100
September 7, 2021 : The day the first country adopts Bitcoin as a legal tender.
El Salvador, a small country in Central America, officially made Bitcoin as a legal tender, the first country to do so, after Bitcoin's inception in 2008.
Why is it amazing for Global Crypto Lovers?
This could mean only one thing: more adoption. The fact that a country could do it, will now empower many other countries with bad inflation rates to follow their course. This could even have a ripple-effect and lead to cryptocurrency becoming mainstream as we all wanted. Countries like Paraguay, Panama, Mexico, etc are in line in considering this option.
THE UGLY TRUTH
As first mentioned by a reddit user named /u/sam-sung , in the subreddit r/cryptocurrency , who posts images to claim that he is a resident of El Salvador, points out why Bitcoin adoption is not welcome that well inside their own country: Original post
1) The President
To start with, he claims that the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is just trying to print himself as a 'cool guy', but in reality is an extremely Right winged Trump wannabe. A guy, who blames George Soros for pretty much anything! The Parliament approved the Bitcoin Law in LESS than six hours, and it was done very late at night:
Some of our congressmen didn't even know what they were voting for:
The government funding the Bitcoin Law by reducing the education, and health budget and using that money to built the Bitcoin infrastructure:
2) El Salvador US Dollar issue
Initially the currency of El Salvador was Salvadoran Colon, which was changed to US Dollar on 1st of January 2001, and was considered a legal tender.
This led to enormous repercussions. To start with, under the dollarization regime, El Salvador has no control over its own monetary policy. By adopting the US dollar as its official currency, El Salvador has ceded its authority over money supply and interest rates to the Federal Reserve
The poorest Salvadorians are the most affected by dollarization. When the dollar was adopted, all businesses needed to change their prices and translate them into dollars. This led to a phenomenon known as “rounding up”. Because the colon-dollar exchange rate was not an exact value, but a fraction, the shift to the dollar caused businesses to change from colon to dollar by rounding up to the nearest dime, quarter or dollar. This left the poorest Salvadorians worse off because while prices rose, wages did not, leaving everyone with a lower real income.
Source
3) The new Bitcoin Crisis
Again, taking reference from the reddit post as in point 1, the user mentions that most of the people, especially elderly doesn't know the basics of Cryptocurrency, let alone know to use a Bitcoin wallet for transactions. Now that, Bitcoin is a legal tender, they are not entitled to decline a payment in Bitcoin, if a customer intends to pay in it.
His exact words are, " You really don't know the situation in El Salvador, where people can take pictures with a smartphone or upload videos but don't know what an email is or how to reply to one. Even worst, old people cannot even understand what a password is"
CONCLUSION
As I am a crypto enthusiast myself, and loved the move by El Salvador in accepting Bitcoin, it now seems like a move which is hastily done without proper planning and concern for their citizens. While it is still a good news for the global crypto world, I feel that we are consciously or unconsciously sending Salvadorans to a dark era!
I can't predict for now how this will pan out in the long run. Let's just hope for the best at the time being.
My intention is not to plagiarise the original post, instead only to show support for the cause, and publicise his views, along with adding my take on it!
Thanks for reading till the end.
Cheers ??
