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195 sats \ 1 reply \ @om 24 Jul 2022 \ on: El Salvador’s Embrace of Bitcoin Didn’t Bring Prosperity — It Rode in With... bitcoin
Of course it didn't bring prosperity YET because El Salvador rode bitcoin from 40K to 20K. But 1 year is an extremely short timeframe for grading such a decision.
And I don't remember seeing Bukele (or anyone) say bitcoin would bring prosperity to El Salvador within a year.
But the authors (and the publication in which their piece appears) are trying to paint Bukele as negatively as they can as in two years there is an election, and Bukele currently has an incredible level of support yet. So they list everything they can to help take Bukele down a couple notches.
Even so, they had to share some bright spots.
Garcia is used to pushing a cart through the sunshine, lugging around supplies, selling sweet ice treats to locals and tourists, including Bitcoiners, some of whom are buying up property in the area.
Bitcoiners are buying property in El Salvador? That sounds like economic activity that came a result of the adoption of bitcoin.
No one we queried thought that El Salvador, a country about the size of New Jersey, needed another airport, except perhaps as a place to bring in private jets of crypto elites or anyone else favored by the regime.
I've got no opinion one way or the other on the economic viability of the airport, but did the article mention that the airport is also to (eventually) accommodate a military base? They did mention that the area is currently used heavily by narcos for cocaine shipments. Using eminent domain for expansion of military footprint is something the left almost never chastises.
Airport of the Pacific
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_of_the_Pacific
Remittances accounts for as much as one-quarter of the country’s economy. Less than 2 percent of remittances sent to El Salvador now use bitcoin.
The article given as the source for that 2% number says the figure comes from the "Central Reserve Bank (BCR)" showing that $96.3 million entered the country via “digital cryptocurrency wallets". Presumably, that means through Chivo -- the only bitcoin remittance method operating there, I believe. Unless BCR also has visibility into Strike accounts. But that $100M is actually a win. That's $100M that didn't go through Moneygram, Western Union, or whatever other banking-related remittance methods are used there.
The authors do not even acknowledge how bitcoin remittances can be sent person-to-person and thus there's no way to know how much bitcoin has been received from outside the country, how much of that is converted to cash via P2P trading, how much of that is spent at local merchants, etc.
So that 2% number is really just the lower-bound.
Now if the question is instead "Is bitcoin helping in El Salvador?", I think the answer can only be: "it's too early to tell to what degree, but there's certainly reasons to remain hopeful it is helping."
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