Saturday | 5 October 2024 | Reg No- 06
বাংলা
   
Saturday | 5 October 2024 | Epaper
BREAKING: 3 die in Sherpur flood; 60,000 stranded      Ex-president Badruddoza Chowdhury passes away      Killing during students' movement: 9 bodies to be exhumed in Sylhet      Malaysian prime minister leaves Dhaka for home      CA seeks Malaysian support for Bangladesh to be ASEAN dialogue partner      Malaysian PM assures of attention to 18,000 Bangladesh workers       Bid to kill Khaleda Zia: Sheikh Hasina among 113 sued      

How a taxi driver in El Salvador got rich with Bitcoin

Published : Monday, 9 September, 2024 at 12:00 AM  Count : 130
SAN SALVADOR, Sept 8: Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador.

He credits President Nayib Bukele's decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life.

"Before I was unemployed... and now I have my own business," said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company.

Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin into legal circulation in a bid to revitalize El Salvador's dollarized, remittance-reliant economy.

He invested hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the cryptocurrency, despite warnings about volatility risks from global institutions.

Osorio credited the US founder of the NGO My First Bitcoin, John Dennehy, with encouraging him to accept payment in the cryptocurrency.

He now has 21 drivers working for his Bit-Driver brand and has made enough profit from the currency's rise to be able to buy four rental vehicles.

A divorced father of two teenagers, he also no longer struggles to pay for their education.

Launching bitcoin as legal tender on September 7, 2021, Bukele said he wanted to bring the 70 percent of Salvadorans who do not use banks into the financial system and promptly began plowing public money in cryptocurrencies.

To spur Salvadorans to use bitcoin he created the Chivo Wallet app for sending and receiving bitcoin free of charge and gave $30 to each new user.

His grand ambitions for bitcoin fell foul of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which hesitated to grant El Salvador a $1.3 billion loan because of its official use of the cryptocurrency.

In August, however, the IMF announced a preliminary loan agreement with El Salvador, while saying it needed to mitigate "potential risks."

- Offered as 'option' - While Osorio has grown relatively wealthy with bitcoin, a study by the University Institute for Public Opinion showed that 88 percent of Salvadorans had yet to use it.

"From the beginning... it was clear that it was clearly an ill-advised measure that the population rejected," the director of the institute, Laura Andrade, told AFP.

One-quarter of Salvadoran GDP comes from remittances sent home by family members, mostly from the United States.

But in 2023 only one percent of the transfers were made in cryptocurrencies.

In an interview with Time magazine in August, Bukele acknowledged that while "you can go to a McDonald's, a supermarket, or a hotel and pay with Bitcoin" it had "not had the widespread adoption we hoped for."    —AFP



LATEST NEWS
MOST READ
Also read
Editor : Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury
Published by the Editor on behalf of the Observer Ltd. from Globe Printers, 24/A, New Eskaton Road, Ramna, Dhaka.
Editorial, News and Commercial Offices : Aziz Bhaban (2nd floor), 93, Motijheel C/A, Dhaka-1000.
Phone: PABX- 41053001-06; Online: 41053014; Advertisement: 41053012.
E-mail: info©dailyobserverbd.com, news©dailyobserverbd.com, advertisement©dailyobserverbd.com, For Online Edition: mailobserverbd©gmail.com
🔝