El Salvador may be one of the smallest countries of Latin America, but that didn’t stop it from making a move that ensured that everyone starts talking about it. As many likely know, the country recently adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, meaning that its citizens can now use it for paying for virtually anything in the country.
Of course, El Salvador only added Bitcoin to the list of payment methods that it will now accept — it did not use it to replace cash, nor any currency. While Bitcoin adoption is one of the biggest moves that the crypto industry has recently seen, one analyst from Fidelity Investments, Jurrien Timmer, thinks that the importance of the move was overplayed.
Bitcoin adoption is important, but it might also be overplayed
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According to Timmer, El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin has allowed for a real-world test for Bitcoin (BTC/USD), allowing everyone to see what it would be like if BTC was adopted. And, since it didn’t eliminate any currency, nor did it replaced cash, its adoption isn’t as big of a deal as many seem to think it to be.
He said that people can still decide to pay with dollars or be paid in dollars, so the USD in El Salvador remains as strong as it ever was. Choosing to use Bitcoin is a completely voluntary thing which is, after all, what El Salvador’s president himself has been saying ever since he announced plans to adopt BTC in the first place.
Timmer pointed out Bitcoin’s scalability issues which is why many critics of the move remain skeptical of its use in real-life environments. While Ethereum itself is far from scalable, Bitcoin’s network is even less scalable than that. So, this will be an interesting chapter in Bitcoin’s history, and a major test of its application.
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