<story><title>El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/el-salvador-adopts-bitcoin-official-currency-first-country-rcna1910</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aazaa</author><text>&amp;gt; To warm up a skeptical public, Bukele has promised every citizen $30 in bitcoin if they sign up for a government digital wallet. Ahead of the launch, El Salvador bought 400 bitcoins, Bukele said, helping drive the currency price above $52,000 for the first time since May.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the early hours of Tuesday the wallet had not appeared on Apple Inc., Google and Huawei’s app download platforms, however, prompting a series of tweets from Bukele, including one with a red-faced “angry” emoticon.&lt;p&gt;The involvement of a government-issued wallet gives this story an even stranger dimension. First, it&amp;#x27;s not clear how the government will identify those eligible to receive the $30 bitcoin deposit. Second, why would the government be involved at all in developing a wallet? There are plenty to choose from now, so what features exactly were missing in those? Finally, what government in its right mind would hitch its fortunes to the vagaries of a walled-garden App Store based in the US, a country clearly hostile to the Salvadoran experiment?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Godel_unicode</author><text>The government is going to have to make an official recommendation for which wallet to use, and from their perspective the risk of promoting an existing wallet whose provenance they don&amp;#x27;t know is pretty high.</text></comment>
<story><title>El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/el-salvador-adopts-bitcoin-official-currency-first-country-rcna1910</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aazaa</author><text>&amp;gt; To warm up a skeptical public, Bukele has promised every citizen $30 in bitcoin if they sign up for a government digital wallet. Ahead of the launch, El Salvador bought 400 bitcoins, Bukele said, helping drive the currency price above $52,000 for the first time since May.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the early hours of Tuesday the wallet had not appeared on Apple Inc., Google and Huawei’s app download platforms, however, prompting a series of tweets from Bukele, including one with a red-faced “angry” emoticon.&lt;p&gt;The involvement of a government-issued wallet gives this story an even stranger dimension. First, it&amp;#x27;s not clear how the government will identify those eligible to receive the $30 bitcoin deposit. Second, why would the government be involved at all in developing a wallet? There are plenty to choose from now, so what features exactly were missing in those? Finally, what government in its right mind would hitch its fortunes to the vagaries of a walled-garden App Store based in the US, a country clearly hostile to the Salvadoran experiment?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nomoreplease</author><text>The most logical reason is that they want to connect the human identity to the wallet&amp;#x2F;address, thereby easily removing anonymity and ensuring the government can monitor their population effectively</text></comment>