Mario Gómez’s warnings about Bitcoin before his arrest

Mario Gómez is a computer expert with more than 15 years of accumulated experience and since learning about the proposal to use Bitcoin as a legal tender in El Salvador, he has questioned all the technical points about digital currency.

Twelve hours before his arrest, Gómez took part in a virtual forum organized by El Diari d’Avui in which he technically questioned the use of Bitcoin as a legal tender.

As he had expressed in other forums to which he was invited by other media, Gomez made it clear that the use of Bitcoin as a currency for transactions and remittances is an experiment of which there is no certainty. on its success since to date digital currency has been used only as a speculative asset, the central philosophy is anonymity and decentralization.

SEE ALSO: defense lawyer confirms that Mario Gómez has already been released after several hours of detention

This note contains the main phrases and warnings that Mario gave in this forum in which he participated within hours of being arrested by the National Civil Police.

EDH Question: What will we use from September 7? Bitcoin, satoshis, tokens ??

– “On the subject of Bitcoin, the tricky part is that in recent years Bitcoin has been used as an asset. The issue of using it as currency is literally an experiment. Nothing like this had been done more than in some communities. “

– “The price (of Bitcoin) has risen considerably in the last year that there has been speculation. Then most people who buy, buy it in satoshis, which is to divide bitcoin into 100 million shares. Now that transactions are made, they will be made in these satoshis. “

–“With the issue of payments with Bitcoin the issue is that the main blockchain is not at all fast. If you pay a large commission you can have your transaction verified in 10 minutes. How big is the payment for the transaction? It depends on how saturated the network is. It can be about 10, 15, 20 cents … until a few years ago, it was several dollars. Precisely because of this problem is that other technologies are created that complement or try to solve these problems of the main network that allow to make more or less instantaneous transactions that already puts it on the same level. The only detail is that these transactions like Lightning Network are new and experimental, they are a developing network. “

–“I’d rather see the kind of inconvenience I’d see is the issue of mandatory. No one should be forced to accept a payment (in Bitcoin). That trust wouldn’t even be necessary to convert it to dollars.”

– “Rather the problems we have is that our telecommunications infrastructure is not always so good. We saw it in the pandemic, we saw it with distance education. So my impression is that those who are going to be able to making use of this technology (it’s an experimental thing), maybe the ones who can take advantage are the ones who have access to infrastructure, the ones who have a postpaid plan, the ones who don’t have to put a balance on their phone. “

Police capture Mario Gómez, an expert in information systems and digital currency

– “At the end of the day if the person does not feel able to receive a payment because it does not give him confidence in himself, he does not feel compelled to receive-“.

– “The government portfolio may be easy. We haven’t seen it work, but it’s under the control of third parties. I do think that things done in the race and by force, you can’t have a good expectation that you have to have good results. “

– “I think the question we have left, because unfortunately no specific regulations have been shared on the subject, is how will the price (of products and services) be set? Because there is something very interesting and is that depending on the application one uses of the portfolio, if it is a portfolio of an exchange, the exchange has an exchange rate that is changing every second and they also have commissions, true, if one decides not to use the government “.

– “But the government portfolio also has to define its prices from something, but we have no idea what the benchmark will be, if they are going to use the average prices of other Exchanges, where it will come out, because at the end of the day even if the person decides the instant conversion they have sold how much people are going to get, if someone decides to pay in Bitcoin or dollars.I think that’s the big question we have and we have no idea ‘where will the reference price come from or what will be the platform that offered the price that is going to be used as a house of exchange for government implementation’.

EDH Question: The government is promoting that the Chivo Wallet is not going to charge commissions, that all transactions they make will be free, is it feasible that it can be said that there will be no commissions in the cryptocurrency system? …

_Mario: “Technically not, everything has a cost. Essentially operating the blockchain, all these brokerage services, operating all these transaction services, everything has a cost, None of the operators or intermediaries will do it for free, even the same operation of Bitcoin and other blockchain each transaction has a small surcharge because at some point these systems transition to a scheme that only depends on the surcharges that users place in transactions so that there is an incentive to verify that the system works, then everything has a cost, either in digital currency or a service provider.

–“What the government is doing in this case or at least with the Chivo Wallet is that they are covering these costs so that the user does not see them, does not absorb them. The question is how long this could be sustainable., Because at the end of the day you have to pay suppliers, if the system is going to stay for a long time how much we will pay whether it is allocated in the budget or how to pay all these suppliers, and all these small transaction charges occurring inside and outside the system. “All of this stems from Article 7 and the obligation under the same government law to provide mechanisms for the person to use the system.”

-Many of these surcharges that occur on third-party platforms could be saved if there really was no obligation, because there is already an infrastructure, there are already services and other portfolios that connect directly to these networks that essentially only have surcharges which takes the miner to process a transaction or which takes the payment channel operator in the case of the Lightning network, because the user has a clear idea of ​​how much he is paying.

“There’s something behind this Bitcoin business, someone will come out winning, but it’s not the people,” says Portillo Quadra

– “I the biggest risk I see, if we look at it from the perspective of what an ideal market or an ideal implementation should look like, is to let the competing portfolio providers in the market see who offered the most suitable positions to system, let people know the surcharges, because if not what we have is a situation where people for convenience or think that the system has no surcharges for its use opt for the government portfolio, which in the long run translates into a kind of monopoly, in this case sponsored by the state and for all citizens who pay their taxes.

– “And the truth, and I put it in a tweet, the system if it was aimed at allowing informal (traders) to start formalizing could be of some use and it would be worth paying them with taxes, but if this were the case then Bitcoin is not a central component, but rather a secondary component, because what they are offering is something else and the role of Bitcoin rather seems a bit secondary. “

–“I’m not an opponent of technology, because I see it as technology and nothing else. But bitcoiners who do see it beyond this technology are many who do agree that an ideal implementation it must have been organic, That it was derived from the participants’ own taste for them to choose this mechanism as an option and to date, even many of the people who are stuck in Bitcoin I would not dare say that they do it transactionally or to buy things, much of the use of Bitcoin people have used it as a means or an asset to speculate, that is, they buy Bitcoin with the expectation of generating profits for its relative value based on the dollars and so it had been until the announcement of the Bitcoin Act. “