[donkey-hotei]

Can someone tell me if adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador as legal tender is a way for the Salvadorian president to print money, in a way? Since the only other legal currency there is USD, which they can't print. Not sure if that question makes sense.

[audunw]

Since they're mainly trying to push their own wallet app, once it has enough users, I can imagine they could create a new cryptocurrency and instantly make it one of the top cryptocurrencies in the world. If it catches on, they could be sitting on a huge fraction of the coins, and just gradually sell them off which would be akin to printing money.

I'm guessing right now it's more of a gamble that the value of Bitcoin will continue to rise, which will increase the wealth of the government and the whole economy. In that case, it's almost better than printing money. But I'm not so sure the gamble will pay off. There's a decent chance that Bitcoin has peaked. I think it will be meeting increasing regulatory hurdles across the world in the years ahead.

[brockwhittaker]

Not really, because printing money implies a low cost to produce new "money" into the system. It’s more like defaulting to gold as well. El Salvador can buy more gold but at a very high cost that isn’t akin to printing money.