This is a question for any El Salvadorans browsing HN: are the funds stored in Chivo subject to the same financial rules and regulations as the rest of the El Salvadoran banking/financial sector?<p>I'm asking regardless of <i>practical</i> enforcement of those regulations, because I want to understand the risk model here as people <i>actually</i> using the app perceive it. Are the people regularly using it under the impression that the government will help claw back or recover lost or stolen funds, or is there widespread understanding that it's irreversible?
Incentivising users to associate real world identities with their crypto identities by paying them $30 isn't a terrible idea. That's more than you get when some advertising giant builds a profile for you based on your browser characteristics. But preloading wallets and saying "use this wallet with you government ID to claim the money" fails to scratch the itch in so many ways:<p>- Users need to understand public/private keys so that the can rotate keys whenever necessary. They should have had users generate the wallets empty and then have them authenticate as a second step to get the payout.<p>- Maybe you need government-authored software to carry out the business of government, but since the chain is public and the keys can be used for signing things other than transactions there's no need for that software to ever see your private key. You ought to be able to handle everything you need by sending signed messages to the government app or having the government app examine the chain.<p>- Pairing an ID number with a photo of a face is not a valid authentication step. Neither of these things are secrets. You're going to need a government employee to look at the ID and the face before they accept the key, that way when skulduggery ensues, that employee can be found and questioned. Relying on non-secrets to do the job of secrets is a bad idea--as everybody who has a ssn knows.
Is the "Chivo Wallet" an actual lightning wallet?<p>I have not found any confirmations so far, that People in El Salvador are actually using Bitcoin. For all I know it could be Government fiat that is denominated in Bitcoin.<p>Does anybody here know more about it?
What does state owned mean? Is it run like a centralized bank or is it just the official "lightning wallet"?<p>The article is confusing because it mentions missing funds but not whether there are any transactions by hackers or scammers.
I'm curious - if someone was able to develop a new type of computing (or phishing) to get the private keys and simply took them, would that be stealing? Do people who own Bitcoin have any legal right to the coins? What if the person who "stole" them claimed they mined it themselves. How could you disprove this?
So basically someone just centralised a coin based the bitcoin lightning network and censored it.
LoL. Waiting for crypto pedlers and Buteriks to shut the heck up about their ponzi schemes.
They would defined come up now saying, bUT bUT uSeRS muSt knOw abOut prRiVate and PubLiC keYs. Dude in real world most of the people including software engineers don’t even understand basic password practices 2FA etc. Its time people start accepting bitcoin/ethereum is just a new problem for a solved problem, with a new database.
Since this is lightning network, isnt this also possible that the users are subscribed to some payment? perhaps the subscription is malicious, or maybe its not