Re: El Salvador has become the first country to make #Bitcoin legal tender! 🇸🇻
⭐ Merited by JayJuanGee (1)
That's one thing regarding the bad news articles, but they also conducted some surveys among El Salvador citizens. Many of them don't even know what it means or what it is supposed to be useful for to make Bitcoin legal tender, but here is the thing: change will always meet resistance. We have seen that with Bitcoin right from the start. People need time to understand their options and how it could help them or maybe not help them. How should you have an informed opinion about something that you don't understand?
I don't trust these opinion polls. The numbers can change a lot, depending on the language that you use. For example, you can ask a question like this -
1. Do you support the recent move by the El Salvador government to make Bitcoin as the legal tender? This would mean that each and every business has an obligation to accept Bitcoin, which is a very volatile currency that can swing up or down by as much as 30% in a day.
The same question can be asked in a different language, like this:
2. Do you support making Bitcoin the legal tender in El Salvador along with the US Dollar? Do you support giving the merchants an additional payment option in the form of Bitcoin?
Now if you ask the first question, then the vast majority would answer NO. But the response would change, if you ask the second question. And the media channels which conduct the poll will never tell you about this. They will never provide the full questionnaire in their article.
Hey Bryant, the guy posting before you obviously didn't fully get what I said!
Anyway...You are of course right and it is not that I take this poll at face value. My comment sounds one-sided and lacks room for interpretation, my bad.
What I wanted to convey though is that even people who have a basic understanding of Bitcoin can't really grasp the implications of Bitcoin becoming legal tender. It is quite similar to the fact that at least 8 out of 10 people can't explain what money is, how it is created and what its functions are. They just can't. They use it, but they can't understand let alone explain it. Now the question goes towards causality. If you don't understand something, you rather tend to say "I don't care" or "no". From a socially desirable respond perspective, you would say no because there is less to lose than if you vote for the introduction of something you have no idea about. This just shows that a lot of people don't sufficiently understand the scope of implications that comes with the introduction of Bitcoin as legal tender AND they probably don't understand Bitcoin itself sufficiently in the first place.
That is why I say it needs time. The introduction is the right step and only through usage and word-of-mouth will people realize the upside effects of having an additional option which they are not forced to use, but could if they wanted to. It is good to see countries take the initiative and give Bitcoin further reasons to exist. With time comes adoption, very similar to personal computers that were once said to be useless for individual households.