Bitcoin changed my life’: Taxi driver cashes in on El Salvador’s crypto gamble !!
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.
He credits President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life.
“Before I was unemployed and now I have my own business,”
said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company.
Three years ago, the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin into legal circulation in a bid to revitalise El Salvador’s dollarised, remittance-reliant economy.
He invested hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the cryptocurrency, despite warnings about volatility risks from global institutions.
Osorio credited the US founder of the NGO My First Bitcoin, John Dennehy, with encouraging him to accept payment in the cryptocurrency.
He now has 21 drivers working for his Bit-Driver brand and has made enough profit from the currency’s rise to be able to buy four rental vehicles.
A divorced father of two teenagers, he also no longer struggles to pay for their education.
Launching bitcoin as legal tender on September 7, 2021, Bukele said he wanted to bring the 70 per cent of Salvadorans who do not use banks into the financial system and promptly began ploughing public money in cryptocurrencies.
To spur Salvadorans to use bitcoin he created the Chivo Wallet app for sending and receiving bitcoin free of charge and gave US$30 (RM130) to each new user.
His grand ambitions for bitcoin fell foul of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which hesitated to grant El Salvador a US$1.3 billion loan because of its official use of the cryptocurrency.
In August, however, the IMF announced a preliminary loan agreement with El Salvador, while saying it needed to mitigate “potential risks.”
