El Salvador: In Depth Review - FED58

Fed Watch - Bitcoin and Macro

In this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s “Fed Watch” podcast, we, your hosts Christian Keroles and Ansel Lindner, discuss my recent article How Bitcoin Will Impact El Salvador’s Geopolitics. You will hear a bullish, yet realistic, perspective on El Salvador, and learn how bitcoin can affect countries as they adopt it as a legal tender.

We begin the show by talking about why this topic is important. El Salvador is blazing a trail by adding bitcoin as a legal tender and there is a lot of build up for bitcoin to perform. People are excited that bitcoin will show the world all the benefits it can bring to nations ready to take the giant leap into the future.

The article is broken into several sections and we take our time stepping through each one. First is history and politics. El Salvador’s history is a multicultural one. It was the meeting place for Mayan, Aztec and other Central American cultures. The region was traditionally relatively decentralized into micro regions and never consolidated into a vibrant seat of power. In more modern times, its people have found difficulty consolidating legitimate power in a government, with civil wars and rampant violent gang divisions. The recent successes in this area by Nayib Bukele are promising, but do not provide evidence that their historical proclivities are gone forever.