson Edilberto Santana Suarez on Unsplash, modified by Speaking of Bitcoin
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Even if you support Bitcoin and you think that Bitcoin is a good option for yourself, I think |
| 0:07.2 | in good conscience, we have to say that that doesn't mean that it's a good choice when |
| 0:11.7 | it's imposed or introduced without the appropriate process. |
| 0:20.5 | Earlier this week, El Salvador's Bitcoin law, making it a nation's legal tender for the very first time, went into effect. |
| 0:26.9 | It was an interesting day to do so as leverage traders were liquidated and the top token dropped by as much as $10,000 on some exchanges very quickly. |
| 0:34.4 | Providing ammunition for those claiming volatility could make the move unworkable. |
| 0:38.4 | But it did happen. We're going to talk about it on today's show. My name is Adam B. Levine, |
| 0:43.0 | and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. On today's show, we're joined by Stephanie Murphy. Hi. And Andreas M. |
| 0:48.6 | Antonopoulos. Hello. Jonathan Mohan is out this week. So folks, we're going to try to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. |
| 0:55.9 | After our last episode over the summer on the El Salvador Bitcoin Law, we received some |
| 0:59.9 | listener mail that corrected some of our misconceptions, which we'll talk about a bit later |
| 1:03.1 | in the show. |
| 1:03.6 | But let's just start with what happened and what it could mean. |
| 1:07.3 | Well, the launch went somewhat unexpectedly. |
| 1:11.7 | Very big news. |
| 1:12.8 | But at the same time, there were some technical snafus from what I heard with the government-hosted wallet that was intended to provide exchange and Bitcoin receiving services for those who wanted to use it, that service was overwhelmed |
| 1:30.8 | and crashed. And I'm not quite sure if it's back up again. And that coincided, of course, |
| 1:38.1 | with a pretty significant drop in the price of Bitcoin, about a 10%, at some point almost 12% drop, which, of course, |
| 1:47.9 | in Bitcoin terms, is not completely unheard of, but for those who are new to that experience, |
| 1:53.1 | must have been quite a shock. |
| 1:55.5 | Twitter user Matt Alberg had a thread on this, where he basically was investigating how |
| 2:00.0 | does the wallet work, |
... |
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