Vitalik Buterin Criticizes El Salvador’s Mandatory Adoption Of Bitcoin As Contrary To Crypto’s “Ideal Of Freedom”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin criticized El Salvador’s forced adoption of Bitcoin on the Reddit forum on Friday. 

In a forum post titled "Unpopular opinion: El Salvador President Mr Nayab Bukele should not be praised by Crypto community", vbuterin (Vitalik Buterin's Reddit account) replied: "Nothing unpopular about this opinion. Making it mandatory for businesses to accept a specific cryptocurrency is contrary to the ideals of freedom that are supposed to be so important to the crypto space. Additionally, this tactic of pushing BTC to millions of people in El Salvador at the same time with almost no attempt at prior education is reckless, and risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed."

Buterin's remarks seem to refer to Article 7 of the Bitcoin Law passed by El Salvador in June, which stipulates that Bitcoin must be accepted by "every economic entity" as a method of payment.

However, due to opposition to the mandatory use of Bitcoin, Bukele clarified on Twitter in July that the use of Bitcoin as legal tender would be "completely optional" and the government would not force any resident to accept Bitcoin as a method of payment.

By Mary Liu

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