- Whose minimum wage is between $113-$242 dollars per month [1]
- Where 26% of the population is living on less than $5.50 per day [2]
Wants to use a digital store of value, as a means of exchange, whose transaction fees have ranged from $6-$60 in the past 2 months [3]
How is this anything except an attention/headline seeking PR move?
[1] https://www.minimum-wage.org/international/el-salvador
[2]https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SLV/el-salvador/povert...
[3]https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
(Also, there were transactions in that block that paid much lower fees than that, but some of them might be CPFP or something.)
That comment also explains how people in poor and middle-income countries use Bitcoin in practice, at least in some cases, even though transaction fees are usually higher than that. If you read it, you will understand the answer to your question to some degree.
> If 1% of it is invested in El Salvador, that would increase our GDP by 25%.
You can’t invest market cap. It’s just a figure you arrive at by multiplying two numbers: number of currency units/price per currency unit. It doesn’t exist anywhere.
If I found a pebble on the beach and sold it to someone for 10 cents, and if we assume there are a trillion pebbles on this planet, then the market cap of pebbles would be $100 billion. But you wouldn’t be able to use this “value” anywhere, because it doesn’t exist.
Agreed you can't invest marketcap. But could you attract $6.8B worth of economic activity into a country based on recognizing a new asset class and encouraging the development of that asset class in the country? I would argue that yes, yes you could.
In 1993, my home country had inflation of 313 000 000 % per month (yes, that's millions and yes that's per month). Average salary was $10/month. More than 50% of people worked in black economy. We had only national (public) banks, all of them were totally non-functional. Corruption was so high it's almost unimaginable for "normal" people in the west - if you needed to visit a doctor, you'd have to bribe him, if you had a traffic ticket you'd just bribe cops, if your kid needed good grades you'd bribe teacher...
28 painful years later - almost 80% of people work regularly, i.e. they are legally employed, inflation is far less than 10% per year, almost everybody has a bank account which costs like $3/month (but almost all banks are now private), averagy salary is $400/month or so, by corruption we're at least in the upper 40% of the world...
1. Where are those $6.8 billion supposed to come from?
2. Market cap is a measure of wealth, GDP measures cash flow for one year. How is an investment into an asset that doesn't produce revenue going to increase GDP over the long term? Even if your Bitcoin go up you can only sell them once, therefore you should delay the sale as much as possible.
I don’t see how giving the citizens of your country the option to save their wealth in a peer-to-peer alternative to traditional currency, powered by a hard inflation policy that cannot be manipulated by any politician or central banker impedes that solution. If anything giving the citizenry a Plan Bitcoin option would seem like a honking good idea to fight inflation. Just look at Venezuela, Libya, Syria et al for recent examples of how Bitcoin helped citizens of those countries.
Is the argument that Bitcoin won’t help them at all or that Bitcoin alone is not the whole solution. (I agree with the latter)