.....I believe that there is a genuine negativity toward Bitcoin on the street in El Salvador. I've come to believe that this is in large part a result of a dedicated effort on the part of 'mainstream media' who are very much in service to the controllers of the 'collective west' (basically the USD-backed financial concerns) and oligarchical local classes which pretty much every country has. If more people had hands-on experience participating in the machinery of operation they would probably develop a much higher degree of discernment in terms of information intake. The fallout would probably be good for some and bad for others. Traditionally leaderships tend to want a complaint and manageable population to 'govern' over...and often go to great lengths to achieve this.
Absolutely right.
Such skepticism towards the new technology is inspired by those very political and oligarchic structures that you wrote about.
And the result of their activity among the masses of the population is quite consistent with such mass processing of public opinion.
Recently, I read in one of the publications of El Salvador that is opposed to President Bukele that the statistics use of bitcoins as a payment method among the population was calculated as follows:
In 2021 - 25,7%,
in 2022 - 21%,
in 2023 - 12%,
in 2024 - 8,1%
Here is this article in this.
Even if this is a correct objective study (which I personally doubt!) then the process of decreasing Bitcoin use has already practically reached a minimum.
And I just think that this is already the minimum use and now this percentage will start to increase. Slower, of course, than it fell over 3 years, but still, the use of bitcoin will gradually increase.
Just do not forget that educational programs on blockchain will in any case bring prepared young people to the payments market.
But, we will see, this also depends on interaction with this very oligarchic group and politicians.
But I still hope for the courage of President Bukele and his concern for the interests of his country and its population.
It does not even make logical sense. It is like the article is just making up data in order to spin some kind of a narrative... It seems that in the form of a survey, they asked people in a supposed representative way whether they had been using bitcoin, and I wonder was the way that they conducted the survey in 2024 similar to the data that they collected in previous years or they mix matching data?
Do they have any other harder data related to if people hold bitcoin or showing bitcoin transactions in the country to the extent to which transactions matter versus holding bitcoin and surely knowing about bitcoin and/or a variety of other ways of measuring involvement in bitcoin could also matter in order to figure out the extent to which Salvadoreans might be getting involved in bitcoin, and I would not doubt that there may well be potential changes in the ways that regular Salvadoreans might have had been involved in bitcoin over the past 4-ish years.
I am wondering how the hell were they supposedly getting 25% of the population using bitcoin in 2021, when it was barely introduced? Sure, in 2021 and perhaps even into 2022, every citizen had a right to receive $30 through the Chivo wallet in 2021-ish, and maybe that could have been a measure in terms of citizen's claiming their $30 through the Chivo wallet in 2021 and 2022?
Even though I can understand that some of the regular El Salvadorean's might not have easy access to technology, and it also could be true that bitcoin is ONLY being used by small segments of the El Salvadorean population, yet the data of the article sounds a wee bit contrived to the extent that there might be actual attempts to measure bitcoin adoption in consistent ways across the past 4-ish years.
It is probably worth agreeing that the decline in real Bitcoin users in El Salvador has been declining since the hype caused in 2021 after the legalization of Bitcoin as a legal tender and the de facto mass advertising campaigns using the Chivo wallet and $30.
However, the given "survey" seems to me too superficial and falsified, since such a sharp decline in the number of users with such arrays of data, amounting to millions of users (and in El Salvador there are now more than 6.7 million residents) cannot change with such crazy dynamics.
So most likely, all these surveys, with obvious negativity towards Bitcoin payments, are most likely an order from those very oligarchic and political circles in the countries of Central America and the whole world in general, which we are talking about in this discussion of the real aspects of life of the population of El Salvador.
And the real use of Bitcoin has most likely decreased, of course, but not as significantly as the authors of this public opinion poll claim.