President of El Salvador wants Bitcoin …

The president of The Savior, Nayib Bukele, announced on Saturday that he would send Congress next week a invoice for the Bitcoin is legal tender in the country. As the President explained, the aim of this measure is to create jobs and “give financial inclusion to thousands of people (who are) outside the formal economy”.

“Next week, I will send a bill to Congress that will convert Bitcoin into legal tender,” Bukele said in a video message during the Bitcoin 2021 conference, which was held in the US city of Miami on 4 and June 5. There he reported that the country will partner with Strike, a digital payments company, to create a modern Bitcoin-based financial infrastructure.

With this initiative, he later said on his Twitter account, the job creation and “financial inclusion”. In a country where “70% of the population does not have a bank account and works in the informal economy”, financial inclusion “is not only a moral imperative, but also a way to grow the country’s economy, by providing access to credit, savings, investments and secure transactions“, he underlined.

If this project is approved, details of which are unknown, El Salvador would become the first country of the world to adopt this cryptocurrency as legal tender, valid to comply with any type of financial obligation, including the payment of taxes.

In Japan, one of the most advanced countries in the world in the use of cryptocurrencies, a legal reform in 2017 made Bitcoin a means of payment. However, a 2018 report by the Central Bank of Japan clarified that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin “are not legal tender and their use for payments depends on the willingness of the counterparty to accept them.”

In 2020, due to the covid-19 pandemic, the Salvadoran economy contracted by 7.9%, although the projection of the Central Reserve Bank (BCR) is that by the end of 2021, 6% growth will be achieved.

The Bitcoin, underlined Bukele in this sense, represents “The fastest growing way to transfer” those billions of dollars in remittances and prevent “millions of dollars” from being lost to middlemen. “Through the use of Bitcoin, the amount received by over a million low-income families will increase by the equivalent of billions of dollars each year. It will improve the lives and futures of millions of people,” he said. declared the president.

According to the specialist page Coinmarketcap, the cryptocurrency market – driven by the interest of increasingly serious investors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley – grew to more than $ 2.5 trillion by mid-year. -May 2020.

Bitcoin, however, suffers from ups and downs. Among those responsible for its sudden rise and immediate fall are Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the second largest buyer of Bitcoins in the world: in February, he announced a purchase for $ 1.5 billion and, since March, he began to accept it as a means of payment for the acquisition of his electric cars, which served as a catalyst for the price of digital currency during this period.

LaterOn May 12, Bitcoin fell 12% when Musk said Tesla would no longer receive the cryptocurrency as payment for its electric vehicles due to the environmental damage it caused.. Just a few days ago, Musk returned to Tweeter and claimed that some Bitcoin mining companies have pledged to post on the current and projected energy consumption needed to mine them, causing the price to rebound slightly.