El Salvador marks 1st year of Bitcoin use as confidence wanes

livemint.com:

A year ago, El Salvador began accepting Bitcoin as legal tender following a controversial and much criticized decision by President Nayib Bukele.

All seemed rosy for the first few months as citizens enthusiastically embraced the new opportunity, but Bitcoin's value has plummeted since and some experts say the move has been a failure.

Maria Aguirre, 52, a shopkeeper in the El Zonte seaside resort that has been a major center for Bitcoin use, says things were going well last year as Bitcoin's value rose from $52,660 at opening on September 7, 2021, to briefly over $68,000 a couple of months later.

"But over the last five months it's been only falling," said Aguirre, who continues to accept Bitcoin transactions.

Bitcoin has dipped under $20,000 for most of this September.

In El Zonte, around 60 kilometers southwest of capital San Salvador, Bitcoin was already being used before Bukele's move, which was designed to encourage a population where only 35 percent of people owned an account at a financial institution in 2021, according to the World Bank.

El Salvador became the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, alongside the US dollar that has been the official currency for two decades.

The government even created the Chivo electronic wallet and granted each user the equivalent of $30.

By January, the application had been downloaded four million times, according to Bukele -- an impressive amount in a country of 6.6 million, although with a diaspora of three million living mostly in the United States.

Bukele's idea was to ensure that remittances, which make up 28 percent of El Salvador's GDP, be sent by Chivo meaning less money lost in commission to exchange agencies.

However, former central bank president Carlos