- El Salvador became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin a legal tender last year, but recent research shows a lack of interest in Bitcoin from most of the nation’s citizens.
- Despite pressure from El Salvador’s flamboyant president Nayib Bukele on local businesses to accept bitcoin as a payment option, if technically possible, it’s rarely ever used in everyday transactions.
A research team consisting of Diana Van Patten, Fernando Alvarez and David Argente claimed to have spoken to nearly 2000 households and found that the type of people using bitcoin on a daily basis were largely affluent, young, and highly educated males.
The citizens of the small, poverty-stricken Central American country caused a system crash when the Chivo app became available last year, with the servers being overloaded for a few day—but this enthusiasm didn’t last long. Much of El Salvador’s population spent the initial 30$ bonus offered, and then completely forgot about the app. At the present time, only 1 in 5 registered users still operate the Chivo app on a regular basis.
The same tendency applies to local businesses—Just 1 out of 5 local businesses announced Bitcoin as an available payment method. Only American chain corporations such as McDonald’s and Starbucks reported they had had no issues with accepting bitcoin from their customers.
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Despite assurances from the local government that the use of the app would dramatically reduce cash and credit card spending, only 1 out of 10 respondents claimed to have reduced cash & card expenses. Initially, one of the main goals for Chivo was to use the Bitcoin-powered app to pay taxes and receive wages, but those turned out to be extremely rare use cases in practice.
