Not long ago, El Salvador, the first on Earth to accept cryptocurrency as legal means of payment in the country, was mocked and criticized by economists like Peter Schiff, big bankers, and officials from the IMF. But less than a year has passed since the recognition of BTC as the official currency of El Salvador, and this small Latin American country has become practically a global cryptocurrency hub. And not only for investors and influencers who buy real estate here and receive residence permits but also for international functionaries.
On May 17, an international meeting of central banks and finance ministries representatives from 44 countries was held in El Salvador. The main topic of the meeting was the discussion of the problems of providing banking services to people who, as of today, don’t have access to banking services (“Banking the Unbanked”), financial inclusiveness, and global bitcoin adoption.
These are the realities of the modern world: there are much more mobile users than bank customers. And to send bitcoin transactions or make crypto payments, you only need a smartphone and an Internet connection.
Add to this weekends and holidays when banks do not work, consider the high costs of maintaining branches and salaries, don’t forget about regulatory restrictions - and we will get almost ideal conditions for the development of a new digital economy, the center of which may be bitcoin.
As expected, there were no representatives of advanced countries (such as the USA, Great Britain, or Germany) among the conference guests. Their commitment to fiat money and their snobbish, incomplete look at cryptocurrencies is well known – it’s hard to encourage alternative financial models when you have a centralized printing press and equally centralized levers of influence.
Therefore, small and developing economies are looking toward cryptocurrencies today. The “first fruits” were El Salvador and the Central African Republic (CAR), where bitcoin is the official means of payment. But there is also the maximum interest of other countries in Latin America and Africa.
The conference in El Salvador was attended, for example, by delegates from the central banks of Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Armenia, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Mauritania, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Liberia, Sudan, and Malawi. The ministries of finance and economy of their countries were represented by Senegal, the Dominican Republic, Mongolia, Zambia, Palestine, and others.
Obviously, the bitcoin movement is in the early stages of the “domino principle.” And the advantages that the digital economy objectively has will undoubtedly be overlapped with the apparent deficiencies of modern fiat economies, which will allow us to hear about new states that have officially recognized BTC already this year.
