It's 2:47 AM and I'm staring at my trading screen, watching BTC/USD tick up and down like a nervous heartbeat. My Twitter feed is exploding. "El Salvador buys the dip again!" says one tweet. "Bukele is bankrupting his country!" screams another. Everyone has an opinion about El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment. The crypto maximalists call it visionary. The economists call it reckless. The IMF calls it "concerning."
But here's the thing: they're all looking at it wrong.
See, I don't just write smart contracts and code in Python. I'm also a forex trader. Not the algorithmic kind, I'm the manual, chart staring, 3 AM price action reading kind. And when you've spent enough time watching how currencies actually move, how central banks actually operate, and how sovereign nations actually play the money game, El Salvador's move starts looking less like gambling and more like... well, genius.
Let me explain.
The Part Nobody Talks About
Before El Salvador adopted Bitcoin, they used the US dollar. Not pegged to it. Not backed by it. They literally used American dollars as their official currency since 2001.
Now, if you're not a trader, you might think, "So what? The dollar is stable."
But here's what that actually means: El Salvador had zero monetary policy. None. They couldn't print money when they needed liquidity. They couldn't adjust interest rates to cool down inflation or stimulate growth. They couldn't devalue their currency to make exports competitive. Every single monetary lever that countries use to navigate economic storms? Gone.
They were passengers in someone else's car, and the driver wasn't even looking at them in the rearview mirror.
When the US Federal Reserve raises rates to fight American inflation, El Salvador feels it. When the dollar strengthens and makes their exports more expensive, they can't do anything about it. When they need economic stimulus, they have to either borrow (at whatever rates international markets demand) or cut spending.
This is the part the crypto critics conveniently forget when they mock Bukele for "gambling with Bitcoin." They act like El Salvador was Singapore before Bitcoin, carefully managing some pristine monetary policy. No. They were already playing with house money, someone else's house.
What I See in the Charts
As a forex trader, I've learned something crucial: every currency is a bet. The dollar? That's a bet on American economic policy, political stability, and global reserve currency status. The euro? That's a bet on the European Central Bank holding together 19 different economies with 19 different interests. The yen? That's a bet on Japan's demographic time bomb not exploding.
Every. Single. Currency. Is. A. Bet.
So when people clutch their pearls about El Salvador "betting" on Bitcoin, I want to ask: as opposed to what? Their previous bet on the US dollar was working out great for them? A country with 20% of its GDP coming from remittances, hemorrhaging young people to migration, with no control over their own economic destiny that was the safe play?
Here's what Bukele actually did, translated into trader speak: he diversified his portfolio.
El Salvador didn't dump the dollar. They still use it. Bitcoin is legal tender alongside the dollar, not instead of it. It's like he looked at his forex account that was 100% long on USD and said, "You know what? Let me hedge this position a bit."
And suddenly, for the first time in two decades, El Salvador has something resembling monetary optionality.
The Remittance Angle (Or: The Part Where It Actually Makes Sense)
Let's talk about remittances, because this is where my Python scripts and blockchain knowledge meet real world impact.
El Salvador receives over $6 billion a year in remittances, money sent home by Salvadorans working abroad, mostly in the US. That's bigger than their entire export economy. These are people working construction in Texas, cleaning hotels in California, sending money home to their families.
Before Bitcoin, here's how that worked: Western Union and MoneyGram took a 10% cut. Sometimes more. Send $500 home? $50 disappears into fees. Your mom gets $450.
Now do that math across $6 billion. That's $600 million a year just vanishing into the pockets of money transfer companies.
Bitcoin rails? Near zero. Even with Lightning Network fees and exchange costs, we're talking 1 to 2%. That's $480-540 million a year staying in Salvadoran pockets instead of Western Union's quarterly earnings report.
As someone who's deployed smart contracts and watched gas fees on Ethereum, I can tell you: when people talk about "blockchain use cases," this is it. This isn't some hypothetical future utility. This is happening now. Real people. Real money. Real impact.
The Volatility Argument (And Why Traders Think About It Differently)
"But Bitcoin is too volatile!" everyone says. "You can't have a currency that swings 20% in a week!"
Okay. Fair. Bitcoin is volatile. But let's zoom out for a second.
The Salvadoran economy was already volatile. Commodity prices? Volatile. Tourism revenue? Volatile. Foreign investment? Volatile. The remittances they depend on? Tied to US immigration policy, which is... extremely volatile.
The difference is: Bitcoin's volatility is visible. It's on every chart, every screen, every news ticker. When BTC drops 15%, everyone sees it. When your economy contracts 8% because American policy changed or coffee prices crashed or a pandemic hit, it happens slowly, quietly, in GDP reports nobody reads.
And here's the kicker from a trader's perspective: Bitcoin's volatility has a ceiling and a floor that makes sense. It moves on supply and demand, on adoption metrics, on technical factors you can analyze. The dollar's value against Salvadoran purchasing power? That moves on Jerome Powell's mood, on US-China relations, on things completely outside El Salvador's control or understanding.
At least with Bitcoin, you can see the chart. You can make a decision. You have agency.
What This Really Is
Strip away the ideology, the laser eyes, the "have fun staying poor" nonsense, and here's what El Salvador actually did:
They added a non sovereign, globally liquid asset to their monetary system. An asset that can't be printed by a foreign central bank. An asset that gives them a direct connection to global capital markets. An asset that makes their remittance economy more efficient.
Is it risky? Sure. But show me the "safe" option for a small Central American country with no monetary sovereignty, massive emigration, and an economy dependent on remittances and foreign aid.
Through a forex trader's lens, Bukele didn't make a reckless bet. He made the same decision any competent trader makes when holding a single position that's not working: he diversified, he hedged, and he gave himself options.
The Bitcoin purists think he's building a crypto utopia. The critics think he's a delusional gambler. But maybe just maybe he's something simpler: a pragmatist playing the only hand he was dealt, and playing it smarter than anyone wants to admit.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here's what makes people uncomfortable: if El Salvador succeeds, even partially, it exposes something awkward about the global monetary system. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, small nations don't have to choose between "dollarization" and hyperinflation. Maybe there's a third option.
And if there's a third option, a lot of very powerful institutions have some explaining to do about why they never mentioned it.
That's what I see in my charts at 2:47 AM. Not revolution. Not recklessness. Just a small country trying something different because the "safe" option wasn't actually safe at all.
Whether it works or not? That's the trade. And like any trade, we won't know until we close the position.
But I'll say this: I've seen worse bets in forex. A lot worse.
The views expressed in this article are my own and do not constitute financial advice. I'm just a guy who codes smart contracts, trades currencies, and thinks too much about monetary policy at 3 AM.
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