El Salvador’s ‘Bitcoin Week’ Attracts Crypto Devotees to Party and Preach

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(Bloomberg) – The Bitcoin community this week descended on El Salvador, the first country in the world to make cryptocurrency legal tender, doubling down on its extremely bullish view of the digital coin while erasing its recent descent from record highs.

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They were in El Salvador as part of “Bitcoin Week”, a series of events anchored by two conferences and featuring a series of impromptu parties and meetings that gave industry experts and crypto loyalists a chance to celebrate their digital token allegiance. they see it as a global game changer.

Wearing hats with the Bitcoin symbol and t-shirts emblazoned with the crypto mantra ‘Buy the fucking dive’, adherents who have flocked to the Latin American nation said they were not worried about the recent swings in prices. price and that they were invested for the long term.

The centerpiece of the week was the annual Latin America Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference, a three-day event that ended on Friday.

On Wednesday night, hundreds of Bitcoin supporters bounced to Latin rap music in front of a stage with live music outside the event, slaughtering cans of Pilsener and Golden, popular local beers, as they decried the US dollar and warned of impending hyperinflation.

“The dollar seems archaic to me,” said Jose Schierano, 51, owner of an ice cream delivery company, wearing white shorts and a black shirt marked “Bitcoin Country” in reference to El Salvador.

Schierano said he traveled from Cordoba, Argentina to hear panelists speak at LaBitConf. He also attended a separate conference in Miami earlier this year, where the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, announced that Bitcoin would become legal tender. The Argentine peso has slipped 16% this year against the US dollar, and strict foreign currency controls in his country mean Schierano can only withdraw US $ 200 a month, he said. “Bitcoin is the way around that, and you see it in other countries as well, like Venezuela or Turkey, countries where central banks don’t have credible policies. Critics call Bitcoin shitcoin, but true shitcoins are all other edicts.

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Companies, from Bitcoin ATM providers to cryptocurrency exchanges, have set up booths around the Teatro Presidente in the capital of El Slavador. Some attendees planned trips to El Zonte, a seaside town an hour’s drive away where Bitcoin first took off in El Salvador.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has mostly fallen amid all the festivities. It fell every day except Friday and by the end of the week was about 16% below its all-time high of nearly $ 69,000 reached earlier in the month. Party-goers were not discouraged, with speakers predicting the prize could reach $ 400,000 or even $ 1 million in the years to come.

Jose Luis Guillen, CEO of Coincaex, a Guatemala-based Bitcoin exchange, said the recent drop shouldn’t be for people who plan to hold onto their tokens. “I don’t care about the price in the long run,” he said. “Bitcoin is in a 13 year bull market.” Guillen said he had seen an increase in the number of clients over the past year as inflation in the United States accelerated, and said his clients are increasingly older, now in the 45 to 65 years of age compared to the 20 and 30 he originally saw. .

Jerri Schick, who traveled from Galveston, Texas to attend the event, said she noticed the price of goods and services in the United States was skyrocketing this year, making it more expensive to maintain of the recreational vehicle fleet it owns. She started buying Bitcoin in February and is trying to buy between $ 20 and $ 100 a day of cryptocurrency to help offset inflation. Her portfolio has grown 40% since she started trading, she said.

“I think Bitcoin is the way out for what’s about to happen, the collapse of the US dollar, biological weapons and extinction-level events,” she said.

Colombian computer programmer Jessie Rodriguez said he was still a buyer of Bitcoin, which he started experimenting with in 2014. Although Colombia does not suffer from the hyperinflation of its regional peers like Venezuela or Argentina , the country’s peso is worth half of what it was seven years ago, eating away at its savings. Now, when working for foreign clients, he requests payment via Paypal and immediately converts his foreign salary into Bitcoin.

“I don’t even keep dollars anymore,” he said. “At first Bitcoin was demonized and nobody saw it as a form of payment, but here in El Salvador you can use it to pay at Starbucks or to buy pupusas. It is a dream come true and I hope it will be the same in Colombia.

Bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador on September 7, and the government launched its Chivo digital wallet, which was preloaded with $ 30 worth of Bitcoin. Salvadorians quickly began to speculate, buy dips and sell rallies with the portfolio, allowing for a quick conversion to US dollars. Salvadoran Economy Minister Maria Luisa Hayem told the conference that the move places the nation of six million people “at the forefront of technology”.

Samson Mow, CSO of Blockstream, a blockchain technology company, is even pushing the government to issue a $ 1 billion sovereign blockchain bond. He met with government officials this week and said they were receptive to his offer to sell a 10-year note for a 6.5% yield and denominated in dollars. As part of his proposal, he said the government would convert $ 500 million from the initial issuance into Bitcoin and, after five years, use the proceeds of any appreciation in the cryptocurrency to pay investors some type of dividend. . The mechanism would be on the Liquid network, allowing immediate settlement and would help the government bypass the costs of bank intermediaries and a traditional issue, he said.

“A financial system built on Bitcoin is inevitable,” Mow said. “You don’t need the World Bank, you don’t need the IMF. Bitcoin will save the day. This is the only chance we have to fix the money.

Bitcoin bulls are certainly feeling this, and in El Salvador they are seeing the start of a phenomenon that they hope will spread around the world.

“Money changes in the world,” said Pablo Gonzalez, co-founder of Bitso, a Mexico-based cryptocurrency exchange through which the Bukele government bought 700 Bitcoins. “El Salvador has taken a very courageous step to accelerate this change of money. They are leading the Bitcoin revolution.

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