He attributes the change in his life to President Nayib Bukele’s decision three years ago to invest in bitcoin.
“I used to be unemployed… and now I have my own business,” says the 39-year-old, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company.
Three years ago, the Central American nation’s leader took a big gamble when he put bitcoin into legal circulation in an attempt to revive El Salvador’s dollarized, remittance-dependent economy.
It invested hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into the cryptocurrency, despite warnings about volatility risks from global institutions.
Osorio credited the American founder of the NGO My First Bitcoin, John Dennehy, for encouraging him to accept cryptocurrency payments.
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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. He is a divorced father of two teenagers and no longer struggles to pay for their education.
In 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 quickly began investing public money in cryptocurrencies.
To encourage Salvadorans to use bitcoin, he created the Chivo Wallet app to send and receive bitcoins for free and gave $30 to each new user.
His grand ambitions for Bitcoin have clashed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which hesitated to grant El Salvador a $1.3 billion loan because of its official use of the cryptocurrency.
However, in August, the IMF announced a preliminary loan agreement with El Salvador, although it said it needed to mitigate “potential risks.”
– Offered as an ‘option’ –
Although Osorio has become relatively wealthy with bitcoin, a study by the University Institute of Public Opinion showed that 88 percent of Salvadorans have not yet used 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, explained to AFP.
A quarter of Salvadoran GDP comes from remittances sent home by relatives, mainly from the United States.
But in 2023, only one percent of 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 “hasn’t had the widespread adoption that we expected.”
He added that “the positive aspect is that it is voluntary, we have never forced anyone to adopt it. We offered it as an option and those who chose to use it have benefited from the rise of Bitcoin.”
He also confirmed that he had around $400 million worth of bitcoins stored in a public “cold storage wallet,” a way of storing bitcoins offline.
Bitcoin’s fortunes have been mixed.
This week it was trading around $52,000, down from a high of $73,616 reached on March 13. In November 2022, it fell to $16,189.
Independent economist Cesar Villalona told AFP that Bukele himself had hindered the adoption of bitcoin by stripping it of the usual functions of a currency.
“Bukele… said: there will be no salary in bitcoin, there will be no pensions in bitcoin, there will be no savings in bitcoin and there will be no price in bitcoin, and with that he took away the three functions of money,” Villalona said.
Luis Contreras, a My First Bitcoin instructor, told AFP that many Salvadorans were simply afraid to make the switch.
The organization has brought cryptocurrencies into public schools, teaching about 35,000 students how to use bitcoin so far.
Contreras says the hardest thing about training people on bitcoin “is their fear of new things, which creates a fear of technology” as well as “the fear of moving from a classic currency in today’s economy to one that is fully digital and decentralized.”
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