Nayib Bukele , the President of the United States of El Salvador , announced late Wednesday that his political science plan to buy one Bitcoin every Clarence Day starting on Thursday . And while Bukele has n’t said when the purchases will stop , it ’s likely to further the financial tragedy his country ’s cryptocurrency experiment has already act , based on the massive red he ’s already take by buying bitcoin at an all - time - high-pitched last year .
“ We are buying one # Bitcoin every Clarence Shepard Day Jr. starting tomorrow , ” Bukeletweetedon Wednesday around 11:30 p.m. local sentence in El Salvador .
The current price of one Bitcoin is roughly $ 16,540 , down 1.5 % from a day originally and down 73 % from a year ago . Bitcoin was trading at an all - sentence high of over $ 68,000 in November 2021 when El Salvador was purchasing declamatory quantity of Bitcoin .
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele speaks in La Libertad, El Salvador, on 1 January 2025.Photo: Alex Pena/Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)
President Bukele has already lose El Salvador tens of millions of one dollar bill , according to the up-to-the-minute calculations byBloomberg News . El Salvador has n’t publically confirm how many bitcoin purchases the country has made , but establish on Bukele ’s tweets we can see he ’s purchased 2,381 Bitcoin since the start of his experiment . The toll for all the country ’s Bitcoin property has add $ 105 million to buy , according to Bloomberg , while the current worth is roughly $ 39.4 million . Bukele would ’ve been smart just holding U.S. dollars as cash , even with annual inflation at almost 8 % .
Despite hold Bitcoin an official currency in El Salvador in belated 2021 , few people are actually using the crypto for purchase in the country . And one of the vernacular reasons cite for declaring it a currency , sending remittances back to the nation from abroad , has been a bust as well . Roughly $ 6.4 billion dollar was send as remittances to El Salvador from September 2021 until June 2022 , but less than 2 % of those were in cryptocurrency , according toReuters .
The Bitcoin experimentation has also caused El Salvador ’s credit rating rating to get knock down repeatedly , with the country ’s rating currently sit at CC , due to the likeliness it will default on bond obligation that are come due in 2023 , harmonize toCoinDesk .
Bitcoin , like all cryptocurrencies , is a tricky system to funnel money from the poor to those who are already wealthy and influential . Most people lose money trading bitcoin , as arecent studymade clear . But that does n’t check a tidy sum of regular people from trying . And those same regular people are getting ache financially , as crypto exchanges hold bankruptcy left and proper .
late implosions in the crypto industry have put a damper on exuberance as gigantic frauds like FTX have shown . The people who started FTX submit real money from exploiter , and risk it away on a hedging investment company called Alameda Research , all while inventing at least two cryptocurrencies to hold on their books as “ plus . ” Those assets were garbage , and when rival CEO Changpeng Zhao from Binance tried to cash out $ 580 million of those scraps assets last workweek , it sent the entire house of cards at FTX tumble down .
Is any of this going to hold back the great unwashed from continuing to buy Bitcoin ? clear not , as we ’re seeing arguably the most powerful Bitcoin impresario in the human race double down on his high-risk investing . Bukele is like the gambler who thinks he ’s just one more hand away from the enceinte score . But the theater always wins , and the citizenry of El Salvador will suffer while he ’s adventure off the state ’s future tense .
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