Understand the implications of Bitcoin's downfall in El Salvador. Learn about the failed economic bet and its impact on the country's financial stability.
The reason El Salvador stopped using Bitcoin as a legal tender is not because it’s some sort of failed experiment (it had issues, but still), but due to continuous pressure of IMF interested in maintaining a US dollar-centric economy.
El Salvador is reliant on US dollars in its economy, which puts it under heavy US influence. Knowing Salvadoran currency wouldn’t be strong, Nayib Bukele suggested an alternative option - risky, volatile, but free from pressure of other countries and strongly appreciating in the long run. IMF didn’t like it, and that’s where we are.
So, when you cheer Bitcoin not being legal tender anymore, you also cheer US and IMF projecting power over the country.
Well, also, they just cut a deal with Marco Rubio to be America’s prison, so they must’ve figured that was more lucrative than Bitcoin and continuing to agitate the US by challenging the dollar was creating unnecessary friction.
Its even funnier. They just straight up promised them a billion dollar loan on the condition that they abandon bitcoin.
In December, the government struck a $1.4 billion loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that scaled back its bitcoin embrace after the lender urged officials to limit its exposure. The lender specifically advocated making acceptance of bitcoin voluntary for the private sector, which is spelled out in the hastily-approved law.
The error messages says that JavaScript must be enabled. You haven’t disabled JavaScript in your browser.
Update: holy crap its loading now. My best guess is that the have some reverse proxy sitting in front of the site that sometimes forces you to use JavaScript to pass through to the backend
They were forced to stop using Bitcoin as legal tender by external parties. The question people should be asking is why? And the answer is not that it was a failed experiment.
The experiment was whether or not they could be independent monetarily. Not whether or not blockchain works. But whether, in actual practice, if it could provide the monetary independence some people claim it has the power to do.
Outside influences were strong enough to overwhelm Bitcoin adoption and it succumbed to those outside influences. As an experiment seeking to test whether or not Bitcoin could resist these influences it failed.
This is how experimentation works. Now you can tweak your experiment and try again, but acting like failing at the exact thing you were trying to accomplish is somehow not an experimental failure is just delusional.
They were trying to break free using Bitcoin. It seemingly worked quite well so they were forced to stop doing it. The article title is misleading in the sense that the failure isn’t from Bitcoin (quite the contrary).
You don’t even have to be pro bitcoin to see this as something bad, but feel free to keep supporting such propaganda and external influence of politics. I’m sure it really benefits you
You know we call that a failure, right? You’re the one attaching emotion to it. Did it succeed? No. Thus it failed.
It’s not semantics. It’s basically logic. Maybe don’t try and be a sophist. I never said it couldn’t be tried again. In fact I said quite the opposite: you need to see this as a failure, address why, and make changes before trying again. But you’re just stuck on the word “failure” and your own preconceptions. No one thinks this was a test of “just Bitcoin”. The dark markets already tested Bitcoin thoroughly over a decade ago. This was a test of real world application of Bitcoin as a a government backed currency in the hopes of avoiding outside influence. Outside influence came in and managed to remove Bitcoin - the exact thing that was trying to be proved it was immune to.
Let’s not get astray here.
The reason El Salvador stopped using Bitcoin as a legal tender is not because it’s some sort of failed experiment (it had issues, but still), but due to continuous pressure of IMF interested in maintaining a US dollar-centric economy.
El Salvador is reliant on US dollars in its economy, which puts it under heavy US influence. Knowing Salvadoran currency wouldn’t be strong, Nayib Bukele suggested an alternative option - risky, volatile, but free from pressure of other countries and strongly appreciating in the long run. IMF didn’t like it, and that’s where we are.
So, when you cheer Bitcoin not being legal tender anymore, you also cheer US and IMF projecting power over the country.
Well, also, they just cut a deal with Marco Rubio to be America’s prison, so they must’ve figured that was more lucrative than Bitcoin and continuing to agitate the US by challenging the dollar was creating unnecessary friction.
Its even funnier. They just straight up promised them a billion dollar loan on the condition that they abandon bitcoin.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/lawmakers-el-salvador-rush-new-bitcoin-reform-after-imf-deal-2025-01-30/
Hot damn why is this not the headline we are seeing
Thats what im wondering, because thats the blog post headline i first saw.
Site doesn’t load
The link is still working and reuters is a huge organization so its probably an issue on your side.
Nope. Their site is always broken. It doesn’t work on tor browser in strict mode. Try it.
We shouldn’t be linking to such websites
That is hardly a valid reference point for a news source. The site even works without JS which is better than most sites.
Nope. It doesn’t work with js disabled. That’s the problem
It does in librewolf, which means that Tor is just doing some extra blocking of stuff that is need for the page to load.
The error messages says that JavaScript must be enabled. You haven’t disabled JavaScript in your browser.
Update: holy crap its loading now. My best guess is that the have some reverse proxy sitting in front of the site that sometimes forces you to use JavaScript to pass through to the backend
Exactly. The title is misleading af
They were forced to stop using Bitcoin as legal tender by external parties. The question people should be asking is why? And the answer is not that it was a failed experiment.
Would you loan money to someone who wouldn’t be able to repay if the bitcoin market crashed?
“Bro, I swear this shit will pay 20% monthly”
Literally gambling.
The experiment was to move beyond external parties. They were not able to do so and returned to using external parties. Ergo “the experiment failed”.
They were forced to do it by the IMF and US
Why do you think that they’d care about it if it was failing?
So they experimented with resisting the US and IMF and it was not successful.
We call that an experimental failure.
You really don’t get it. “Blockchain” was not the experiment. “Utilizing blockchain in the global economy” was the experiment.
And it failed.
https://i.imgflip.com/9j0u6j.jpg
Again, for the people in the back:
The experiment was whether or not they could be independent monetarily. Not whether or not blockchain works. But whether, in actual practice, if it could provide the monetary independence some people claim it has the power to do.
Outside influences were strong enough to overwhelm Bitcoin adoption and it succumbed to those outside influences. As an experiment seeking to test whether or not Bitcoin could resist these influences it failed.
This is how experimentation works. Now you can tweak your experiment and try again, but acting like failing at the exact thing you were trying to accomplish is somehow not an experimental failure is just delusional.
You can argue semantics all you want
They were trying to break free using Bitcoin. It seemingly worked quite well so they were forced to stop doing it. The article title is misleading in the sense that the failure isn’t from Bitcoin (quite the contrary).
You don’t even have to be pro bitcoin to see this as something bad, but feel free to keep supporting such propaganda and external influence of politics. I’m sure it really benefits you
“They tried to break free but it didn’t work”.
You know we call that a failure, right? You’re the one attaching emotion to it. Did it succeed? No. Thus it failed.
It’s not semantics. It’s basically logic. Maybe don’t try and be a sophist. I never said it couldn’t be tried again. In fact I said quite the opposite: you need to see this as a failure, address why, and make changes before trying again. But you’re just stuck on the word “failure” and your own preconceptions. No one thinks this was a test of “just Bitcoin”. The dark markets already tested Bitcoin thoroughly over a decade ago. This was a test of real world application of Bitcoin as a a government backed currency in the hopes of avoiding outside influence. Outside influence came in and managed to remove Bitcoin - the exact thing that was trying to be proved it was immune to.
But cope harder if it helps you sleep at night.
Yeah the headline is insane. This would have been a wildly successful experiment, and now is a great time to cash out.
I guess they made a deal to sell their coins to the US.
Edit: misinformation, sorry. They’re not selling. they’re still buying. The IMF is just forcing them to strike the word legal tender