The president of Colombia is pro-bitcoin!
Gustavo Petro, the newly elected President of Colombia, is a vivid and controversial character who publicly supports bitcoin and challenges the largest drug cartel on Earth.
Colombia’s three main export products (oil, coal, and cocaine) are “poisons”, according to Petro. At the same time, half of the country’s population lives below the poverty line. These are challenges that Petro takes on, setting a course for modern trends: cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and eco-friendly technologies. More than 50% of people voted for him in the second round of elections. Probably, these are the same guys who need a change.
The new Colombian president promises to stop further hydrocarbon exploration, ban the construction of new large-scale quarries, and put an end to hydraulic fracturing experiments.
Even contracted offshore oil and gas projects were threatened. The oil lobby immediately responded that the income from its industry was often used to finance any election slogans, implying that Petro’s promises were “just words”.
His views on bitcoin, which “deprives states of issuing power, and banks of the right to dispose of the national currency”, seem to be even bolder. According to the president, the strength of bitcoin lies in trust, which, due to the blockchain, has finally become possible to measure. If there is trust, there are new users and new transactions. Everything is simple.
The contradiction between the environmental aspirations of Gustavo Petro and the non-ecological image of the Proof-of-Work algorithm, which is used to confirm transactions in the bitcoin network, is still a moot point.
Discussions on this subject are carrying on. Everyone has heard about the PoW ban in the US state of New York. And the supporters of the idea of the “bitcoin bubble” consider it a utopian model when it is necessary to spend material benefits to create useless virtual tokens.
The network’s hashrate is constantly growing, so the issues of energy consumption and the “carbon footprint” are painful. But bitcoin evangelists believe that the problem is far-fetched. After all, BTC is positioned not as money but as a “store of value” or “digital gold”. It follows that any comparison of electricity consumption between bitcoin and payment systems is incorrect.
Perhaps it is Colombia that is destined to resolve this conflict. The country has enough “green” resources, and Colombia’s energy matrix has long been dominated by hydropower.
“What if we took advantage of the cliffs of our rivers on the western mountain range to generate electricity for the entire coastline? And cocaine can be replaced by cryptocurrency mining,” Petro wrote in the autumn of 2021 on his Twitter, concerning El Salvador’s case with volcano mining:
Source: twitter
Well, now it’s up to the key issue - implementation. It makes sense for mining equipment manufacturers to take a closer look at the Colombian market. What if the mafia clans will see an opportunity to completely legalize themselves in the new president’s ideas?
