This is fun (and smart from Salvador to get in early)
I can see a future, where most country are pretty repressive with Crypto, alongside some Crypto heaven (like some actual tax heaven country.. looking at you Cyprus)
But when tax Heaven attract multinational company , Crypto Heaven will probably attract all the mobster (with probably the same positive impact for the country economy)
Your article 404s. There are a few choices - is this close to whatever MSN put up then pulled down again? I offer this correction exclusively in the spirit of aiding a non-native speaker I deeply respect with the idiosyncrasies of a difficult language. That said, I think you're missing a beat. Nearly everyone is. This is being publicized as "El Salvador to accept Bitcoin" rather than "El Salvador requires third party app to integrate with its financial system." From El Salvador's perspective, they're putting the onus on transactional and tax reportage on Strike so who cares what the "native currency" of the app is? They get to make the gringos plug into their existing framework while also gaining untold amounts of insight into a transactional network designed to bypass their economy entirely. The whole idea behind Bitcoin was it was free from currency controls and government interference. It's taken ten years but the governments are coalescing around "I don't care if you pay each other in chickens so long as I get my taxes." Which, I mean... - You buy a car in the local currency (which is the US Dollar anyway - hmmmm) for $10k. Theoretically you're paying 13% VAT on it but it's a cash deal so the dealer reports it for $4k. El Salvador loses out on $780 in tax and there's nothing to be done. - You buy a car using the Strike app on your phone. Your Strike profile and the car dealer's Strike profile now have a transactional amount in common on the Bitcoin blockchain regardless of how much tomfoolery Strike goes through to mask it. El Salvador's treasury department now has a few servers sitting around doing nothing but parsing Bitcoin data and if they decide they need more info than Strike feels like providing, El Salvador goes "have I mentioned I'm a sovereign nation" and all of a sudden El Salvador has every transaction you and the car dealer have made on Strike, down to the millisecond and satoshi. They feed both of you into an algorithm that analyzes payments and if it goes "something's funny boss" they audit you both and elbow Strike into giving them banking data about the other parties in every transaction you've made (which is something banking law allows them to do already). This has gone from a forensic investigation using lots of manpower to a spreadsheet using lots of Microsoft Excel and dollars to donuts if they say "looks like you cheated us out of $820 in VAT on that car you bought in June, how 'bout we fine you $1500, you give us access to your banking data for the past year and we call it even otherwise lawyer up", you're gonna logroll like an otter with a clam. And whatever fines, penalties, settlements or transactions the government wants, they'll take in dollars, thanks. They know what your transactions were for in BTC so they can go back and assign an exchange rate for each one, again using Excel or equivalent. For them, this is Visa only fancy and who fucking cares. All the onus of making it work falls to the DeFi company pumped full of VC Bux so they don't care either. Our technolibertarian future looks a lot like our overreaching socialist past only with vastly better bookkeeping and enforcement. In order for that to be true, the local currency has to vanish. Not run in parallel, but completely disappear. That's not going to happen for any country in the world because there's no impetus to do it. This is the thing nobody gets about China's crackdown on bitcoin mining - that's the CCP playing "who run Bartertown" with the Triads, who have an uninterrupted lineage back to the Mongol invasion so good luck with that. Whatever magical moon money you feel like using, the minute it plugs into anything on this planet it will be taxed. And if it is taxed, it is tracked. And if it is crypto, you just invited the tax man onto your blockchain and for some reason, the cryptobros can't see past this very real, very foundational, very far-reaching inevitability.I can see a future, where most country are pretty repressive with Crypto, alongside some Crypto heaven (like some actual tax heaven country.. looking at you Cyprus)
But when tax Heaven attract multinational company , Crypto Heaven will probably attract all the mobster (with probably the same positive impact for the country economy)
A little history goes a long way, doesn't it? The reason we grow cereals instead of tubers is because it's easy for the local Warlord to see how much wheat Old McDonald is growing and harvesting when it's above ground, and it's easy to weigh and take the Warlord's cut of something easily monitored and transportable. You want to be a farmer on the Warlord's land, then you grow what the Warlord allows you to grow. That's literally how civilization started. Not much has changed since then no matter how smart tech bros judge themselves to be.Whatever magical moon money you feel like using, the minute it plugs into anything on this planet it will be taxed. And if it is taxed, it is tracked. And if it is crypto, you just invited the tax man onto your blockchain and for some reason, the cryptobros can't see past this very real, very foundational, very far-reaching inevitability.
Doesn't the Euro attest to the possibility of some sort of "continental currency" emerging to address this issue? The politics are hard, yes, but then Germany and France both joined the EU, so it's possible some sort of SoCentAm Peso could be negotiated. If it means that the participating governments have better controls/auditing capabilities to gather their taxes because it's on a blockchain, it could be the catalyzing force to push these countries into some sort of Peso-based EU. In order for that to be true, the local currency has to vanish. Not run in parallel, but completely disappear. That's not going to happen for any country in the world because there's no impetus to do it.
Germany and France joined the Euro because it permanently enshrined their exchange rate against the Lira and Drachma. This is the reason Greece pretty much demanded Germany pay their debts back in 2015 - anchoring the currency without anchoring the economies caused the economic inequalities of the countries conjoined by the Euro to accelerate, not dissipate. And even then, the timeline looks like this: - 1945: Europeans mostly stop committing genocide on each other - 1957: European Economic Community created - 1992: Treaty of Maastricht - Also 1992: Black Wednesday - 1999: Euro introduced - 2002: Euro introduced to the public If you're going to introduce treaties and common currency areas and all sorts of massive legal crap like that, the people who use it will be fucking in the holodeck and mining the asteroids by the time it's available. There aren't any easy, predictable pathways for Central or South America to establish a reserve currency. Anything is possible? But it's not really in the cards right now based on the current geopolitical lay of the land. And "establish a reserve currency" was the entire point of the Euro. If they wanted to use someone else's reserve currency, they'd just do as they're doing.Doesn't the Euro attest to the possibility of some sort of "continental currency" emerging to address this issue? The politics are hard, yes, but then Germany and France both joined the EU, so it's possible some sort of SoCentAm Peso could be negotiated.