El Salvador became the first country in the world to use Bitcoin as legal currency. President Nayib Bukele has been at work modernizing the country since his election in 2019, including legalizing Bitcoin to help Salvadorans who don’t have access to traditional financial services.
“We must break with the paradigms of the past,” he said in a statement translated from Spanish. “El Salvador has the right to advance toward the first world.”
Bukele also said that using Bitcoin would be an easy way to transfer billions of dollars in remittances that Salvadorans living outside the country send back each year. El Salvador currently holds 550 Bitcoin, which is about $26 million.
People have been using Bitcoin effectively in its rollout.
“Just walked into a McDonald’s in San Salvador to see if I could pay for my breakfast with bitcoin, tbh fully expecting to be told no,” Aaron van Wirdum said in a tweet that was retweeted by Bukele.”But low and behold, they printed a ticket with QR that took me to a webpage with Lightning invoice, and now I’m enjoying my desayuno traditional!”
There are some minor setbacks to using the Bitcoin method. A recent poll by the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, a Jesuit college based in El Salvador, found that 67.9% of people opposed the decision to make Bitcoin legal currency. People have had trouble using the currency because they aren’t familiar.
Time will tell if El Salvador succeeds with this method and sets a precedent for other countries around the world.
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