El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, announced that his Nation has mined a small quota of its first bitcoin for the first time since officially adopting the cryptocurrency as legal tender, by utilizing natural power using geothermal power obtained from Volcanos.
The President on 3rd of october 2021,announced the first results of El Salvador’s new volcano-powered bitcoin mining system.
This comes shortly after the country’s official adoption of bitcoin as a legal tender, which happened in September.
The news was revealed by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, through his tweet.
The mining project has, according to the press release, accumulate a total of 0.00599180 BTC so far.
This was celebrated in a tweet released by President Bukele, in which he shared the total amount of mined bitcoin so far, which is far from one bitcoin as of yet. The tweet also includes a section called “payment on pend” which is listed separately from the amount of bitcoin that was gained through mining.
In this section, 0.00483980 BTC will be sent to the account through a “pending payment” which is equivalent to USD 231.19 (or GBP 170.68) as of writing. In total then, the account contains 0.01083156 BTC, equivalent to USD 517.36 (or GBP 381.96) as of writing.
President Bukele’s tweet also specifies that the volcano energy-based mining project is still in the “testing and installation” phase right now, likely being the reason for the fairly small total number of bitcoin.
Despite the positive messaging promoted by government representatives and media, the reported reality of things is far more controversial. September 8, 2021, was the day that bitcoin was officially inducted as an official currency in El Salvador. Before it was implemented, the news attracted as many critics as proponents. The Guardian’s Jeffrey Frankel, a noted crypto-expert, called it “pure folly” and continued to describe the idea of cryptocurrency being adopted as legal tender to be “the strangest, most worrying aspect” of crypto.
After the official designation of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador had been introduced and implemented, the country saw riots which many media outlets linked directly to the adoption of bitcoin by the country’s government. The reason cited for this is due to fears that recognizing bitcoin as legal tender would “bring instability and inflation to the impoverished Latin American country.