El Salvador, in the north of Central America, has a population of about 6.5 million in an area of 21,040 square kilometers, making it the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. Due to the many volcanoes in the territory, the country is also known as the "Land of Volcanoes". On June 9, 2021, El Salvador did something that even the United States would not dare to do. Is it to break up with Bay Bay? No, El Salvador declared itself the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as a legal currency.
The area of El Salvador was originally inhabited by the Mayan Indians. It became a Spanish colony in 1524 and became independent from Spain on 15 September 1821. Between 1979 and 1992, a fierce civil war broke out between the junta and a coalition of left-wing guerrilla groups. In 1992, the two sides signed the Chapultepec Peace Agreement, establishing a multiparty constitutional republic.
Factors such as conflicts left over from the civil war, low levels of education, and political party struggles have severely limited local economic development. As the most densely populated and smallest country in Central America. El Salvador's economy is predominantly agricultural, and together with Honduras and Guatemala, el Salvador is almost the poorest, most violent, most gangster-rampant, most refugee problem and the most politically chaotic country in the entire Western Hemisphere.
The Salvadoran colon, the first currency issued in El Salvador, was lost in credit due to severe inflation, and the government authorities decided to make the United States dollar legal tender with a fixed exchange rate of 8.75 colons for 1 United States dollar as of 1 January 2001.
Without its own currency, El Salvador's financial system and economic development are heavily dependent on the united states dollar. As of 2020, as many as 1.5 million Salvadorans work around the world, "foreign workers", accounting for nearly a quarter of The Sardija's 6.5 million people, who sent $5.9 billion to relatives in Sahara that year (World Bank, 2021), accounting for nearly 20% of Sahara's GDP. The Salvadoran economy is predominantly cash in its day-to-day transactions, with about 70 per cent of nationals without bank accounts or credit cards. If you use Bitcoin, you can indeed effectively reduce remittance fees, but it also escapes the bank's supervision of the economy (everything has pros and cons).
The president incarnates as a cargo master
Naib Bouclé, who was sworn in as president of El Salvador in 2019, is known for his "iron fist" in his governing style, and he is the most loyal carrier of Bitcoin. After becoming president, Boukat, who came from advertising, either ran to the United Nations to play selfies or ruled the country on Twitter every day.
In February 2020, when lawmakers did not pass the budget for him, Boukare rushed into parliament with a group of armed soldiers to physically persuade him. In 2021, The "New Ideas" of Bouklay's ruling party witnessed a number of "highlight moments", first in February to lead the parliamentary elections with an absolute advantage, successfully taking over the national legislative power, followed by the removal of the president and the attorney general in May, and the successful ascension of the replacement candidate under the strong recommendation of Bouclay.
The subsequent promulgation of the Bitcoin Law more of a continuation of the Buclay administration's usual vigorous style, which was passed in Parliament without any debate, and the whole process took about 5 hours. So Salvador's fiat currency since 2001 is the US dollar, why the good end of why suddenly add a bitcoin. The new president always has to give the people a statement, to sum up, there are roughly the following reasons:
Most people in El Salvador now do not use the banking system, but half of them have mobile phones, so it is better for everyone to use digital wallets;
A large number of Salvadorans are working overseas, and the fee for sending money to the country is too expensive, so it is better to change to a peer-to-peer bitcoin transaction channel;
The country's economy is tied to the dollar, and it's time to decouple;
Bitcoin transactions, digital scan code payment sweep, both convenient and fast;
For ease of use, El Salvador has deployed more than 200 ATMs that can trade bitcoin across the country, and launched the official digital wallet Chivo in September 2021, where ordinary people can immediately receive $30 as long as they download the new registration.
As we all know, the most important thing about fiat currencies is to require stability. Bitcoin's characteristics, on the contrary, are extremely arbitrary in price fluctuations, so Bitcoin, as a legal tender, faces a higher risk. The president of El Salvador has studded bitcoin, which is gambling on the national fortune of a country.
After using it, ordinary people in El Salvador found that bitcoin ATMs on street corners often reported errors after swallowing money, and they had to call the staff to report repairs. The transfer of the e-wallet Chivo always takes at least a day to succeed. Many vendors are even more annoyed, and they only trade with customers for a minute late, and they inexplicably lose tens of cents.
After tossing and turning, the people began to realize that digital currencies are just like that, or it is more reliable to see and touch the US knife, so there are fewer and fewer stores that support Bitcoin payment. In 2021, only 2% of the funds that entered El Salvador from the sea in the whole year chose the Bitcoin channel. Today, there is only one place in El Salvador that fully supports Bitcoin transactions. It is a small town along the coast with only 3,000 residents called El Zonte ("Bitcoin Beach").
At Bitcoin Beach, from hotels and bars to craft stalls at the bazaar, from cutting hair and surfing to buying an oyster snack on the street, everything can be bought and sold using a digital currency wallet called bitcoin beach wallet. President Bouka sees hope from the Bitcoin Beach project. He plans to build a Bitcoin city at the base of the volcano Conchangua, relying on the geothermal energy that comes with the volcano to power the entire city and mining cards, and about $17 billion of the capital needed to build the city comes from bitcoin bonds. The president also declared that anyone who invests more than $100,000 (or more than 3 bitcoins) in El Salvador can immediately acquire residency in the country.
In order to make money faster, the powerful Bouka decided to personally speculate in coins, and publicly announced to the people of the world on Twitter: "We took the money from the national treasury today and bought ×× bitcoins with our mobile phones!" According to Boukley, his state-level bitcoin investment has been quite successful, and the profits he has made have built an affordable pet hospital.
Unfortunately, Boukley happened to catch up with the decline in the price of virtual currencies. El Salvador has purchased bitcoin for the 11th time since adopting it as legal tender last September. The country currently holds 2,381 bitcoins at an average cost of $43,000 each, for a total cost of $102.38 million. At the current bitcoin price of $19,470, these bitcoins are worth about $46.35 million, meaning that El Salvador's bitcoin investment is losing about $56 million.
For El Salvador, bitcoin pricing power is not in its own hands, which also means that the entire country is exposed to the risk of bitcoin prices fluctuating. Trying to replace the dollar with Bitcoin is somewhat difficult, but it increases the risk of being suppressed by the dollar.
However, El Salvador's move has successfully attracted the attention of other countries on the American continent, and the politicians of Paraguay, Panama, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Ecuador have expressed their strong interest in Bitcoin in different ways. These countries basically have one thing in common, that is, the vast majority of countries are extremely dependent on the US dollar, and even the official legal tender issued has been replaced by the US dollar.
The controversy over Bitcoin continues, but the wave of digital currency innovation has swept the world.
Reading on, the "queen of cryptocurrencies" became the FBI's most wanted man
On the last day of June 2022, the FBI updated its list of "Top Ten Wanted Criminals," which was named by countless cryptocurrency investors, Ruja Ignatova, who was named to a maximum reward of $100,000. Because Ignatova wore flamboyant costumes, expensive jewelry, and bright lipstick on every appearance, her fanatical followers gave her a resounding name – the Queen of Crypto. Those who did not know her were lucky, because those who knew her were deceived into ruin.
On 30 May 1980, Jouya Ignatova was born into a working family in Bulgaria and later immigrated to Germany. According to public information, Ruya is a master's degree in economics from the University of Konstanz in Bulgaria, and later obtained a double doctorate from oxford university in the United Kingdom and the law department of the university of Konstanz in Germany.
Her classmates recalled that Ignatova had a deep obsession with the luxurious life of the upper class, and even if she was not rich at that time, she would pretend to be a rich lady, spend money on cosmetics and nail art, and would never appear in front of people.
After graduating, Ignatova became CEO and CFO of CIF, Bulgaria's largest fund management company. If you follow this path, she must be a typical inspirational story heroine. However, the right way of earning money simply does not satisfy Ignatova's desires.
In 2012, Ignatova partnered with her father to acquire a Bulgarian company that had declared bankruptcy, not to save and bring the company back to life, but to whitewash the company and sell it again. The illegal operation was exposed, resulting in Ignatova and her father being convicted of fraud and suspended for 2 years.
At that time, the blockchain was just emerging, the transaction price of bitcoin was only over $500, and investors who missed the first bucket of gold from bitcoin were staring intently at the cryptocurrency market, waiting for a second chance to make a fortune. Rich, experienced, legally knowledgeable, Ignatova, who is "ready for everything", pulls up her own brother and another professional who is good at pyramid schemes, ready to do big tickets.
In 2014, Ignatova co-founded Onecoin (Vikacoin) LLC, which created the concept of Vicarin Onecoin out of thin air.
Ignatova started by packaging herself and created a Kochi, elite female persona. Realistically speaking, Ignatova's doctorate and the resume of the CEO of a fund management company are indeed intimidating enough. With these titles in spite of this, Ignatova frequently attends forums and travels the world to give presentations.
Ignatova and Vicarcoin claim that their Vicar coin grasps the largest potential market of cryptocurrencies in the future, can completely "replace" bitcoin, inherit bitcoin decentralization, the stock is determined entirely by algorithms, and adopt KYC and record transactions to allow the government to recognize the iconic features of these cryptocurrencies, vicarcoin is also fully supported by blockchain technology, the token is in line with the characteristics of decentralization, unique and sufficient security.
Ignatova created a persona that even confused many people in the industry, and she was invited to attend the "Economist" symposium. Most investors do not understand the operating logic of cryptocurrencies, nor do they know what blockchain technology really is. Ignatova made a set of paid teaching materials and courses, from whom interested people would pay for lessons. Consumers who know nothing about cryptocurrencies will think they know everything after class, but will spend more money on Vicarvo. Ignatova's classes are also not cheap, and there is no price cap at all. Selling classes and selling coins at both ends of the money to make money, and consumers still do not know that they have fallen into the trap.
Even more appealing, Ignatova publicly promised high returns and expanded in the form of pyramid schemes pulling people's heads. From January to June 2016 alone, Onecoin defrauded more than 400 million euros in Chinese mainland, more than 31 million euros in Germany, more than 30 million euros in the Uk, and more than 25 million euros in the United States...
In the eyes of investors, they did make a profit after buying Vicarcoins. However, there is a key problem that people don't pay attention to – Vicartein is not a cryptocurrency at all! Cryptocurrencies are uniquely tradable because they are cryptographically complex, just like each banknote is stamped with security marks and numbers. However, Vicardcoin is a completely fictitious product. People actually actually spend money out and get a bunch of numbers on the site.
Countless people, immersed in false happiness, can not extricate themselves, only Ignatova alone enjoyed the glory and wealth of reality. According to statistics, between August 2014 and March 2017, the amount of fraud in OneCoin exceeded 4 billion euros. The actual amount may be three to four times what was expected. And Ignatova took most of the money, bought a big mansion and a big yacht in London's Kensington district, and got married and had children.
It's a scam, and there's always a day when it's punctured. In 2017, just as global cryptocurrencies were in full swing, OneCoin hosted a grand carnival in Portugal. Ignatova, who had planned to attend, did not show up. Only then did OneCoin's followers get a little worried about whether they had been deceived.
In China, Vicarcoin has spread to more than 20 provinces, with 140 levels offline, a total of 2 million registered accounts have been defrauded, and the amount involved has reached 15 billion yuan. Until 2018, the chinese branch's major pyramid scheme case was cracked by the mainland police, recovering 1.7 billion yuan and arresting 98 people involved in the case.
On September 5, 2018, Ignatova's partner, Mark Scott, was arrested in Massachusetts.
On March 6, 2019, Ignatova's brother Konstantin Ignatov was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in the United States.
A number of accomplices were arrested one after another, but the main culprit, Ignatova, disappeared. Ignatova last appeared on October 25, 2017, two weeks after the Lisbon Salesmen's Congress. Ignatova boarded ryanair's flight to Athens, Greece, and was never heard.
In 2019, the vika coin was finally banned, but Ruya Ignatova, who disappeared for five years, remains unpunished. The reason why many people choose to believe in OneCoin is not that it can really become the "world's first currency", but that it can make them "rich overnight". Ignatova was able to succeed not by exploiting the trendy concept of cryptocurrencies or the elaborate scheme of pyramid schemes, but by the greed of human nature. Greed for small and big, from ancient times has not changed.