Topic: El Salvador has become the first country to make #Bitcoin legal tender! 🇸🇻 - page 121. (Read 43185 times)

From the survey result, you can easily point out the general behavior of El Salvadorans toward bitcoin through the chivo wallet record but then we should not forget the fact that not all Bitcoin users in El Salvador access the network through the Chivo wallet some users will use other none custodial wallets and hardware wallets which are not accounted for in the survey, more importantly, is the increase in the number of businesses/ companies that have adopted Bitcoin payment since it legal adoption, which percentage is placed at 20% within the short period Bitcoin is made legal tender in that region. Also am not surprised by the general conversion rate of Bitcoin into dollars this is the general appetite of most people toward Bitcoin to avoid its volatility.

1800 Salvadorans were surveyed by National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), this number of people surveyed are not much but this still gives some information about the use of bitcoin as a legal tender in El Salvador.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/one-fifth-of-businesses-in-el-salvador-now-accept-bitcoin-nber-study

According to the report from National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Chivo wallet users decreased the use of cash by 10% and decrease the use of debit cards by 11%

Among owners of firms and employees familiar with the companies payment methods, 20% said their company or place of work accept bitcoin while 25% accepts credit card.

Also in the research, 71% of bitcoin sales are mostly converted to dollar, 17% stored as dollar on Chivo wallet while 10% stored as bitcoin.

A question
Salvadorans using Chivo wallet and Salvadorans using bank, which one is more?

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele have come up with more predictions for the year 2022, almost everything looks to be on the postpone level. The major prediction comprises of bitcoin price reaching $100k. Two other countries adopting bitcoin as legal tender. Bitcoin being a major issue in US elections. Bitcoin City construction, volcano bonds and surprise at the Bitcoin Conference.

Among all that's been mentioned price movement could happen. One more country Central African Republic have adopted it as legal tender and Honduras SEZ there is adoption of bitcoin as legal tender. About the election, there is no big news. Bitcoin City and Volcano bonds seems to be postponed as there is no planned profit. About the bitcoin conference, President Nayib Bukele wasn't able to attend due to some fights happening within the country. So, we can expect all that are in the postponed phase to make a big change in the future.

Yet amidst their failure we found another El-Savador in Central African Republic with an official statement of accepting bitcoin as a legal tender https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/central-african-republic-adopts-bitcoin-as-legal-currency/ar-AAWEdfe this is a plus one on the entire Africa countries, El-Savador has now develop more confidence convincing enough for it to continue, i heard some are making claims about the debt of El-Savador and how the rate increases to about 18% claiming poverty and inflation rate are going high and El-Savador already in debt it can't afford to pay nor come out of it, i will like to ask about other countries that does not adopt bitcoin as a legal tender, are they not in debt? Aren't they battling inflation? Their own poverty rate has a degree ahead that of El-Savador's.

How would it not be successful, it would. See the US dollar Pounds, Euro and other fiat getting devalued which is how they are, this is one of the reasons bitcoin will proof itself. Even without the devaluing of fiat, if fiat remain somewhat stable, which is not possible though, the price of bitcoin will still increase because more people are demanding for it. Bitcoin now at 5 digits, let us expect 6 digits next 2 or 3 years. It will be successful but it will take time before El Salvador will know the effect.

Not a failure, the fault in Chivo wallet that led to loss of US dollar could be one of the reasons, people do not joke with their money, once people see a way money can be lost, they will avoid. It will take time before some people will have confidence in Chivo wallet. Also as more people in El Salvador are getting educated about bitcoin, they will know more about it and use it. It can be a matter of time though.

What that I see that is also most important is that El Salvador support bitcoin, that is a success. The success is in those that buy bitcoin and make the adoption to continue

I have said on this thread before that what that matters most is adoption, El Salvador is one of the good part of the story but not only the story, countries that have citizens that hold and involve in other ways bitcoin is having more adoption all contributed. Check the image below.


https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/cryptocurrency-gains-by-country-2021/

Its a good thing for el savador to make progress in the economy, as we know that bitcoin users and community continues to increase, and in latin america a lot of data says crypto users will increase by more than 100% in 2021, i'm sure it will be a lot of benefits for el citizens savador.

I’ve whipped through the survey to see the methodology being used. The survey was conducted in a face-to-face (which I like) manner by a local company called CID-Gallup, on 1800 Salvadorian households during February 2022. The amount is representative statistically speaking (95% confidence;1,94% margin of error).It seems well done in terms of choosing  a sample to survey that is heterogeneous enough: male and female nearly equally represented, age segments well balanced, multiple districts represented – although with a heavy representation in San Salvador, which one could expect (see Apendix B on below reference).

There are parts that, albeit only taking a brief look at the survey, seem like something to remark. For example, figure 4b (page 16) indicates that something like 50% of those that downloaded the Chivo Wallet has remittances in mind as one of the reasons, although only 11% actually did (8% in USD but only 3% in BTC). There is therefore a gap between what was expected and what has happened so far, and perhaps that gap deserved a further question.

The majority have never used BATMs, but 42,86% (figure 4e) have made at least 1 withdrawl. Table 3 on the subsequent page (17) provides averages for those than used bitcoin ATMs more than once, but averages will mix those heavy users with those lightweight users. A breakdown by this kind of categorization would be more useful in my opinion. We need to bear in mind that bitcoin ATMs are also more concentrated in certain areas, and scare or non-existant in others, as shown in figure A3 (of Apendix A).

All in all, the interesting thing to do is to perform these kinds of surveys recurrently, see their evolution, and in general, drill-down further on some boolean yes/no questions to better understand frequencies and values by categorized clusters.

See: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29968/w29968.pdf

I suspect this study is just trying to focus on chivo wallets and we all know that chivo wallet is issued by the government of El Salvador, it is a kind of custodial wallet. What about those using non-custodial wallets?.
8 months is not enough to say that El Salvador has failed, things have only just begun and I hope Bukele has a plan and continues to bring bitcoin closer to their people. And contingency plans for a protracted bear market are becoming increasingly apparent.

I'm not sure, how far is the data accurate. Based on the data it isn't a failure. The country is experimenting and experiencing the reality of adoption. This will help other countries in the queue for bitcoin as legal tender to make better plans and implement.
It is too early to give conclusion for the big step taken by a country. For a country with a population around 7million even 5% of users getting used to bitcoin and making use of it directly is a big success. I believe El Salvador have achieved it. El Salvador have to plan wise to withstand the situation even when the market turns bearish, because it is the only country that is being followed to know how effective is bitcoin in a country's growth.

Of course, there are some other options besides the government sponsored wallet - and surely there has been some level of adoption (even if relatively small) that provides options to citizens whether they figure out how to use those options or not.

Furthermore, in terms of actual use of something like relatively "free" remittances, that can be a very powerful option to have and to use, and even if it takes a decent amount of time for newbie normies to take advantage of such option, those individuals can become quite empowered by how much money they are saving by using that kind of a service. 

We also know that there is no real guarantee that bitcoin's prices are going to go up or even "go up forever Laura".. but having these kinds of possibilities to hedge any kind of value that is being saved by a variety of people across the El Salvador population (some of them rich, some medium wealth and probably a decent number of poor) could still cause a certain level of prosperity for any of the population that have been ready, willing and able to store (invest) some of their value into bitcoin as a savings mechanism.  We know that bitcoin has historically had 3.5 year periods in which it has NOT performed positively to fiat, and I have frequently asserted that there is a need for a couple of cycles to really start to feel the wealth effect from HODLing bitcoin (and yeah, 2 cycles would be 8 years), and how long it takes to feel the wealth effect of holding bitcoin will depend on a variety of factors including how much any person had put into bitcoin and perhaps even their methods of putting value into bitcoin in such a way that they are NOT having to tap into their bitcoin savings during that time of accumulating, buying and or HODLing bitcoin...

since the beginning of the emergence of bitcoin we have seen how serious the country of El Salvador is in the long-term adoption of bitcoin in the country and even they became the first country to legalize bitcoin for the country's public.even where they have created how many bitcoin ATMs so that it can be done transactions by their citizens.we really hope that with the adoption from these developing countries.at least it can increase the price of bitcoin more stable as it happened a few years ago

8 months after they had made it a legal tender isnt something enough for us to say that it was a big failure and its not bad to make out some consideration on giving off some time before we would make out
some conclusions.Its somewhat expected that this wont really be ending up to be a happy ending considering that people or citizens are get used to fiat or traditional payments which you could really
able to see these kind of hesitance on adopting the current thing that they are involved with.You  could really expect that people would be still cosidering on using the old ways
but its good to see that 10% of overall number are really into it.

Let's presume that all of these facts are correct.  Does that mean that you (Vaskiy or anyone else) would agree with the conclusion that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment is "a big failure" or "failed to take off?"

I personally would assert that the data does not support the such conclusion, but I would be interested to hear possible strong arguments (based on reason, facts and logic rather than emotions and fears about bitcoin) that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment is "a big failure" - especially given that we are still ONLY less than 8 months since the legal tender law actually went into effect - - even though surely we are nearly 10 11 months since the June 2021 announcement that they (El Salvador) were (was) going to go down this bitcoin implementation path.

Edit: made the two minor changes highlighted above

A recent study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an American nonprofit research organization, Bitcoin adoption has failed to take off in El Salvador for various reasons.

• More than 60% of respondents ditched the government’s Chivo wallet after using the $30 bonus
• 89% of Salvadorans have never received remittances with the help of the chivo app
• 99% of the respondents have never paid taxes with Bitcoin.
• 60% of citizens did not download Chivo at all
• Majority of Salvadorans have never used Chivo ATMs
• 80% of companies in El Salvador still do not accept the largest cryptocurrency
• 12% of the storea accepting bitcoin chose to store their coins in the wallet, whereas the majority convert it to USD
• El Salvador also postponed the issuance of its much-hyped Bitcoin bonds.

Source : El Salvador's Bitcoin Experiment Is Big Failure, Study Shows

This is barely eight to nine months now and El-Savador is still going along, remember earlier this year the prize run deep around $34k before it swindled it way around $47k, now bitcoin is back to $38k bearish move and you think this will cause a panic on El-Savador's? Bukele has have plans and strategies in place which US fail to see nor understand, but i believe the time El-Savador will begin to unleash it fortune will be when a new ATH record is set and/or after the launch of it volcanic bond, they will definitely survive through because this is not their first experience.

I really hope their country will succeed with bitcoin although know that it is very difficult because the price volatility of bitcoin is so big. El Salvador is betting the nation's fate on bitcoin, pray for them.

Whether they succeed or not, plus the great things bitcoin has shown in the battle between Russia and Ukraine, surely many other countries are also very interested in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Actually, as a Crypto trader, I am very happy with this news, of course I support it because it benefits me and most crypto players. Of course, from that decision they were threatened with punishment from the IMF, because the IMF considered Bitcoin a threat to the stability of world currencies, especially the US dollar. Bukele became an extraordinary president, he is the pioneer of a country that accepts Bitcoin as Payment. If they are successful, I think many countries will follow suit. Although I think El Salvador's Bitcoin purchase fund is huge and i think when the Bitcoin price drop today made the country's financial reserves a little bit.