Bitcoin was announced as legal tender and this was rolled out on September 7 and over the last month or so, there have been reports of a few glitches in the system that has had users fuming and the rollout hasn’t been as welcomed as it was expected to be.
Though bitcoin was announced as legal tender, the dollar also continues to be legal tender which means that people can opt for using either of these. It is only natural that risk-averse citizens would choose to go with the dollar for payments as they cannot tolerate the risk involved with bitcoin prices. Apart from this, the rollout involved the users being required to sign up for the chivo wallet and all those who signed up would be given $30 in BTC in their respective wallets. Now it has been reported that for several users, the wallets had already been signed up by someone else and the $30 has been taken away as well which means that the users are either not able to sign up or even if they did, they do not have the $30 in their wallets. This has caused a lot of heartburn in the country lately.
There have been other such technical glitches that are natural for such a large rollout as this, which included a server overload as many users tried to sign up for the chivo wallet at the same time. This led to some downtime initially which seems to have been sorted out at this time. On the other hand, users have been able to perform cross-border transactions in a free, fast, and reliable manner which was one of the first advantages that was touted by the supporters when the rollout was announced.
But only time can tell on whether this adoption would last for long and how much of the population would be willing to accept the use of bitcoin as legal tender, especially in times of a bear market when prices slide and this is something that is bound to happen sooner or later. Cu8rrently, the bitcoin prices are rising and so no one feels the pinch but when it drops and becomes highly volatile, that will be the time of the biggest challenge for this experiment and could serve as something to be studied for other countries that are getting ready to roll out digital currencies, though most of the developed countries aren’t planning to adopt bitcoin but are leaning more towards digital currencies tied to their fiat currencies or are looking to use stablecoins.
