El Salvador Goes All-In on Bitcoin

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Cato Institute

Immigration, News, News Commentary, Peace, 424708, Markets, Government, Libertarian, Policy, Politics, Cato, Defense

4.5 • 979 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2021

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The government El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as its currency, but that has problems. What does that mean for average people, and how could they have done it better? George Selgin offers a few ideas.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 17th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.
0:08.4	The government of Al Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as a currency. I should say they've adopted Bitcoin as the currency.
0:14.9	While it's refreshing to see a country experiment with new kinds of money, there are better ways to do it.
0:21.1	George Selgen directs Cato's Center for Monetary and Financial
0:24.5	Alternatives. We spoke about Al Salvador's experiment this week.
0:29.0	It has been the dream of many a crypto-officonado for a country to adopt a
0:36.8	cryptocurrency in particular Bitcoin as either an official currency or an
0:41.2	acceptable currency. What has Al Salvador done?
0:44.6	El Salvador has passed a new law called the Bitcoin law and by it
0:49.0	Bitcoin becomes El Salvador's official money or currency for the and that that makes
0:56.4	El Salvador the first country to to have Bitcoin as an official money.
1:01.2	The law is has about 16 different provisions. Some of them
1:07.8	resemble provisions that apply to most official currencies.
1:13.0	El Salvador's differs though in requiring people who are equipped to do so,
1:18.0	all sellers, all merchants, all vendors, to accept payment in Bitcoin, even if they'd rather have US dollars which until now
1:27.1	have been the official currency of El Salvador.
1:31.3	All right so what is the hope?
1:34.0	What led El Salvador to this decision?
1:37.0	Well, I think the hope was partly just a sincere desire to make people independent of the US dollar and to
1:46.6	encourage the use of cryptocurrency.
1:50.0	Also it's pretty clear that El Salvador's president
1:54.8	president, Bukale, would like to see it become a bit kind of a
	...

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