Today marks one year since El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender…the nation has faced criticism from the usual suspects and opponents but one year is a blip on the radar of time as a whole…

ONE YEAR LATER: THE SUCCESS OF MAKING BITCOIN LEGAL TENDER IN EL SALVADOR

“Let’s begin by recalling where El Salvador was before the Bitcoin announcement. The truth is that many won’t be able to remember because they could hardly point to the country on a map. At best, many Bitcoiners would have likely mistaken El Salvador for Ecuador and made remarks about how they would be able to spend their sats in the Galapagos.

Before El Salvador embraced Bitcoin, it endured centuries of colonial oppression, decades of military dictatorship and a 12-year-long civil war, a proxy battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Once the Salvadoran government and the leftist guerillas signed the so-called peace treaty that ended the civil war in 1992, corrupt governments from both the right and the left of the political spectrum began to ransack the country. Unfortunately, they dedicated themselves to running corrupt personal enrichment schemes instead of reconstructing the country, further perpetuating El Salvador’s debt and its infrastructure and societal deficit.

In the early ’90s, the Bill Clinton administration deported many undocumented Salvadorans from the U.S., mainly from East Los Angeles, where many of their American-born children were engaged in street gang warfare. The exported phenomenon of the maras, or gangs, and the violence they brought to the country further sunk El Salvador’s dire economic situation.

Salvadorans grew tired of the political corruption, the gang violence and extortion, the lack of opportunity and the constant out-migration to the U.S. The electorate decided to give dark-horse Nayib Bukele and his New Ideas party the presidency and a supermajority in the National Assembly for a chance to fix the situation. It was the proverbial aligning of the stars that allowed the political conditions for El Salvador to adopt bitcoin as legal tender.

Ultimately, before the Bitcoin announcement, El Salvador was not in a good situation and had the deep scars of poverty, suffering and death as evidence.

THE GREATEST COUNTRY REBRAND IN HISTORY
Presently, there’s no shortage of politicians on Twitter signaling that they are pro-Bitcoin, or worse, that they are pro “crypto.” Targeting Bitcoiners as a constituency is the latest affinity scam by the high-time preference political campaign complex. However, in El Salvador, adopting bitcoin was strictly about economic survival.

Bukele announced in 2017 that El Salvador would adopt bitcoin, even before he was president. Back then, the Salvadoran population did not even know what the extent of that announcement would mean. The statement was not to court votes but to warn his opponent that his government would do things outside of the box.

Dagoberto Gutiérrez, a political analyst who is widely-respected by Salvadorans, was recently asked to weigh in on the decision by El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin on a popular morning radio show. The host, Pencho Duque, asked Gutiérrez if he thought the project was a failure and pointed to the low adoption by Salvadorans as proof. The 77-year-old answered in a simple yet profound manner that even seasoned Bitcoiners still fail to articulate. Gutiérrez summarized his thoughts by saying that at this point, adoption and our opinions on it are inconsequential to the more significant forces at play. In his assessment, the move was about game theory, the first-mover advantage to a better monetary system and safeguarding El Salvador’s overreliance on the U.S. dollar when its hegemony is in its final decline.

It has taken a full year for many skeptics to realize what Gutiérrez has: that the obvious choice for a country like El Salvador is to seek refuge in the rising monetary system of our time instead of a dying one.”

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/el-salvador-bitcoin-one-year-later