The caravan has arrived, and all eyes are on the $30 legal tender bitcoins that will begin raining down on El Salvador in a matter of hours on Tuesday.
“I thank you everybody,” Karla, an El Salvadorian barista, said after receiving almost 5 million sats (0.05 btc) worth $2,600 from bitcoiners all around the world.
Alex Gladstein, the human rights bitcoin campaigner who spoke with Jack Dorsey, is on hand to demonstrate a Lightning Network (LN) bitcoin to cash ATM.
The government of El Salvador is launching 200 fee-free ATMs and 50 banking branches across the country.
Following the implementation of the legal tender law, they are also eliminating capital gains taxes on bitcoin, with permanent residency available to anyone who invests three bitcoins in the country, a quantity that is probably flexible based on the price.
Peter McCormack (left) is also there, interviewing El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, and witnessing some anti-bitcoin protests.
There was always the potential that bitcoin would be converted into a party political issue in El Salvador, with Bukele's failings — and most likely not accomplishments – becoming bitcoin's shortcomings.
We can't do much about it as a decentralized crypto, not least because no one knew where El Salvador was on the map until a few months ago.
So they can look at it anyway they want, but we don't have a choice but to draw a clear line between Bukele and everything else about El Salvador, and bitcoin and its new legal tender status.
The latter is a first, and to mark the occasion, crypto enthusiasts around the world are planning to buy $30 worth of bitcoin as a symbolic gesture, with everyone free to buy as much as they want after that.
As a result, the price of bitcoin temporarily crossed $52,000, indicating that the currency had finally achieved parity with fiat money in at least one country.
The IMF does not like this because it is sponsored by governments which print their own money, which automatically boosts taxes.
El Salvador, on the other hand, does not print its own money. So, in their opinion, why should they grant monopoly status to just one foreign central bank when they could add bitcoin and give it some competition?
No one needs to accept bitcoin because they can have the transaction instantly turned into dollars, and if they're LN-ing, they may save money on banking fees, especially for international transactions.
The only risk here is a hazy "money laundering" when the government wallet has KYC and the FinCen files show chartered banks are far and away the specialists in this area.
Of course, there's been some bitcoin colonialist hyperbole as well. All of these wealthy and intelligent individuals are primarily dudes on the cutting edge of technology, delivering advanced technology to poor peasants that they may hire and thus pass on know-how in an enslavement to a bank in your pocket while harvesting rare resources such as volcano mining.
Whatever your political views, you should be opposed to nerds wielding Macbooks and commanding worldwide code-based banks from their refuge on the El Zonte beaches, like some modern Taliban.
They go so far as to declare jihad against centralized Libor-style price rigging of money and everything else by encoding it in Moses stone tablets, or code, as they call it.
Who wants these well-behaved apes in t-shirts in their garden, babbling about the Moon and Mars, and even nonsense like Andromeda, which they wish to conquer through their rigorous and immutable code networks?
Nah, better the IMF and Jerome Powell's utterly egalitarian design decide everything, but to be fair to Powell, he has done a reasonably excellent job given the conditions and nature of his post.
In a nutshell, "Viva El Salvador!" Long live liberalism, with this legal tender proclamation being one of the most liberal acts in a generation or more, as people, or at least one people, are now free to choose what money they wish without restriction.
The rest of us will have to wait for our own Talibans to realize that competition may be beneficial. That freedom is preferable to a lack of it. The freedom to rein sats on mac chimps, the freedom to own our code and platforms, the right to have a set measurer of worth and use it on a level playing field, the freedom to conduct a peaceful revolution based on the people's judgment, choice, and consent.
One day, we'll get there. For the time being, we can only speculate about the future of El Salvador, where a large number of bitcoiners are presently residing in order to experience what it's like to live in a bitcoin-free country.
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