El Salvador race to become the Bitcoin Capital of the World
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Pierce says he is surprised by the government’s push. “This government is incredibly enterprising,” he says. “They’re like doing things at lightning speed.” He says he is working to organize a “big conference” in the country.
Lauren Bissell, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who later became a blockchain and Bitcoin entrepreneur and was a member of Pierce’s delegation, said she was “surprised” by the government figures she met on the trip.
However, Bissel admits that the roadmap for adopting Bitcoin is very ambitious. “There will be many hours of sleep. There’s a lot of work to be done, ”he says.“ But I think the marketing is going to be successful. ”
With the Bitcoin Day countdown to 69 days, the screws needed to make cryptocurrency the legal currency are still mirrored. Athena was initially advised to install the company 1,000 ATMs in the country (and Bukel to spread the 1,500 challenge on Twitter) 14. will just begin. Going from being a volcanic emoji to reality will also take time. “What you have in El Salvador seems to be a lot of geothermal energy and, at least for now, it’s a pleasant jurisdiction,” says Alex Brammer, vice president of cryptocurrency development at Luxor. “Providing infrastructure there will take years.” Even though Bitcoin law seems like an unfinished business: the rewriting of the entire new money system is sketched out on two pages and 16 articles, which is why more detailed regulations are expected to be issued soon.
What exactly is Bukele’s game? One of the recurring cases of this move is that Bitcoin would be “bankless banks”. This passionate mantra is often balderdash, but it may have some merit here, as 70% of El Salvador’s population does not have a bank account or access to easy payment solutions. With this in mind, the government-backed Bitcoin portfolio, as a smartphone app, could likely reach more people than existing banking service providers and provide a convenient low-commission means to send shipments to the Salvadoran diaspora. A small-scale Bitcoin project in El Zonte—The coastal town in the north of El Salvador — was successful in making the local economy work more efficiently and is credited with inspiring Bukele. In this reading, Bukele is a rigorous machinist who uses liberating technology to lift his people out of a state of deprivation driven by financial institutions.
There are problems, however, with that narrative. Some have indicated that it is only 45 percent the people of the country have access to the Internet – and an Internet connection is required to use the app. Ricardo Barrientos, chief economist at ICEFI, a Guatemalan-based research institute based on fiscal research, predicts that Bitcoin will be treated as a “weak currency,” with employers keeping savings in dollars and using more volatile Bitcoin to pay their salaries to employees. “This division of classes can create social tensions; that’s the recipe for disaster,” says Barrientos. Barrientos IVEFI figures on this issue, saying that without installing an anti-money laundering check, the government plans to encourage “some kind of purchase or investment” without creating money laundering checks, creating a parallel market where “operations are opaque”. “It can happen.
Barrientos expects Bukele to return before September 7, under pressure from international financial institutions and some of his advisers. If that doesn’t happen, Barrientos hopes Bitcoin won’t catch on among the population. “The best case for this is that no one uses it and everyone continues to use dollars, except for a few narcos,” Barrientos says. “Hopefully there will be natural debitcoinization.”
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