There are now only two weeks until Bitcoin will become legal tender in El Salvador. I remind you the law was already adopted roughly 2 and a half months ago, what we are expecting it's the actual implementation.
In a thread on Twitter (which is where all the cool boys are playing these days, being them super shadowy coders, entrepreneurs or country presidents) Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, announced a few details of this implementation.
- there will be about 200 Bitcoin ATMs, where people could cash out the $30 in BTC the government will give, or any other BTC they receive (mostly remittances).
- sending BTC over will be done over Lightning, using Strike, which recently made the process feeless, so no transaction costs / fees. He made it very clear the government will take care about that.
- there will be no obligation for Salvadorians to choose only BTC, they "can queue to the Western Union queue if they like", and continue in dollars.
- all this will be available starting September 7th, including the presence of the Chivo wallet in the app stores
The key number in this thread is $400 million. That's the amount paid in commission by El Salvador (or only the main city, I'm not yet clear). After Bitcoin becomes legal tender, they will automatically be richer by $400 million. Not too shabby.
Anyway, looks like the process still pushes forward. I'm less concerned now that El Salvador will be marginalized, as many things changed in the last couple of months. If I would only mention that Visa (yes, the card thing) started to buy CryptoPunks NFTs, and that would be enough of an interesting change in the narrative.
I think it should be more important to observe how other countries will process and integrate this. Once legal tender in a country, it automatically becomes legal tender in any country.