El Salvador wants to make bitcoin a legal tender from crypto currency. A bill to that effect will be tabled in Congress in the coming weeks
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President Nayib Bukele announced this in a video message at the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami on Saturday. “It will create jobs and integrate thousands of people into the formal economic circuit,” the president said. He referred, among other things, to the fact that seventy percent of its population does not have a bank account. “This will improve the lives and futures of millions of people,” he says.
The country works together with the payment service Strike for this. According to CEO Jack Mallers, El Salvador would become the first country in the world to introduce bitcoin as legal tender.
Bitcoin is the most famous crypto currency. It is not controlled by a central bank, but by a decentralized and particularly energy-intensive computer process, the so-called ‘mining‘. The cryptocurrency is considered a speculative currency and is subject to strong price fluctuations. According to most experts, bitcoin is therefore completely unsuitable as a means of payment.
President Bukele likes to pose as a modern and unconventional head of state. He is very present on social media and likes to give his ministers instructions via Twitter.
But critics see the 39-year-old’s authoritarian style of government as a threat to democracy. For example, the reaction was dismayed when he had soldiers marched into parliament in February 2020. He wanted to put pressure on the MPs to approve the financing of his security concept through a loan. His party became the largest in the last parliamentary elections.
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