Bitcoin in El Salvador: Three Years On

SAN SALVADOR: 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.

Three years after El Salvador became the first country in the world to legalise Bitcoin, taxi driver Napoleon Osorio says the decision has changed his life for the better.

Osorio, 39, was the first cabbie to accept payment in the cryptocurrency, which he credits with helping him go from being unemployed to running his own car rental business.

"Before I was unemployed… and now I have my own business," said Osorio, who uses an app to charge for rides in Bitcoin.

The move by the Central American nation's president to put Bitcoin into legal circulation was a huge gamble in an attempt to revitalise the dollarised, remittance-reliant economy.

But 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 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."

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 in Bitcoin."

He also confirmed that he had around $400 million in Bitcoin that is kept in a public 'cold storage wallet' — a way of storing Bitcoin offline.