The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, shocked the crypto community with an announcement, that might become one of the most important milestones in the adoption of Bitcoin.
Welcome to the future 🇸🇻 #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/j30vcZVXvJ
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) June 5, 2021
Bitcoin to become legal Tender in El Salvador, says President
News of this historic step broke at Bitcoin Conference Miami, which was held this weekend. During his presentation called “One small Step for Bitcoin, one giant Leap for Mankind”, Jack Mallers, CEO of the bitcoin investment and payments company Zap, played a pre-recorded message submitted by the Salvadorian president, who announced that the country will adopt Bitcoin as legal tender:
In the short term, this will help provide jobs and financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy.
Mallers fought his own tears, as he gave an incendiary speech that stresses the importance of a digital currency that controls its inflation through a hard-coded set of consensus rules, rather than relying on a fiat money system that is controlled by central banks and political pundits:
Bitcoin fixes this. We now have an asset class that has a fixed supply and this was known [to everybody] when this asset was issued first. The monetary policy is set and protected by a distributed network. This network carries no bias.
Can South America become the new China?
With mining bans in China and Iran, it seems like several Latin American countries are touting for attention from the crypto community. Both Paraguay and Panama have announced to join this effort to create a global and immutable currency.
Moreover, countries like Argentina and Venezuela are artificially attracting crypto miners by subsidizing energy costs. Moreover, rampant inflation rates in the Latin American area lead the population to adopting digital currencies with a fixed inflation rate. Overall, many countries in South America offer themselves as a safe haven for various blockchain activities.
