The Financial Times published an article where it said that El Salvador has good economic indicators, it is successfully paying off obligations on bonds, but still the newspaper is trying to put it in a negative light because of bitcoins. This is despite the fact that they themselves note that the negative forecasts that predicted El Salvador's decline and default have not come true, and its credit ratings have grown. It seems that they will persist in their bitcoin hate to the last, no matter how well El Salvador develops.
In this case, when he does decide to adopt bitcoin, of course there will be a lot of eyes highlighting the steps taken by Bukele. as @Cryptmuster said as long as the majority of the population supports this I think they already know the consequences when they will always be hated, especially for countries that really don't want El Salvador's policies.
But the important point is as long as they are comfortable and some profit they have got from the adoption of bitcoin that they do I feel they are enough for it regardless of being hated or not it won't matter to them because most importantly with the risky decision they took in the beginning now has produced good results for them.
But times have changed. In February, Moody’s changed its outlook from negative to stable, citing a “decreased risk of a credit event in the near term” and “manageable” repayments on the 2025 bond. Its 2025 and 2027 debts are now trading at 78.39 and 55.92 cents on the dollar.
This statement alone proves that things are slowly getting better for them.
I agree with everything you said here, but I have been following this thread for a long time and I feel that the discussion all too often deviates from the original subject, which is Bitcoin as legal tender in a sovereign state. I have often read explicitly or between the lines that this thread discusses more about El Salvador being an
investor in Bitcoin than an
economy being operated with Bitcoin as one legal tender.I think that most of those who post here are not really interested in the deep implications that the term
legal tender is holding. But that would actually be the much more interesting discussion. What does it mean if Bitcoin becomes legal tender? It is not only the obvious answer like "you can pay your debt with it" or "settle your tax with it" or "merchants have to accept it as a form of payment". All these obvious answers entail a plethora of implications from the perspective of both the national and international political and social economy.
But in order for people discuss deep implications, they would have to put a lot of effort into educating themselves first with lots of terms in their isolated form and the interdependencies between them.
Again, legal tender is a topic that gets me excited, but this topic has come off track before it really even got started. Or perhaps I am nit-picking and I take OP's headline too seriously.