President Bukele seeks to make El Salvador 1st country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender
06 June 2021
El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said in Saturday that he plans send a bill to the country's Congress next week "that will make bitcoin a legal tender."
Why it matters: If the legislation is passed by lawmakers, El Salvador would become the first country to formally adopt the digital currency.
#Bitcoin has a market cap of $680 billion dollars.
— Nayib Bukele 🇸🇻 (@nayibbukele) June 6, 2021
If 1% of it is invested in El Salvador, that would increase our GDP by 25%.
On the other side, #Bitcoin will have 10 million potential new users and the fastest growing way to transfer 6 billion dollars a year in remittances.
- "In the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy," Bukele said in a video for the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida, which was posted online.
- Jack Mallers, founder of the Lightning Network payments platform Strike, which is working with Bukele on the project, noted at the conference, "Over 70% of the active population of El Salvador doesn't have a bank account. They're not in the financial system."
The big picture: Over 2 million Salvadorans live outside the Central American country and send home some $4 billion every year, with remittances making up about 20% of the country's GDP, per the BBC.
- Bukele didn't go into details on how the policy would work. But he said it would be used alongside the U.S. dollar, which the country has used as its official unit of currency since 2001.
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.