Bitcoin opponents and those fighting the approaches of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele have obliterated a cryptocurrency ATM in the country’s capital city. Media source Teleprensa and others posted recordings via social media showing a Chivo-supported teller in San Salvador consumed by flames in the midst of a horde of columnists and dissenters on Wednesday. The Bitcoin (BTC) machine, one of many organized by the El Salvador government since its acknowledgment of the digital currency as legal tender, could be seen ruined with anti-BTC messages and a sign that read, “democracy is not for sale.”
San Salvador Mayor Mario Durán said city laborers had pulled out of the space subsequent to receiving threats, yet intended to return sometime yesterday. The damage is, by all accounts, restricted to the Chivo ATM in the Plaza Gerardo Barrios in the center of the capital city, yet nonconformists likewise purportedly set fire to furniture from one of the court’s shops.
The ATM is one of approximately 200 in El Salvador, part of the public authority’s rollout to acknowledge BTC as legal tender on the same level as the US dollar. President Bukele has said he trusts the crypto ATMs will ultimately be “all over” the country, but has asserted that nobody will be compelled to utilize Bitcoin.
Even prior to the implementation of the new Bitcoin Law on September 7, El Salvador confronted opposition from the apparently extreme enactment. Dissidents considering themselves the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Block marched in the capital city roads in July, while a gathering comprised of retired people, veterans, disability beneficiaries and others shaped their own campaigns the next month.
