The only surprise here is that they stuck with it for as long as they did.
BUT I WAS TOLD THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BUTTCOIN AND REAL MONEY, WHAT THE HELL?!?11?!
Who could have ever seen this coming other than anyone who thought about it for the briefest amount of time?
lol
I generally keep out of crypto discussions as I do not sufficiently understand it. But this event is very easy to understand. In the beginning of the article itself:
… approved last Wednesday a confusing reform to the Bitcoin Law at the request of Bukele’s government, which had no other option to receive the $1.4 billion credit agreed in December with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Thus, this move was forced on El Salvador by the IMF.
“Forced” is doing a lot of work here. I think it was El Salvador that decided it was worth to ditch btc in favor of getting actual rescue money.
Edit: it makes sense that Bukele just told Rubio they’d be happy to be the US’ offshore prison system. Seems they really need the money.
I had a Libertarian try to tell me that this was going to revitalize El Salvador just a couple of weeks ago, lmao.
Not the greatest idea to transition to a currency where every single transaction requires the same amount of energy to power a mansion for a week.
Didn’t know it was that bad. Knew it was bad, but that’s depressingly bad.
Not promoting just saying that this is misinformation. Transactions are done in bulk and on the lightning network at a tiny fraction of what you suggest.
Edit: BTC itself can only process 8 or so transactions per second(hence the high energy demand per transaction), the actual number of monetary lightening network transactions (grouped up into a these large BTC transactions) is close to a million.
Well their reserves doubled in value
It’s absolutely bonkers to me that Libertarians think BTC is a better option that fiat bills.
This shit has the have been astroturfed or otherwise psyop’d.
i remember laughing at crypto nerds about this a few years ago, but who’s laughing now?
me, still
Crypto prices from a few years ago were hilariously low. Keep laughing tho!
El Salvador apparently invested about $270 million in bitcoin since 2021 and that investment is worth about half a billion bucks now. Oh my god, ha, what idiots!
Ok, can they sell it then? What’s the use of Bitcoin? Why are you valuing it in Dollars? Countries accumulate Dollars and other first world currencies to be able to import more (and in case of El Salvador, spend more domestically). Bitcoin is sitting there doing nothing.
Same applies to massive foreign exchange reserves like in the case of China. But still, atleast forex reserves can be quickly used to stabilize the exchange rates.
Also keep in mind even if they sell it and assuming there is enough liquidity, $300m one time isn’t a lot of money even for a country like El Salvador.
The IMF is forcing them to sell it. They probably want it.
Edit: misinformation. They’re keeping it as a reserve. They’re just being forced to strike the language of legal tender
Yes, he could sell it.
It’s commonly used as a store of value. When people invest in gold, what’s the use of that? They’re not going to actually use the gold for its physical properties.
I’m American and the unit of value that I’m most familiar with is dollars. We could convert it into any currency that you’d like. I could have also said simply that their investment had about doubled in value and roughly had the same initial value as about 10,000 economy cars.
Sovereigns aren’t the same as individuals. For sovereign, at the macro level, spending drives consumption and creates employment of real resources.
If El Salvador had its own currency, they could tax and spend that instead. But no, they use US Dollars.
What’s the point you’re trying to make here? You seem mad about el salvador’s bitcoin experiment. They made a little of money on their little investment.
They make no money from the investment you mentioned unless they sell for Dollars. Your stock portfolio gets you no money in form of capital gains unless you liquidate it for Dollars. Same with gold.
Is El Salvador budget denominated in gold or bitcoin? No, it’s denominated in Dollars.
El Salvador should first stop using a foreign currency, the dollar. Then worry about trying to attract capital inflows.
I agree. No currency or store of value has any true value until you go to spend or exchange it. It only has potential value.
You do realize that Dollars also are also constantly changing in value.
If El Salvador had its own currency, they could tax and spend that instead. But no, they use US Dollars.
This is a legit criticism. It’s absolutely wild that these colonized states are completely monetarily subservient to empire. I think they go with bitcoin instead of their own currency, because bitcoin is much harder to destroy/manipulate.
Bitcoin is not different from the USD fiscal policy space wise. You use USD (which you obtain from trade, remitances, loans and capital inflows) to buy Bitcoin or use the same USD to buy ASICs to mine Bitcoin with. In the end you hope to sell it to someone else to get more USD than you started with.
Even if it’s not for conversion then would the population like to use a system where there is no physical cash form of bitcoin (El Salvador has large informal economy) fully dependent on internet, electricity and a smartphone. Would the Government make budget denominated in bitcoin? How will all the pricing be done? Why should El Salvador go through all these complications instead of adopting its own currency where it’ll have more fiscal space?
Bitcoin was never widely used in El Salvador outside small transfer payments which would’ve been converted to Dollars pretty quick anyways.
Having your own currency gives you power to manipulate exchange rate and employ domestic resources instead of having to borrow continously from the IMF.
Not saying that a sovereign currency alone is enough. Countries may not be able to enforce taxes enough or try pegging rates to the Dollar to prevent pass-through inflation and balance of payments issues. But it is a necessity.
El Salvador apparently invested about $270 million in bitcoin since 2021 and that investment is worth about half a million bucks now. Oh my god, ha, what idiots!
… Okay just to clarify, you’re saying they invested $270,000,000 and now it’s worth about $500,000?
Is there a typo in your comment or something?
Yes, there was. Thank you.
i don’t understand why you dorks are laughing when i advocate for the use of tulips as legal tender. i’ll have you know that i recently cashed out during the height of this latest tulip bubble! you rubes are simply jealous of the treats i can now buy and the very coherent and good point i’m making.Wow you are funny. How many years has this act been going on?
Source?
Let me Google that for you
https://dig.watch/updates/el-salvador-profits-as-global-bitcoin-holdings-rise
That feels incredibly off. Bitcoin is around 100k now while back then it topped out at ~65k or so?
They didn’t buy it all at once. The price dropped between then and now and they were buying. Wikipedia has an entry on it.
I’m not an expert on El Salvador’s bitcoin, I just know you all sound like a bunch of sore losers.
Just because you had luck doing something incredibly stupid doesn’t mean it was a good decision
I know you’d like to characterize it as dumb luck because that would make you feel better. The reality is that I’ve been making small monthly bitcoin purchases for the better part of a decade as a part of a much larger retirement fund.
When the btc price hit $100k, I sold most of the initial investment so that now I’m just risking losing part of my gains.
You can call it lucky and incredibly stupid. I can call it calculated risk.
So you’re rich because others also bought into the completely unproductive ponzi scheme. Go brag somewhere else, loser.
You’re all mad because you lost money investing in bitcoin when it was pumping and then selling during a crash. Don’t worry, it’s safe with me.
literally no one cares, fuck off dweeb
now do nvidia
I can’t say I understand the bitcoin hate in this thread. I have very real, realized gains.
Your meme should say, “I love working for minimum wage at Wendy’s”
they could have bought rolling 16x futures on gold in or 5x on cacao beans in 2021, just saying, with better success chance and lower risk. The fact that you won (allegedly) in casino doesn’t make you smart, it makes you lucky, it’s bonkers to do for a country
You seem pretty smart. They should probably put you in charge.
thanks 😉
Bitcoin has gone up by at least 40k in the last three months, surely that must have made El Salvador a few pretty pennies.
*pesos
Their national currency is USD.
Whoopsie! Didn’t know that! Thanks
It has but bukele’s bitcoin fund is still a drop in the bucket compared to their GDP. I’m seeing they own 6,055 bitcoins, which is about 600 million dollars, to their GDP which is 34 billion.
Looking forward to them establishing monero as a legal tender
The problem with any new kind of currency no matter what it is will always be controlled and manipulated by the wealthiest individuals who will flood their wealth into that new system.
Strike the word new.
Let’s not get astray here.
The reason El Salvador stopped using Bitcoin as a legal tender is not because it’s some sort of failed experiment (it had issues, but still), but due to continuous pressure of IMF interested in maintaining a US dollar-centric economy.
El Salvador is reliant on US dollars in its economy, which puts it under heavy US influence. Knowing Salvadoran currency wouldn’t be strong, Nayib Bukele suggested an alternative option - risky, volatile, but free from pressure of other countries and strongly appreciating in the long run. IMF didn’t like it, and that’s where we are.
So, when you cheer Bitcoin not being legal tender anymore, you also cheer US and IMF projecting power over the country.
Well, also, they just cut a deal with Marco Rubio to be America’s prison, so they must’ve figured that was more lucrative than Bitcoin and continuing to agitate the US by challenging the dollar was creating unnecessary friction.
Exactly. The title is misleading af
They were forced to stop using Bitcoin as legal tender by external parties. The question people should be asking is why? And the answer is not that it was a failed experiment.
The experiment was to move beyond external parties. They were not able to do so and returned to using external parties. Ergo “the experiment failed”.
They were forced to do it by the IMF and US
Why do you think that they’d care about it if it was failing?
So they experimented with resisting the US and IMF and it was not successful.
We call that an experimental failure.
You really don’t get it. “Blockchain” was not the experiment. “Utilizing blockchain in the global economy” was the experiment.
And it failed.
Again, for the people in the back:
The experiment was whether or not they could be independent monetarily. Not whether or not blockchain works. But whether, in actual practice, if it could provide the monetary independence some people claim it has the power to do.
Outside influences were strong enough to overwhelm Bitcoin adoption and it succumbed to those outside influences. As an experiment seeking to test whether or not Bitcoin could resist these influences it failed.
This is how experimentation works. Now you can tweak your experiment and try again, but acting like failing at the exact thing you were trying to accomplish is somehow not an experimental failure is just delusional.
You can argue semantics all you want
They were trying to break free using Bitcoin. It seemingly worked quite well so they were forced to stop doing it. The article title is misleading in the sense that the failure isn’t from Bitcoin (quite the contrary).
You don’t even have to be pro bitcoin to see this as something bad, but feel free to keep supporting such propaganda and external influence of politics. I’m sure it really benefits you
Would you loan money to someone who wouldn’t be able to repay if the bitcoin market crashed?
“Bro, I swear this shit will pay 20% monthly”
Literally gambling.
Its even funnier. They just straight up promised them a billion dollar loan on the condition that they abandon bitcoin.
In December, the government struck a $1.4 billion loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that scaled back its bitcoin embrace after the lender urged officials to limit its exposure. The lender specifically advocated making acceptance of bitcoin voluntary for the private sector, which is spelled out in the hastily-approved law.
Site doesn’t load
The link is still working and reuters is a huge organization so its probably an issue on your side.
Nope. Their site is always broken. It doesn’t work on tor browser in strict mode. Try it.
We shouldn’t be linking to such websites
That is hardly a valid reference point for a news source. The site even works without JS which is better than most sites.
Nope. It doesn’t work with js disabled. That’s the problem
It does in librewolf, which means that Tor is just doing some extra blocking of stuff that is need for the page to load.
Hot damn why is this not the headline we are seeing
Thats what im wondering, because thats the blog post headline i first saw.
Yeah the headline is insane. This would have been a wildly successful experiment, and now is a great time to cash out.
I guess they made a deal to sell their coins to the US.
Edit: misinformation, sorry. They’re not selling. they’re still buying. The IMF is just forcing them to strike the word legal tender
If he were smart, he would bring back the Colon and stop using US Dollars. But noo he had to do stupid shit like Bitcoin.
He’s just a US puppet, Trump literally called him a dictator and said that the Salvadoran people areremoveds and murderers, and Bukele is still licking the US boot. Just like South America’s failson dictator wannabe Daniel Noboa and Captain Ancap in Argentina.
Captain Ancap in Argentina.
And note not even he wants to do crypto
It’s would be much much easier to manipulate the Colon. That’s why it no longer exists.
Why isn’t this being discussed on any of the crypto subreddits? This is all I could find. Somebody’s not telling the truth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ihd9ek/el_salvador_buys_11_more_bitcoin_boosting/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1iflbk5/the_satoshi_statue_has_arrived_in_el_salvador_en/
Mods are probably preemptively blacklisting this article and similar articles to avoid inconvenient information reaching the cryptobros. From a cursory glance, both of those subs seem pretty overwhelmingly biased towards being pro-crypto.
It would hurt their feefees
the buttcoin sub is decent
The government, she assured, will continue buying bitcoin and having reserves in this cryptocurrency. According to the National Bitcoin Office, El Salvador has 6,050 bitcoins worth $634.8 million. “President Bukele continues buying bitco
They are still keeping the mass reserves just not forcing it to be accepted as legal tender in stores. Before if someone wanted to pay in Bitcoin you had to accept it, now you don’t have to.
Yeah most commenters here just read the headline I think.
The govt just wanted the loan so they did the thing.
They’re still big into bitcoin. Seems like their holdings have gone well (only because Trump won), but their other projects haven’t been successful by any metric.
People haven’t taken up crypto as a currency, it’s just the pres using federal resources to invest in crypto. He’s been lucky so far.
Bitcoin seems like the best crypto for storage of reserve funds like gold. If it was to be used day to day something smaller and quicker would be better suited like zcash?
Sorry you’re barking up the wrong tree there mate. Crypto is a detriment to humanity.
Who could have predicted this
