I agree that this will affect people’s decision to transfer BTC or USD, but in the case of El Salvador, we know that they have set up 50 Chivo ATMs in the largest US cities, which means you insert USD into ATM and automatically get BTC free of charge into your Chivo wallet, and then you send that same BTC for a minimal fee to any other Chivo wallet. Let someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I realized that the whole thing works that way.
They are not in the largest cities:
Isn't Chivo giving away $30 to anyone who registers? Of course a lot of people in a poor nation would want to claim free money. The article claims that millions of users were added to Lightning Network, while in reality millions of people just installed an app. Not a fact that they will use it in their daily lives. A lot of people will uninstall it once they claim the free $30 or will use it a few times per year. It's completely unrealistic to think that millions of people who a few weeks ago didn't care about Bitcoin are not "Bitcoin users" who conduct their purchases through LN.
Of course, the number of installs is meaningless to usage.
If we add the downlaods of every bitcoin wallet available in google play we end up with more addresses than the blockchain holds, so...
So, it is 2 million but 14 000 transactions per day, so, a bit more than 0.5% doing a transaction a day.
Not really the best figures but I wasn't expecting more anyhow, in order for poeple to spend be it fiat or bitcoin people must have money in the first place, and that's not one Salvador strong points.