As most know here, El Salvador officially made Bitcoin legal tender for the entire nation last week. The BCH scene has been watching events unfold, and we have a great advocate on the ground in El Salvador, Marc Falzon. Marc understands that El Salvador chose the wrong cryptocurrency to adopt as legal tender, because BTC does not scale, has high fees, uses pointless second and third layer KYC "solutions", has a brain-damaged ecosystem led by stupids like Peter McCormack, and has several corrupt and parasitic corporations like Blockstream and Strike lurking behind the scenes.
Emotions are running high over concepts like "president Bukele is a dictator", "El Salvador is running Bitcoin fractional reserve on the backs of the poor", and "Bitcoin dissenters are being arrested extrajudicially", which are all likely exaggerations or outright lies. Reason being, the global financial system's opinion leaders are overwhelmingly against crypto use by a nation-state, because they will lose their stranglehold on monetary movements, currency creation and exchange rate manipulation.
Financial remittance companies like Western Union are surely panicked, because 20+% of El Salvador's GDP is money coming in over the wires using such services. Cryptocurrency has tremendous potential to wipe out these predatory remittance services with far lower fees and faster settlement (currently 3 days for WU). And if people can spend cryptocurrency directly in El Salvador, they won't have to eat predatory exchange rates or high fees when they receive Bitcoin. Imagine a Salvadoran in the USA buying Bitcoin and sending it to El Salvador, then the Bitcoin is spent locally in that economy. This will reduce the amount of USD in circulation there and increase the amount of Bitcoin, effectively creating a massive hedge against USD inflation. Bukele is betting his entire nation's wealth against the dollar, and it's probably the right call! Back in the 80s this sort of thing would've gotten a Central American leader killed or at least an unexpected vacation to a random African country...
Most people who are familiar with the original Bitcoin vision as laid out in Satoshi's whitepaper know that crypto's potential could be fully recognized in El Salvador. But now comes the bad news: hardly anyone in El Salvador other than the government actually has Bitcoin. That's because El Salavdor's "Bitcoin" is merely a fiat balance on the state-run Chivo app, a fiat balance on the Bitcoin Beach app, or a fractionally-reserved Lightning balance on the KYCed Strike app. None of these apps give anyone Bitcoin, they simply deceive noobs into believing they have anything other than a Banking 2.0 balance at some shady corporation, which is carefully tracked and traced and could be frozen at any moment. This is where BCH comes in, because BCH doesn't require any of this crap: you don't have to KYC, you don't even need approval from a government, and you and you alone possess the private keys for your coins.
I'm watching developments in El Salvador very closely and have donated some BCH to a few citizens there. All of them were AMAZED at how easy and fast BCH JUST WORKED!
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/pnom2d/bitcoin_in_el_salvador_a_complex_issue_with_many/
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