El Salvador and Bitcoin
Our Southern neighbor's President, Neyib Bukele took a chance and started investing in Bitcoin about two years ago. I am talking about investing the country's money into Bitcoin, and starting to use Bitcoin as a paralel currency. As far as I know you can use Bitcoin freely in El Salvador and can use it for most commercial transactions.
The investment has been relatively big, the country has a portfolio of about 2,400 Bitcoin, so right now their investment is worth north of $40 million, but their purchases are over $100 million so at the moment they are facing a rather heavy loss. I really don't know what the implications are, as they actually use Bitcoin as currency and I guess its value in the country must not be the same as its international price. Bukele is also trying to implement mining using geo-thermal energy, which could be abundant in that country and would probably bring mining costs down.
I think it is a nice experiment, hope it turns out OK, I have no doubt BTC will go up in price again and the Salvadoran investment will pay for itself. In the meantime it is interesting that a whole country is willing to go down the non fiat road.
Here in my country Honduras, we now have BTC ATM's, well in the two largest cities and there is also a pilot project in a mountain town called Santa Lucia, very visited by tourists, where Bitcoin is now being accepted in most businesses there, I am talking about small shops, souvenir stores, and of course restaurants. So yes, we are slightly a backward country but even here Crypto is starting to make inroads.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta