Content
With U.S.-denominated government junk-bond debt now yielding over 13% in the market, El Salvador has ventured into a creative alternative to raise money at lower costs while directly betting on bitcoin’s upside over the next five years. Without an agreement with the IMF, the government’s main alternative would be to issue more junk-bond debt that has already been selling off in distressed territory all year. When backed into a financial corner, Bukele and El Salvador have doubled down on Bitcoin. Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory. The El Salvador and Blockstream partnership to issue cheap, U.S. dollar-denominated debt to directly buy bitcoin is a new version of speculative attack. The $1 billion bitcoin bond will be split 50/50 for buying bitcoin and building out energy and bitcoin mining infrastructure. The bond’s duration is 10 years, paying 6.5% initially with additional dividends paid out to bondholders from bitcoin holding liquidations after a five-year lockup period. The initial bonds will be issued in 2022, with Blockstream highlighting that it can easily accept investments as small as $100. Mining is a time-consuming and expensive endeavour due to the way the currency is designed.
Koch exchanged one fifth of his 5,000 bitcoins, generating enough kroner to buy an apartment in Toyen, one of the Norwegian capital’s wealthier areas. In April 2013, the value of bitcoin peaked at $266 before crashing to a low of $50 soon after. Since then, bitcoin has seen large fluctuations in its value, most recently following the seizure of online drugs marketplace Silk Road, plummeting before jumping $30 in one day to a high of $197 in October. Read more about DRGN to BTC here. The meteoric rise in bitcoin has meant that within the space of four years, one Norwegian man’s $27 investment turned into a forgotten $886,000 windfall.
Estimating This Cycle’s Bitcoin Price Top
Each subsequent bitcoin mined is more complex than the previous one, requiring more computational time and therefore investment through the electricity and computer hardware required. However, bitcoin is gaining more and more traction within the physical world too. It is now possible to actually spend bitcoins without exchanging them for traditional Bitcoin Exchange currency first in a few British pubs, including the Pembury Tavern in Hackney, London, for instance. On 29 October, the world’s first bitcoin ATM also went online in Vancouver, Canada, which scans a user’s palm before letting them buy or sell bitcoins for cash. If you want more than $100 worth of crypto, you’ll need to verify your identity.
