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Host Rich Goldberg examines El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender and the country’s long-awaited Bitcoin bond. Rich is joined by two journalists who have been on the ground in El Salvador: Anna-Cat Brigada and Leo Schwartz.
Anna-Cat Brigida
Anna-Cat Brigida is a freelance journalist based in Central America. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets.
Leo Schwartz
Leo Schwartz is a Mexico City-based reporter at Rest of World covering how technology is changing business, politics, and communication across Latin America, with a particular focus on blockchain and surveillance technologies.
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So we already knew that Bitcoin is hot with speculative investors — with investors, I’d suggest, who have a short-term interest and little understanding of the long-term implications of Bitcoin’s unique nature.
And we already knew that it’s a practical currency with which to conduct crime. That’s been well established and is widely known.
Now it seems that Bitcoin also has appeal to authoritarian-leaning rulers of floundering Latin American countries who put forth a vague yet domestically unpopular vision of Bitcoin on every corner and in every shop.
It all seems a little scrambling and desperate, and I continue to wonder what real and substantial use cases exist for this peculiar and perhaps fleeting store of value.