Topic: El Salvador has become the first country to make #Bitcoin legal tender! 🇸🇻 - page 74. (Read 38876 times)

Here I can tell that they will continue to make efforts to achieve their goals. No offense to the IMF and no defense of El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin. Like two sides of a coin, El Salvador will continue to take the steps it has made while the IMF will try to obstruct or prevent it for various reasons.

As a financial institution, perhaps the IMF feels that they will get support in terms of financial warnings against El Salvador, but I think that behind it all is a fear that Bitcoin will become an official currency because it can beat the value of fiat currencies. That's my logic and I agree with you that they don't want Bitcoin to be recognized.

I am not able to cite any specific source, but it seems that when we hear bitcoin monetary folks talking about how the IMF, World Bank and various governmental institutions are talking about El Salvador's bitcoin adoption, they are showing that the various international monetary folks are scared as fuck because they are ongoingly jumping through hoops and engaging in all kinds contradictory logic (lack of logic) to describe bitcoin as NOT legitimate as a currency or as non-legitimate ways that a sovereign nation can recognize transactions of value within their country. 

Many international monetary standards require the recognition of the monetary choices of sovereign nations, even though in the case of El Salvador's recognition of bitcoin, exceptions are being made in order to proclaim that international monetary institutions do not need to recognize bitcoin, and then state false reasons to attempt to justify themselves, such as bitcoin's energy inefficiencies.. and of course there is going to be some basis in reality for some of the stated concerns.. yet many of those stated concerns are causing them to lose credibility so they have to shift their story from time to time, and I suppose the more and more that bitcoin is used by a variety of people, then people become less convinced about the protests coming from international monetary institutions.

It seems that there are some various provisions of laws being rethought, rewritten and/or reinterpreted in order to refuse to recognize bitcoin and to even fight against bitcoin, even though a sovereign nation has chosen bitcoin as one of their official means in which value can be transacted within their country.

It seems like a losing battle to me for the IMF, World Bank, other financial institutions and various counties to be fighting against bitcoin in these kinds of ways to demonize and to fail to recognize bitcoin as legitimate - so their creation of stronger rhetoric against bitcoin shows aspects of their level of desperation - and it seems that people become less and less convinced.. even though there are a lot of people who are still willing to go along with the denigration of bitcoin statements - because they do not know enough about bitcoin.. and so I suppose ongoing knowledge and exposure to bitcoin does seem like it is a long and slow process - even if there are times in which it seems that a lot of folks are jumping on board towards appreciating bitcoin (which seems to come more when the BTC price is going up), but I suppose some regular folks become bitter too, if they get their money caught up into locations in which they might have lost a large amount of their bitcoin.. and some folks lost all their bitcoin, and might not have realized that they might not have really owned bitcoin if they had been dealing with various yield products or even getting greedy with their bitcoin entrusting other folks to "invest" their bitcoin, and those folks were gambling, with such bitcoin (and we witnessed a lot of those examples in the last year, which could have caused some folks to lose faith in bitcoin, and confusion regarding what is bitcoin)..   


It seems to me that sometimes it will seem that concessions are being made, and some of the global financial players are realizing that their direct attacks are not convincing, so they have to work behind the scenes to continue to sabotage and to provide disadvantages to try to undermine El Salvador, if they are able to do it.  Yeah, and maybe indirect and subtle attacks are better than some of the direct attacks.. and surely the IMF/World Bank and outside financial/government institutions are waiting for an opportunity to pounce in the event that El Salvador screws up in their use/transition into greater and greater adoptions/building of bitcoin in their country and El Salvador's ongoing attempts to demonstrate models for other similarly situated poor countries.

Still on the matter with El-Savador and IMF, they made a fresh declaration that bitcoin and it's risk is yet to materialize in El-Savador https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1624478306769797121?t=ysyyvp24ZGttCYYjWabNAQ&s=19 to me they have expected from El-Savador to have grown or shown evidently to the world the danger or risk it has behold from its bitcoin adoption but still yet, nothing is coming up in this regard, which means the image from which the IMF are viewing the bitcoin adoption is from a wrong perspective with El-Savador despite it's countless times warning, this is really encouraging because El-Savador is giving alot of taughts on this, the decision is theirs and not IMF, you take charge and bear full responsibilities for your actions, but the risk associated with fiat monetary system and central authorities which they have with banks has all these years been materialized which is the reason we needed to be more careful with banks while embracing the decentralized network with bitcoin adoption.

It wouldn't be wrong if I wanted an explanation from you and JayJuanGee on the adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador. Your and JayJuanGee explanations really prove that the knowledge of Bitcoin development information in El Salvador is above most people present in this thread.

Regarding the risks of Bitcoin, the IMF continues to prioritize Article IV in 2021 even though their intention to El Salvador as stated in the official website you shared was to consult on Article IV 2023.
I will try to study both articles so that they can be taken into consideration to add to my knowledge regarding the IMF's desire for El Salvador's Bitcoin adoption.

These countries hardly will adopt bitcoin as a legal tender in the nearest future. All rhetoric of their governments doesn't give us such expectations. Even when they say about permissive legislation of bitcoin they don't mean it will get all right of a national currency. Look at Brazil: they permitted even to use bitcoin to pay with it (we have news about that Brazilians can even pay taxes with bitcoins), but they didn't make it a legal tender and I didn't hear they are thinking about anything like that.

If that's what it's supposed to be, I don't think there's a problem either. After all, El Salvador also had the courage to make decisions by adopting things that other countries did not dare to adopt. So it won't be a problem if everyone thinks that El Salvador managed to pay off all its debts with the efforts and adoptions they've put in so far.

However, El-Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele revealed that the government had paid off US$800 million worth of bonds, plus interest on the same day they matured. On his Twitter account, Bukele, who is one of the biggest supporters of BTC, said that he was sorry that most of the international media did not share this information. At the same time, they are among the first to cast doubt on whether the state will be able to repay the US$800 million bond that matures on January 23. _{Source: id.tradingview.com}

Bitcoin legal tender refers to when the people of a country can accept a product or service in exchange for bitcoins, that is, the exchange will be recognized as a legitimate policy by the local law.
Although there are 228 countries in the world, only two countries have declared Bitcoin as legal tender. EI Salvador, a small country in Latin America, is the first in the world to declare Bitcoin as legal tender. EI Salvador's President Nayib Bukele declared Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021.
The Central African Republic (CAR) became the second country to announce Bitcoin as legal tender in April 2021. Currently, these two countries out of more than two hundred countries in the world have recognized Bitcoin as legal tender.

But not these two countries but several other countries are in the pipeline to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender.

Saint Kitts and Nevis
Paraguay
Ukraine
Russia &US
Venezuela

Mexican Senator Indria Kempis introduced a bill to legal tender Bitcoin, noting that about 67M (56%) of the country's people do not want to use their bank accounts and instead pay attention to Bitcoin. But the country's central bank opposes a bill that would introduce bitcoin as legal tender. So far no second bill has been introduced to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender in the country of Mexico.

Read more about it:Mexican Senator Indria Kempis Proposed Bitcoin bill as a Legal tender

I wonder which next country will make Bitcoin legal tender? Will it be Mexico?

Anyway, eventually all countries will become Bitcoin countries.

I don't have much that I could attempt to explain in regards to some potential lessening hostility that might be taking place - except there could some dynamics in which El Salvador (Bukele) have fewer and fewer relations with the IMF and World Bank (which @DdmrDdmr seems to have had outlined in his post..  the IMF/World Bank remain interested, but with the passage of time, El Salvador seems to be cutting them out)... so there could be some forcing into irrelevancy of those historically oppressive financial establishments.  

Other indebted and poor countries may well copy such models that attempt to get out of the grasps of those world financial institutions, yet the whole process of extraction seems to be long since the whole world seems to go around based on debt, and bitcoin systems do not completely remove El Salvador from debt, and I doubt that any kind of propaganda campaign from the powers that be financial/governmental institutions is going to stop - even if there might be less ammunition that the IMF or the World Bank can throw at El Salvador if the BTC price is going up, and El Salvador is paying off their debt that involve those kinds of control-fanatics (IMF/World Bank) and working out other financial relations, that involve bitcoin transitional systems that are still being conceptualized, created and hopefully put into practice.

And, sure I would say that @Artemis3 outlined well the motivations that poor countries (and people from poor countries) have to get out of the grasp and the historical strangle-hold of the control and debt systems that are placed upon them from the outside and even the contagion of those outside forces into the banking options within their countries, and surely we can see the motivations for "why bitcoin," yet we are still in the very early stages in terms of watching how the incentives are going to play out - including how much of a battle that world financial/governing institutions are going to put up, and how desperate that they might become in terms of trying to hold onto status quo financial/debt systems,

.....and I would not even proclaim that there is going to be any kind of "clear sailing" for El Salvador because there are always going to be temptations for individuals to be corrupt or even to lose control of systems that they have established - including some of the facts that as outsiders we cannot really have a lot of confidence regarding the extent to which Bukele has already created secure enough bitcoin custodial systems so that he is not going to be rug-pulling the bitcoin community or his citizens in regards to either running off with the bitcoin or losing the bitcoin that he had supposedly bought and is somehow custodying.  I am not even sure what would be "best practices," even though we know that there are ways in which multi-party signatures can be set up. .so that a procedure has to be followed in order to unlock coins, but sometimes leaders (or business owners) are not going to want to "publicly reveal" the totality of their coin security systems (to the extent any security exists) because they might be concerned about revealing too much and causing vulnerabilities through their sharing of such systems that they have in place (presuming they have some kind of security rather than Bukele walking around with El Salvador's coins in a bitcoin wallet on his phone.. and we find out that sometimes leaders (or otherwise seemingly smart people - LukeDasher) do some stupid things, and some of the vulnerabilities are ONLY found out after some kind of a blow up incident.. which we had seen a lot of those this year with Terra/Luna, 3AC, Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager, FTX/Alameda, Genesis/Gemini.. and perhaps some other BIG ONEs that I am currently not remembering).  Bukele claims that he did not have any coins that were involved or connected to any of these potential third party custodians, but sometimes they are NOT going to say anything until their name comes up on a list (I am not even saying that I have any information that Bukele lost any of El Salvador's supposed bitcoin stash, yet.. Bukele, on his own, seems to be pretty smart when it comes to bitcoin, but he also seems to have the ear of some of the seemingly smartest of bitcoin maximalists in the space.. which surely can be helpful, even though surely any of the individual smart folks are fallible in various ways too.).

This image posted by Cygan in the WO thread seems to summarize the evolving timeline of the El Salvador situation fairly well.

It doesn't matter what the IMF says. El Salvador is financing itself from investors coming for the simple fact that Bitcoin is welcome, furthermore the Bitcoin City project with its VAT only policy is definitely going to attract more than one company as it will become a fiscal haven. If you can't see what this will bring to the country you must be blind.

No, the effects are not immediate, and no, there is still debt to be paid back. BUT, the fact that they are paying beyond what was "expected", while NOT doing whatever the IMF says, is sending the world strong signal that i have seen very few times before from other countries in the region.

Someone said IMF represent capitalism, but that is actually inaccurate. In true capitalism, if a bank loans more than what it really has and people withdraw, it goes bankrupt as it should (the market doing its own "check and balances"). BUT by having the State intervene to aid those banks (instead of the people who deposited their money thinking it would be "safe" there) creates a distortion of false security that should not exist in the first place. You should fear a bank the same way you fear an exchange. If the money is not in your own wallet (not Your keys...). A bank deposit is in reality a loan you give to the bank with the hope it is repaid back. Think of what this means, are you afraid a friend may not pay you what you once lent? Then why would you trust some company?

A "custodial" is the opposite of what they portray, but because its a business its marketed well. You are exchanging verify with trust, custodial means don't verify, trust they will have it "safe" for you, just like a bank...

Bitcoin is the end of banks, you don't need a bank account with bitcoin, you don't need a debit or credit card with bitcoin, and more importantly for El Salvador, you don't need a money transfer company with Bitcoin. The fact that is Bitcoin and not some State CBDC, means you are free to use a wallet you trust, Chivo being good or bad doesn't make or kill adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador. Its nice, but its optional, you can always use another wallet with Lightning etc. The important thing is, you can pay and be paid in bitcoin there so you can have a circular economy. How much does that release the country from loses in fees given to others? Do you know that moving USD from country a to country b can take from 15 to 30%? And do you know many people are migrants sending money back to their families? This is not unlike The Philippines or many other countries in the same situation.

If you don't live in a poor country, you simply don't get it because you have not experienced what it is to not have access to fiat cash (because hyperinflation destroyed it) and no access to plastic cards (because the rules of your country made illegal to use foreign currencies/and or is sanctioned) and being chained to banks that take days to transfer that trash money that loses value everyday. To you the problem doesn't even exist because your USD and EUR can buy anything and you even have plastic cards that make it possible cashless and you can happily go to a bank and open an account and be given one, its like you'll never experience a problem of not having the means it exchange wealth in your life; something that many people suffer is probably an alien concept when you live in one of the "nice" countries.

And then you will wonder "what Bitcoin can do to a country" and be puzzled while living in a nice place where such issue appears to not exist. Yes it does exist, but its taking longer to be noticed, naturally. The pandemic revealed it a bit, Even Japan had a 50% devaluation after decades of the Yen being "stable", if course USD and EUR got record inflation because, surprise, politicians simply "printed" more because they can...

And there is the people who have not read the Austrian economists and don't understand why the economic cycles of bubble and burst are created cyclically thanks in great part to the trash fiat which is in turn needed by the monetarist school of Chicago that is the current most economists follow...

At the foot of this post you’ll find an article poste don IMF’s website, where they summarize the outcome of the official staff visit to El Salvador.

In terms of bitcoin related comment, they essentially reiterate their opinion on the country being exposed to a series of risks to "financial integrity and stability, fiscal sustainability, and consumer protection", though the limited use of bitcoin there, in practical terms, and from a macroscopic point of view, currently sets those risks way lower that the IMF might have thought it could be by now.

The IMF also slaps El Salvador on the wrists for their lack of transparency on bitcoin purchases and the Chivo System itself, something that seems a clear call that many can abide to. They vouch for proper audits to be carried out, indicating that one on the bitcoin trust fund (aka fidebitcoin) will soon conclude. Let's see if we get wind of that later on publicly.

As to the bitcoin bonds (or other token based products), the IMF is essentially discouraging their issuance, labelling them as something to avoid due to fiscal risks. Nevertheless, the kind of state that, if they do go ahead with them, the controls and guarantees should bathe in the best practices of traditional securities. It looks like they don't want them to go forward with them, but are well aware that they are going to come through regardless of IMFs will (as expected).

See:
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2023/02/10/el-salvador-staff-concluding-statement-of-the-2023-article-iv-mission

The goal of the International Monetary Fund is to spread capitalism and the orientation towards bitcoin will harm its orientation, as the bank, through loans, can play a major political and economic role for many countries, especially developing and poor ones.
El Salvador's experience with Bitcoin was limited. Despite the legislation and legal regulations, the actual use was not popular, so the International Monetary Fund may have modified its policy instead of the strict approach.

May have gotten something wrong about El Salvador's debt repayment as there is nothing like El Salvador's total debt settlement, but we hardly knew about the last few weeks back of El Salvador repaying a large amount of its debt but not all the debt has been settled.
- El Salvador bitcoin adoption is a long-term movement and we have to take a break from analysing the success or failure of bitcoin adoption in El Salvador.
-Also we have to wait for the completion of some El Salvador national projects that will facilitate flexibility of bitcoin usage and adoption within the region.

By Bitcoin development, do you mean how popular Bitcoin is used in El Salvador, or how BTC has or can develop El Salvador. Some of the statistics from El Salvador is that many people have downloaded the Chivo BTC wallet, i don't know the number of people that pay merchants through BTC, but i know El Salvador's BTC adoption is still young. Anyway the nation is attracting "BTC tourists", and i feel it should help to boost their tourism sector, but i feel it is still very early to make too many suggestions of success or failure.

Many people wrongly think BTC adoption only is going to bring development to El Salvador, BTC is a currency and some people forget about that. I know El Salvador have invested big into BTC for profits, but they are not planning on selling their BTC anytime soon.

We don't know the extent of Bitcoin development in El Salvador but I personally keep trying to scour various news sites to find out about Bitcoin development in El Salvador.
Since the initial announcement made by Nayyib Bukele that their country would legalize Bitcoin, many people have opposed the policy. The IMF was no exception.
The IMF was the first to warn Bukele to reconsider his decision on the grounds of economic safety and so on.

Then with the news you shared, Reuters wrote that the IMF again warned El Salvador to reconsider their efforts regarding Bitcoin bonds.
Actually, according to my observation from this Reuters news, the IMF thinks that El Savodor is avoiding IMF financing.
But with their visit, I can judge that the IMF has seemed to have lowered their tension a little than what has been stated in the past.

I am waiting for a clear explanation from some people who are more familiar with this such as @JayJuanGee and @DdmrDdmr.

So at this point with El Salvador paying off all of their debt, is it considered the first countrywide adoption success story?

Reflect all they want, the world doesn't need IMF, WB, Central Banks. Each bank should stop using fractional reserve by default, and each bank should be accountable on their own and not helped by the State to sustain their legalized Ponzi scheme, speaking of which, should be back to be illegal as it was in the 19th century.

Your deposits in a bank should be backed by 100%, which obviously means paying fees to the bank to keep ALL of it in custody. Now if you want to play games with that then you should transfer to some lending/financing whatever they want to call it account, with all the risks involved. AND, if its lent, you must lose access to it until its paid back. No games of multiplying money.

Of course there is too much money they made by their ponzi scheme and countless generations that grew up thinking that was normal, so easy it won't be (with fiat anyway). With Bitcoin its simple: Not your keys... no fractional reserve.

Banks are NOT a necessity, and should just go. A few will remain, sure, there is always people needing such "services", but let them be a rarity.

Imagine all the resources that would be saved with less banks? And they (Ripple bankers) blame bitcoin of "polluting", when they should see their own face in the mirror...

You are right, it is a possible scenario and that's why they should work as much as possible. But as we see in this topic, they do so. I'm not sure if they can do really much more: they implement different educational courses, they develop different infrastructure project, they try to attract bitcoin friendly business and tourists, they try to multiply BTMs. If they have an option to do more it is of course important to do it on this early stage, but what they already do is amazing by itself.

The IMF, after another visit to Central America, changed the rhetoric regarding the policy of accepting bitcoin by El Salvador, saying that the risks associated with El Salvador's policy regarding bitcoin did not materialize, but El Salvador, according to the IMF, should reconsider plans to expand state participation in bitcoin. Here, it seems to me that the IMF is reflecting on the recently adopted law on digital assets, I hope that the adoption of this law will help El Salvador to further strengthen its position on the adoption of bitcoin.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/imf-says-el-salvadors-bitcoin-risks-have-not-materialized-should-be-addressed-2023-02-11/

I think Nayib Bukele will win th 2024 election. He was in better position and currently he holds 56 seats out of 84 seats which is 13 seats higher than the requirement for a majority which is 43 seats. The second party on list is Nationalist Republican Alliance which just holds 11 seats. In his tenure he have done everything in a better way. Hope he'll win the election and continue making his country progress through bitcoin.