The financial publication, sister to The Wall Street Journal, is considered the most important of its kind
The American financial magazine Barron’s, published by Dow Jones & Company, dedicated an extensive article to the result of the implementation of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador.
Read the article in full: El Salvador’s solo experiment with bitcoin: either the biggest flop or the biggest scam.
The article dedicated to the country and the use of bitcoin was titled “El Salvador’s lonely bitcoin experiment: ‘It’s either the biggest failure or the biggest con”, which in Spanish can be translated: El Salvador’s solo experiment with bitcoin: either the biggest flop or the biggest scam.
Barron’s was founded in 1921 by Clarence W. Barron (1855–1928), is a sister publication to The Wall Street Journal, and is dedicated to the dissemination of US financial information, market developments and relevant statistics.
Bitcoin was imposed as legal tender the previous September, at the initiative of President Nayib Bukele. El Salvador was the first country in the world to make such a decision.
To get a broad overview of how the implementation of bitcoin is going, a team from Barrons visited El Salvador.
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The article highlights that: El Salvador is far from a cryptocurrency lover’s dreamand instead, became a warning of what can happen when a country adopts a cryptocurrencytries to incorporate it into its economy and looks for the image of a technological paradise, but in the long run “it does not work as advertised”.
Also, that the government used large amounts of resources from the already limited and indebted country in order to start the cryptocurrency project.
Also as the national economy was further complicated by the large bitcoin purchases announced by Bukele at a time when the pandemic affected the state coffers, and the effect on the country’s financial profile with creditors and raised the yields of sovereign bonds.
He also mentions the opposition’s lack of confidence in the wise investment at the time of distributing at least 250 million dollars in the “digital infrastructure”, the same one that would be used to circulate bitcoin.
Read the article in full: El Salvador’s solo experiment with bitcoin: either the biggest flop or the biggest scam.
Those funds, to which the publication refers, went to the development of a digital wallet (distributed and preloaded with a bonus of $30 in bitcoin. The money also went to the installation of the booths used to make use of the cryptocurrency.
Barrons’ publication joins another from specialized magazines such as Business Insider, which considered: Bitcoin projects use the poorest communities as an experiment.
And it is that a large number of projects related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general have been launched in the last year, mainly in countries with economies under pressure that need financial alternatives to solve their crises, such as Guatemala, some African nations and even El Salvador.
Article, posted by Business Insiderquestioned whether those projects really help these economies, noting that “‘crypto-evangelists’ want to convince the poorest to use bitcoin, but it may not be a good idea.”
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At this point, the publication referred to the town of El Zonte, in El Salvador, which became known last year for having projects related to the adoption of Bitcoin even before the cryptoactive was legalized by the Salvadoran government.
Within the analysis of whether it is beneficial or not, an expert consulted by the media, called Jorge Cuéllar and who is a professor at Dartmouth University, affirms that these projects “experiment at the expense of the most precarious populations in the world.”
