Cryptocurrency

President of El Salvador says ‘FTX is the opposite of Bitcoin’

El Salvador President Naive Bukele on Twitter declare In the wake of the exchange’s collapse on November 14th, it used the Bitcoin protocol as the opposite of FTX, likening FTX to a Ponzi scheme.

Bukele, an avid proponent and believer in Bitcoin, said the flagship cryptocurrency was designed to prevent Ponzi schemes, bank crackdowns and fraud by institutions within the financial system.

Examples cited by the president include Enron’s abuse of accounting practices to inflate company earnings and hide the debt of its subsidiaries in 2021; And most recently, it includes covert customer transfers by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). ‘Funding for Alameda Research.

Bitcoin’s blockchain is an open-source protocol that allows all transactions to be made public, as opposed to Ponzi schemes where investment funds are shrouded in secrecy.

Bitcoin and Bukele

Fake news alleging that Bukele stored the country’s crypto assets in the collapsed FTX ran rampant last week, but soon dismissed Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao tweeted on November 11th.

However, since Bukele and his government made the currency legal tender in the country, it has not been disclosed how much public funds they have spent buying bitcoin.

On October 31, 2022, El Salvador’s development bank, BANDESAL, twice rejected a request by the country’s Anti-Corruption Legal Advisory Center (ALAC) to disclose government bitcoin transaction records.

The country currently holds 2,381 bitcoins, approximately $39.8 million at the time of writing. according to data from Bloomberg Economics.

Meanwhile, the government is also ranked by Bloomberg Economics as one of the top default-prone emerging market economies.

So far, bitcoin adoption in the country has been slow.

according to According to a March 2022 survey by the El Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce, 86% of businesses have never sold in Bitcoin, only 20% accept Bitcoin, and only 20% have traded Bitcoin since it became legal tender. Only 14% of respondents have used it. in El Salvador.

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