El Salvador’s Bitcoin Gamble Is Off to a Rocky Start
As El Salvador enters its bitcoin era, its sky will sparkle with the lights of a platoon of drones. “We are throwing an event,” says American cryptocurrency evangelist Brock Pierce. “They did a big one at Burning Man in the past. They did one during the Super Bowl. So we brought down the best drone crew in the world, and we’re going to be putting on quite a show in the sky.”
A former child actor, and current tech investor and notorious Burner, Pierce led a delegation of crypto entrepreneurs in June to the Central American country, following president Nayib Bukele’s announcement that El Salvador would adopt bitcoin as its legal tender, in addition to the US dollar, starting on September 7, 2021. Since then, Pierce has been in touch with government officials in El Salvador—“I just got off the phone with the president’s brother,” he says—and with businesspeople looking to establish a presence in the country to cater to its novel crypto needs. He is now back in El Salvador to attend the big day. “The rate at which they’ve been able to implement this is rather astounding,” he says. “Like all things, I’m assuming it’s going to be less than perfect at first. But perfection is the enemy of progress.”
The speed at which the Bukele government has brought about this experiment, kick-starting the country’s bitcoinization just 90 days after the parliament passed the law sanctioning the shift, is indeed eye-popping. To the point that one wonders whether the country, and its population, would have benefitted from a longer lead-up. Or, at least, from more transparency.
