El Salvador has been buying and holding Bitcoins continuously since 2021. The government of this country, Nayib Bukele, has gained a lot of popularity by investing in Bitcoin and has benefited a lot financially. I saw in a report that yesterday the government of El Salvador bought 11 Bitcoins, for $1 million+. Currently, the total Bitcoins purchased by El Salvador are BTC5980.76, they will buy more Bitcoins in the future, of course, they are fulfilling their goal. Since they are constantly buying Bitcoins, at some point they will have a large amount of Bitcoins in their capital and this will be interesting.

https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1869898617609159148?t=6eiaddspXXBFZoIitNskHQ&s=19

El Salvador has just but 11BTC which is worth more than $1M to add to their bitcoin reserve a day after they made a loan deal of 1.4B deal. This has made the total bitcoin holdings of El Salvador to be 5,980.77 BTC, valued at approximately $580 million at the current price of $97,000 per BTC. El Salvador has gone beyond acquiring one bitcoin per day based on the rule set by Bukele to always acquire one bitcoin per day.

El Salvador planned to continue buying bitcoin in such manners, despite that before IMF agreed to give them the loan, El Salvador agreed to limit their involvement in bitcoin.

https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/12/20/el-salvador-buys-11-btc-a-day-after-1-4b-imf-loan-deal/

In fact, I do not like such a too compromising policy of the Salvadoran government in terms of practically canceling those achievements of the alternative financial system, which became possible in this country three years ago in connection with the legalization of bitcoin. Such a planned change in legislation, which El Salvador makes in order to satisfy the IMF's demands for the provision of the next tranche, as the abolition of the mandatory acceptance of bitcoin by business structures as a mandatory payment unit, in my opinion, simply threw Bukele himself as a triumphant and discoverer of an alternative financial system to the position of an almost ordinary, albeit super-popular leader of a small country. If the reduction of requirements for bitcoin payments in El Salvador continues, this will clearly play a minus in general for the country's image. Bitcoiners will turn away from El Salvador and, on the contrary, there will be a process of refusal from both tourism and the export of the latest IT technologies. And in the long term, El Salvador loses from this. I am not sure that Bukele has a good idea of ​​​​the future of his country.  But in my opinion, he began to make mistakes in global financial policy by betting only on the dollar as the basic national currency. And he makes these mistakes too early, only 3 years after the start of this experiment. By the way, this softening of the requirements for mandatory acceptance of bitcoin in payments, including in the tax system for businesses and citizens, automatically disavows bitcoin as a legal means of payment. Apparently, El Salvador's legislators will also have to change the constitutional norm on the status of bitcoin, adapting to this stupid, momentary, in my opinion, decision.
I think it would not be worth it so quickly, after only 3 years, to so shamefully retreat from the excellent start of the experiment.

It is not that difficult to imagine.

Any company doing business in any country would have to accept their official currency (or currencies).  In the case of El Salvador, since August 2021, it has been the dollar and bitcoin, yet apparently they have not been very strict on such requirement in regards to bitcoin especially with smaller companies, yet if a company is a larger company, then they would be more capable of complying with such a requirement.. especially if they have several business locations in El Salvador.  Sure some McD locations might be company owned and others might be franchises, so it is not necessarily an easy process, even for a BIGGER company that might have operations that are not directly owned by the company but are operating under the company's name..

It is true that since El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, they (the Government of El Salvador) do not require their citizens to use Bitcoin as a currency, but they do give them some flexibility in whether or not they can use it. From that it can be a lesson that the use of two currencies works well and for people there to realize the other side of the ease of using two currencies.

As for the regulations, I would say that in El Salvador it is not complicated although I don't know where the rules apply to large companies.

As a legal tender individuals and companies are mandated by the law to accept Bitcoin except they don't have the necessary technological tools to carry out the transactions. So if I walk into a shop and decide to pay with Bitcoin, the laws says that they should accept my Bitcoin if they have what it takes to process the transactions. The El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law, and Article 7 is in public domain. The laws are clear and anybody can access it for better understanding.

El Salvador has accepted Bitcoin as legal tender, but not everyone knows how to use Bitcoin properly. That is why Nayeb Bukele has introduced an educational policy for Bitcoin education in schools for everyone from children to adults. A country cannot suddenly reach the peak of development, it takes time, although El Salvador lacks the technology for Bitcoin transactions, but they will definitely fill this lack of technology in the future.
However, now that the Bitcoin education system has been launched, the interest in Bitcoin education has become the most desired among almost everyone, and Nayeb Bukele has suppressed terrorists and is doing various other good works. However, the largest number of tourists has gathered in El Salvador, which is why their Bitcoin transactions have gathered the most.

I don't want to piss in anyone's Cheerios, but...

A 'friend of mine' used BTC at McDonald's in El Salvador one time.  It was via the self-order kiosk.  It took the payment, but nothing happened.  Eventually, upon approaching the teller, he was told 'oh, that doesn't work.  You can pay cash here.' which he did.  He lost his BTC.

Pretty much everything used by vendors is Chivo and/or Athena.  It is possible to get one's money back when ripped off, but VERY hard to find and used support for this.  Even when there are flesh-n-blood helper staff.  Honestly, I would have to strongly entertain the hypothesis that at the very least the vendors taking BTC are given leave to scam people since I have seen no mention of the problems or solutions from the 'bitcoin office' who one would hope would be interested in such issues.

My experiments with use of BTC in it's various forms for street level transactions are complete, and I won't be using BTC much any more (whether the real power...the IMF...allows it or not.)  I've had great success using BTC for relatively higher end services and semi-formal business transactions thanks to convertibility at the cash machines.  Car rentals, drivers, etc, but I had the good fortune to be dealing with honest and reliable individual people.  Pretty good luck with the large corporations such as Walmart too.  But...

In order to have any sort of success there needs to be auto-refunds built into transactions for cases when the service provider (e.g., Chivo) simply does not inform the vendor of a successful payment and an alternate form of payment is used.  As we all know, Bitcoin by design does not support 'refunds' and once you sign a transaction it cannot be 'unsigned'.  This should be fairly easy for the 'private/open-source' sector, and for the quasi-state-sponsored efforts like Athena/Chivo to engineer if they had any desire to do so.  Of course there may be 'privacy' issues, but nothing about any of the options in El Salvador seem to have anything to do with 'privacy' including the ATM machines;  They won't play ball without a phone number, and these are all tracked.

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On the IMF 'legal tender' topic:  It is wall-to-wall 'El Salvador bought 11 BTC' copium on X.  It's enough to make a guy laugh out loud.   I highly doubt that the IMF or bond buyer's or anyone is going to be impressed by anyone's BTC stash or loan them any money based on it unless the stash acts as some sort of collateral.  So, at best El Salvador's financial class gets to gamble with derivatives of the stash.  Good luck with that.

What the apologists don't wish to talk about at all (and probably want to drown out with the above) is the IMF's demands that taxes be paid in USD only.  That is to me pretty much the defining legal concept of 'legal tender', and I would have to consider BTC simply not 'legal tender' in El Salvador any more without the ability to use it for taxes ('all debts public and private'.)  These things have very specific legal meanings, and it makes zero difference whether people actually do use BTC to pay taxes or not.

These things are meaningful to the more sophisticated operators higher up in the legal and financial circles of international law and geopolitics, and not really accessible at the lower levels.  I would have hoped that the likes of Herbert and Keiser would have taken this as an opportunity to teach deeper lessons about the international financial swamp, but instead they seem to have gone the opposite direction and used people's ignorance to divert their attention toward shiny and meaningless trinkets via some fairly base propaganda techniques.  I'm disappointed to be honest.

It’s still a bit crazy looking back and seeing that El Salvador was willing to be the first to do so. Certainly there were many across the world that didn’t believe in his vision and things certainly got worse at a certain point in time, which of course gave me even more pause to what he had planned and in store. Things are certainly looking pretty good right now.

World's first Bitcoin nation scales back crypto dream


Source link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20e3l3xllwo


El Salvador has achieved the highest success by investing in Bitcoin alone, that's why they celebrated the highest Bitcoin logo in front of the people for the first time. Because they are currently ready to invest more Bitcoin, and will attract more people through this festival. The more people in El Salvador celebrate like this, the more Bitcoin holders will come, but I definitely like this celebration the most.