“Without technical support and only pointless calls, where is my money?” Luis Guardado asked President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador directly.
According to several Salvadorans posting on social media, some of the money from El Salvador’s state-issued Chivo wallets has gone missing.
According to a Dec. 16 Twitter thread initiated by user “the commissioner,” at least 50 Salvadorans have reported December losses totaling more than $96,000 as a result of the government’s establishment of Bitcoin (BTC) wallets. Some of these transactions were for as little as $61, but others claimed to have lost thousands, if not more, of dollars.
“There is a security breach on the wallet, and funds and transactions have vanished,” Luis Guardado said directly to President Nayib Bukele. “Without technical support and only pointless calls, where has my money gone?”
Bukele said in October that 3 million Salvadorans, or about half of the country’s 6.5 million residents, were utilising their Chivo wallets. Since the proposal of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law in June, many citizens have opposed the idea for a number of reasons, including the volatility of cryptocurrencies and assertions that they were an unreliable investment for pension funds. Protesters marched through San Salvador’s capital city prior to the law’s implementation on Sept. 7, with subsequent protests resulting in the ransacking and burning of Chivo kiosks.
El Salvador’s president has frequently used social media to promote BTC adoption and related projects, such as mining cryptocurrency using geothermal energy from the country’s volcanoes and developing a Bitcoin City initially funded by $1 billion in BTC bonds. He also utilises the site to publicly publicise his Bitcoin acquisitions. At the time of publishing, the country’s treasury had 1,391 BTC — around $71 million — with the cryptocurrency’s price hovering over $50,000 for the holidays.
Wallets