Milena Mayorga, El Salvador’s ambassador to the United States, said in a recent tweet that the nation is seeing a change in its social fortunes, Cryptoslate noted.
Later, he credited Bitcoin and better “security mechanisms” for this. “We are ridding ourselves from the plague that has submerged us in poverty for decades.”
On September 7, 2021, the Central American country made history by becoming the first sovereign state to recognise Bitcoin as legal money. President Bukele has stood his own and kept supporting the “Bitcoin experiment” in the face of a storm of criticism, including that of the IMF and the World Bank.
BTC has lost over 60% of its value since the legal tender act became a law. Additionally, El Salvador is down about $56.4 million with an average buy price of $45,000, which gives detractors more reason to condemn the decision—especially because the money for it comes from public funds, Cryptoslate noted.
Alejandro Zelaya, El Salvador’s finance minister, responded by stating that although the plan is on schedule, people shouldn’t anticipate results right away. He thinks that once the technology is widely used, the critics will change their minds.
El Salvador has seen a surge in tourism as a result of the Bitcoin experiment. The first half of 2022 saw 1.1 million tourists, just shy of the 1.2 million that arrived for the entire year of 2021, according to the Ministry of Tourism.
In a recent tweet, Mayorga included a chart from the United Nations World Tourism Organization listing the top tourist destinations in terms of revenue in the first five months of 2022.
El Salvador, which saw a +6% increase in tourism revenue over 2019 statistics, came in at number thirteen out of the fifteen countries included.
The government is expected to make $99 million more from tourists this year than it did in 2019 according to Bitcoin Magazine, which is about twice the unrealized BTC loss at the moment.
(With insights from Cryptoslate)
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