You are taking the analogy too literally. Lending to a country/corporation is different to lending to a person. There is no such a thing as "free time" for a country. If the president wants to gamble his own wealth on bitcoin this is absolutely fine.
Further, you would be punishing him if he renounced his gambling addiction, but if he is still convinced that his gambling adventures is the right course of action to preserve and create wealth for his country then withholding fund is actually for his benefit.
> Lending to a country/corporation is different to lending to a person
> If the president wants to gamble his own wealth on bitcoin this is absolutely fine.
So, how would you fix El Salvador and give their people the best chance at a good life?
A lot of the anti-crypto sentiment on HN portrayed El Salvador's actions as a very bad and irresponsible move, but I'd say that the President of El Salvador is not only making the right move for his country, but personally has far more skin in the game than any democratically elected leader from most other countries. If his move doesn't work out in the long-run, he will likely eventually be violently removed from office. Hell, he risks assassination from other countries too merely for "stepping out of his lane", so to speak.
Why is it the right move for his country? How much of a gamble is any action when you don't have much to lose?
I don't want to disparage El Salvadoran people in any way: but the reality is that they're a very poor country with a very bad education system and not much industry and have had major crime problems, and many of their people who build up some success and resources in life still see their best path to success as finding a way to get into other countries. Their only real path out of this situation is either humanity inventing free energy and replicators to give them unlimited resources, or them taking a shot at being a friendly jurisdiction for the next major industry and technology before everybody else truly embraces it.
They're like a small-market NBA team with no real chance of winning a title without tanking. Everybody is going to rip them for tanking, but that's their only real path to win.
El Salvador is now in a non-zero position to be a wealthier country in the long run. That's much better than the basically 0 percent chance they had before their crypto actions.
What does a President having "skin in the game" mean? That is the kind of talk you would make when talking about an investment. From the perspective of a sovereign nation, it's currency is not an investment. The goal of a currency isn't to provide maximum returns for people who hold that currency. In fact, from the perspective of a sovereign nation, an ideal currency is one that depreciates in value in a controlled manner. The fact that cryptocons don't even understand this simple fact is remarkable.
The NBA is a zero sum organization. There can only be 1 winner, and everyone else will be a loser. 1 team getting better than the others strictly means that the other teams are worse off. Nations and the world economy do not operate in a zero sum environment. Ukraine being attacked by Russia means nearly every country that relies on its produce and output are worse off. This is unlike the NBA where if suddenly every player in the Warrior's lineup got injured today, every other team would have a better chance of winning.
> 0 percent chance they had before their crypto actions.
Citation needed really really badly. There's a million things countries can do to improve their wealth. The one thing that is not gonna help them is investing in a speculative and highly volatile asset like crypto currencies.
> How much of a gamble is any action when you don't have much to lose?
As a Salvadoran it really hurts to read you describing everything we have there "not much to lose".
I mean. We are in the middle of most statistics in the world. It's not like we are in the bottom for everything. Perhaps crime, but that's been improving for the past 5 years.
1) Reality is not always pleasant or politically correct. It is not my desire to be insulting, but at the same time, it's hard to have a discussion about real world events and and not say some things that some people might prefer not to hear. Some feelings might be hurt, but the world would be better off if more frank discussions were had.
2) If I understand this right, a short time ago in this very thread, you posted that El Salvador lost Visa Free Travel to the UK due to 17x increase in asylum requests. Again, I'm not trying to be insulting, but that's the kind of data point that tells a lot of the story about the state and direction of a country.
3) Let me add that I genuinely want El Salvador to do well: it's in your country's and my own best interest.
4) Nobody can 100% predict the future, but I think your president has given your people the absolute best chance they have at prospering, even if it will take some time to materialize. Even if Bitcoin never truly moons, establishing your country as a crypto friendly jurisdiction seems like a far-sighted move that most people won't really understand the long-term benefits until a long time later.
5) I'm sure you understand El Salvador far better than most people. If I've said any facts you think are incorrect, I always invite correction or clarification. I'd definitely be interested on what specific things you think your country can do to improve the long-term outlook other than providing generic platitudes about doing better in crime or education.
> Let me add that I genuinely want El Salvador to do well: it's in your country's and my own best interest.
Me too.
> Establishing your country as a crypto friendly jurisdiction seems like a far-sighted move that most people won't really understand the long-term benefits until a long time later.
I don't work directly with law, but El Salvador is becoming an an increasingly complicated jurisdiction to work in.
There have been more than a handful contradictions between written law, tweets, and government official declarations.
Doing business, in a country with conflicting interpretations of law is complicated, wether plain old business or crypto.
Laws changing on Sunday evenings, optimized for social media engagement instead of business hours. Or laws coming onto force before they are officially published.
Tweets or government official declarations used as an official 'interpretation' of law. Sometimes the interpretation being close to the opposite of what the law states. Who to believe? The interview, the tweet, the written law, the supreme court?
This confusion permeates everything. From complex stuff:
Like for the past months, a big pension reform has been announced. No drafts available of course. Will the individual pension accounts be nationalized? (Equivalent to the US IRA/401k/Employer contributions) There's no public info about that.
To the day to day stuff:
If the police detains someone and posts their picture on and convicts you for 20 years in prison in twitter. Is the tweet a valid conviction or not? I don't know. Judgement via social media?
Can police stop someone and check their phone? Yes
Have people been sent to prison for not carrying a phone? Yes
Have people been sent to prison for a 20 second TikTok video using the 'wrong' background song? Yes.
Can a business be taken over by the government? Yes, it happened at least once. It didn't even follow a normal law process and was a very confusing procedure with conflicting official declarations.
Can the police force the door open while a couple is in a 'love hotel' with your gf/bf and post their picture in social media, in underwear, your car, license plate, or your ID card? It has happened before too. Security checks.
Will having the wrong local rap song in the Spotify history send someone to prison? Probably.
Thanks for sharing. I can see some of this stuff unfortunately being true, but some of it sounds pretty ridiculous and I'd guess might be embellished a little.
That being said, is some of this justice system stuff being worked on? I think your president was focusing on crime issues in addition to the crypto stuff, but I don't really follow all of the El Salvador news too closely.
The interpretation being close to the opposite of what the law states, for example the reinterpretation of the constitution regarding consecutive reelection:
The point of analogy is that it's very different from the actual issue. In fact, an analogy will always be different from the real situation, otherwise it wouldn't be an analogy, it would be the thing in itself.
There is nothing contradictory in using an analogy to illustrate a specific point (in this case, how a lender may be hesitant to lend something to a borrower even if the borrower acted unwisely with a small part of the money that was lent to them), and pointing out that the analogy is not the same as the actual situation.
Yes, I'm aware of all that. But when you pick an analogy, you should pick one that helps your case, not where the central dynamics are opposite from or incomparable to the dynamic you're trying to illustrate.
If you don't believe that loaning to a human is analogous to loaning to a country, you really shouldn't be the one introducing it as an analogy!
The purpose of an analogy is to more clearly convey a dynamic, not muddle understanding by reference to a case with the opposite implications.
In the likely event that it still isn't clear what's wrong with ak_111's points, let's review.
"People are obviously going to be reluctant to lend to <country> because <country> is behaving like a human who spent his money frivolously after borrowing your money again. Because you would not continue to lend to that human, you can see why others would not lend to <country>."
"Okay, you misunderstood my analogy. You can't conclude anything about countries based on how you would handle a human. The situations are completely unrelated, to the point that it is impossible to reason about one from knowledge of the other."
Am I the one who doesn't understand analogies, or is ak_111?
Further, you would be punishing him if he renounced his gambling addiction, but if he is still convinced that his gambling adventures is the right course of action to preserve and create wealth for his country then withholding fund is actually for his benefit.