The first few days of El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender have not been particularly encouraging.
A one-off incentive payment of $30-worth of BTC had been offered to each citizen and placed in new digital wallets called Chivo (cool). However, US dollar withdrawals from these Bitcoin-seeded electronic wallets were not possible as the system went offline after being plagued by technical problems.
Other Latin American countries such as Panama and Cuba, which are considering similar legal adoption of Bitcoin, will nevertheless be looking through these short-term technical issues and asking: will El Salvador’s experiment work?
The answer is almost certainly no.
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