'Nothing good has occurred.'
Southbound
While the value of Bitcoin continues to plummet, Politico reports that El Salvador, which embraced Bitcoin as legal tender last year under its blockchain-loving president, is seeing an increase in gang violence.
According to Politico, Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele was unable to attend a major crypto conference in Miami last month due to gang violence that resulted in the country's worst single-day murder surge since 1992, when the country was engulfed in civil war.
Bukele is taking to harsh tactics to quiet the violence, such as threatening to imprison media who publish gang remarks.
Previous Experience
Despite a spike in foreign investors and streams of tourists, it was evident that there was trouble in crypto paradise even before Bitcoin's turbulent crash this week.
While we can't say for sure whether Bukele's Bitcoin boosting was the direct reason of the country's spike in violence, it hasn't helped the region's socioeconomic instability.
Critics are now pointing out how Bukele's leadership style is diametrically opposed to the glitzy Bitcoin fantasies he promised last summer, around the time he originally declared plans to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country.
"The Bitcoin ideology is for freedom," Claudia Ortiz, a potential presidential candidate to Bukele, told Politico, "but the Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador is part of an authoritarian project, and that's nonsensical."
Eat It
Ezequiel Milla, the former mayor of La Union, El Salvador, which is home to a volcano where Bukele established a geothermal Bitcoin mining plant, put it even better.
"Nothing good has happened," Milla said near the Conchagua volcano's base.
He appears to be correct lately.
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