El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

IMF gave them 1.4 billion to abandon the “experiment”:

> The IMF made this a condition for a loan of 1.4 billion US dollars (1.35 billion euros). In December of last year, the IMF reached an agreement with President Nayib Bukele’s government on the loan of the stated amount to strengthen the country’s “fiscal sustainability” and mitigate the “risks associated with Bitcoin,” as it was described.

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I dislike cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy but this was clearly something else than a failure of the currency itself

Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…

If I could convince someone to give me 1.x billion to change my behaviour, I would consider that behaviour a massive success without much further thought. It isn't a huge amount of money at the scale of a national economy but >$1 billion for nothing is a win.

Although of course it is unknowable how much of that money was bribe and how much El Salvador would have gotten without additional leverage.

> If I could convince someone to give me 1.x billion to change my behaviour

I think you need to refresh your understanding of the difference between a loan and a gift; it wasn't an incentive to change the behavior, it was a loan to deal with the problems caused by the behavior.

There are loans and there are "loans". This isn't El Salvador issuing bonds on the market, it is politics that comes with political conditions. That means they negotiated it and that means they got something in exchange for any leverage they could find.

> There are loans and there are "loans". This isn't El Salvador issuing bonds on the market, it is politics that comes with political conditions. That means they negotiated it and that means they got something in exchange for any leverage they could find.

I think you need to take a pause and read what you wrote because there's some serious cognitive dissonance in your claims.

The IMF is a fund put together and ran by the majority of countries in the world as a lender of last resort. It serves as the world's insurance policy on stability. So when a country like El Salvador knocks on their doors, it's a kin to stating the world they are in trouble and they desperately need a hand. The IMF then provides help, but requires as a tradeoff that the country cleans up their act and actually corrects it's course as to mitigate or eliminate the root causes of their instability. For example, countries that are hugely indebted have to comply with demands to lower their sovereign debt down to manageable levels.

Looking at El Salvador, their populist and ill-advised policy to adopt Bitcoin as a currency was a fantastic failure with a tradeoff of being a huge risk factor. Even the most firebrand crypto bro is forced to acknowledge that crypto currencies like Bitcoin have a number of traits that renders them unusable as money, among which the most popular one is the core reason driving it's popularity: volatility. It's to no surprise that one of the basic requirements for stability is to not use a highly volatile and uncontrollable asset as the nation's currency.