El Salvador Had a Bitcoin Revolution. Hardly Anybody Showed Up
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The main issue, is lack of education of the public in how to use crypto and the government wallet, which is against the spirit of uncensorable crypto transactions.
A negative one, seemingly.
“The Bitcoin experiment promoted by the Bukele administration has significantly raised the market’s risk perception of the country,” said Fabiano Borsato, Chief Operating Officer of Torino Capital LLC.
Nah, that's positive.
What El Salvador has done is revolutionary.
Revolutions have a way of eating their own.
I, and many leftists (actual leftists, not the US sense of the term where it's about bullshit identity politics instead of economic systems), would disagree.
Plenty of civil wars have been fought over what amounts to momentary policy, hell, that's what the Cold War was about too.
of course there are similarities, but, the biggest difference in El Salvador is that nobody is forced to use it, it is a choice. Those people that don't use the Chivo wallet and bitcoin for transactions can still use USD to pay in cash as they have before.
The experiment is voluntary.
Now for example in Sweden, where the government has been pushing a cashless society bereft of anonymity, that is not voluntary. If you go to Sweden today and try to pay for something with anonymous cash, it is essentially impossible. That is also an example of forcing an ideology onto the people against their will.
This is an example of how the current El Salvador's government writes something in the law, and then changes the meaning (sometimes to the opposite interpretation) by means of a tweet, an interview or pushing a narrative through its propaganda machine, without actually changing the original law.
Bitcoin law states is compulsory, the first government communication was that it was "compulsory", but then the official narrative changed to voluntary as the price decreased.
Quoting Bitcoin Law:
Article 7. Every economic agent MUST accept bitcoin as a payment method if offered by the acquirer of a good or service.
I remember reading something similar in a quite famous book:
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/world/americas/el-salvado...
Not sure how that would be important for the crypto community, other than giving it the dressing down it needed.
Good things take time. 1 year is not enough to determine the success of anything, especially initializing a new financial system for a country.
Vague unfounded promises of salvation in the future are the stuff of cults, not sound policy making.
The current system also promises salvation, except the difference is that Bitcoin at least is a limited resource, there will only ever be 21 million BTC minted whereas the Fed can print unlimited dollars and devalue the currency, which is what has been happening.
Promises of salvation is all that humanity has to give it hope of a better future.
When BTC was essentially worth less than $1 nobody could ever have imagined that the price would go as high as $59k within 11 years. Who knows what will happen in another 11 years, but i would like to think, that a finite asset such as BTC will be worth more, not less, and show the finance and banking cartels that we don't need them.
Who do you think controls BTC? What do you think crypto exchanges are? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
https://hacken.io/industry-news-and-insights/the-major-crypt...
All BTC would do is forever entrench the power of the Capital, while weakening the one entity strong enough to take it on: The State.
It would condemn us to forever be under the control of finance cartels, with no control mechanism to reign them in.
Every person that keeps their Bitcoin in a wallet where they have the private keys, owns their Bitcoin.
>What do you think crypto exchanges are? Crypto exchanges are platforms where you can buy or sell your crypto, either for fiat or for other crypto. Seems pretty simple. Some exchanges are large, like Binance, but it is wrong to think that they are like banks. Most people understand that the exchange is only used for buying or selling, and then once that activity is done, you transfer your crypto to a wallet where you control the keys.
People don't keep all their crypto holdings on the exchange (well some might) but the majority only use exchanges for buying/selling. With a bank, we keep all our money with the bank in an account/s. Some people keep cash in other places, but to think that exchanges are like banks is incorrect. So it is not the new boss. IF there were no option to withdraw crypto from exchanges into private wallets, then yes, that analogy would be correct. But it isn't/
The whole point of crypto is to become sovereign, and have your finances not able to be controlled by the state.
The state is not your friend....unless you are a communist, and like to lose all your assets and become poor.