If the case of the adoption of Bitcoin has already caused a lot of ink to flow, it seems that we can expect new shocks: indeed, the entry of Bitcoin in the customs was already not necessarily called to be done in the greatest of calm, but here are rumors and complaints of users of the national wallet Chivo are more pressing: Salvadoran citizens would suffer from inconsistencies of the wallet in question … and some would even lose their Bitcoin balances. An uncomfortable situation to say the least…
On the trail of the missing bitcoins
If the first testimonies emerged on Twitter, it is the New Scientist media that first picked up the news to share it: Salvadorans who did not ask for anything and who use – more or less forced – the state wallet Chivo to store their bitcoins have found that their funds disappeared … purely and simply.
This is not the first time (and obviously not the last) that we hear about the more or less occasional malfunctions of the Chivo wallet: its launch had given rise to many headaches for its users, confronted with serial bugs, difficulties in verifying identity, or sending bitcoins to merchants … who never received them, as told with humor, good humor and a certain echo Rogzy on his return from the local event Adopting Bitcoin
Hot on Chivo?
It was one Twitter user in particular who sounded the alarm at the increase in cases, leaving the victims of this unfortunate incident totally helpless in the face of a Salvadoran public service that is obviously a little out of touch and unable to solve the problem – or even provide a real response to these episodic disappearances.
According to Decrypt, which was able to interview this user answering under the pseudonym of Comisionado, the Salvadoran government has still not officially reacted to the alerts of its fellow citizens.
A rather surprising situation, especially since President Bukele has in recent months accustomed the community of rich bitcoiners that he targets in particular to its large operations of communication polished and worked: the public has thus come to know the president with methods deemed authoritarian by the local opposition and the free media, whether it be his ability to tout his new bitcoin maximalism on English-language podcasts, his shitpost-like rants demonstrating a taste for quality trolling on Twitter, or his recent bombastic announcements (such as bitcoin mining supposedly enabled by volcanoes or a hypothetical future Bitcoin City so far as real as Senegal’s Akoin City).
For the time being, the problem does not seem to be solved, so much so that one would almost advise Salvadorans to avoid wasting their time with wallets managed by their own government, preferring open source solutions such as the wallet developed by Bitcoin Beach, the local initiative that has been pushing Bitcoin adoption locally for several years now.
While some maximalists sometimes seem to forget themselves a bit, falling in love with the first nation to make Bitcoin a legal tender and the prospects that such an initiative could open up, It is still surprising that the hope of progress with Bitcoin sometimes makes people turn a blind eye to the notable and annoying imperfections of tools that are otherwise reviled in Europe and the United States, and accept a dubious complacency towards methods of government that would make the same maximalists howl if they were to be even partially applied in our French-speaking lands. The cause of Bitcoin, the Number Go Up and the singing tomorrows of the satoshis… above all?
