Bitcoin is emerging as a viable alternative currency

IMAGE: Grok

Bitcoin’s apparent resilience at an exchange rate of around $100,000, proving it to be a good long-term store of value seems to be encouraging more and more players to see it as an alternative to traditional money in general, and the dollar in particular.

In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele’s risky bet on bitcoin to save the Central American country’s economy looks to have paid off: last Friday, the country’s government acquired more than eleven bitcoins worth $1.07 billion, and made another purchase two days later, with the tentative goal of acquiring twenty thousand more bitcoins. The country has already accumulated reserves of $574 billion in bitcoins, and has just closed an agreement with the IMF for a loan of $1.4 billion in exchange for scaling back its controversial policies and allow businesses to decide whether to accept bitcoin, in an attempt by the institution to postpone the problem that seems to be coming upon it if the country’s example spreads.

But El Salvador, a very small and unrepresentative economy, is far from the only country with bitcoin-linked ambitions. Another small country, but much more important, Singapore, has just surpassed Hong Kong in the race to attract cryptocurrency companies.

Meanwhile, Russia is increasingly turning to bitcoin for foreign trade in a bid to counter…