The website that Nayib Bukele cited to talk about profits in December showed a loss this Sunday. There are doubts as to whether the purchase is genuine, as official information has never been shown beyond that published in X.
On the morning of December 4, 2023, bullish Nayib Bukele wrote on his X account, “El Salvador’s Bitcoin investments are in the black!” Want to miss the opportunity to blame those who pointed them out.
“The responsible thing would be for them to back down, apologize or, at least, acknowledge that El Salvador is making profits, just as they have repeatedly denounced that we have suffered losses. If they consider themselves true journalists, they should report on this new reality with the same intensity with which they reported last time,” he concluded.
On that occasion, Bukele cited reliable information from nayibtracker.com, a website that tracks on its X account all Bitcoin purchase announcements that the government of El Salvador allegedly makes and compares them to the value of the cryptocurrency. Estimate whether there is a loss or profit on that investment. This note will explain below why the President is said to consider this source credible.
Read More: Bukele uses third-party graph to report Bitcoin “profits”
Therefore, if Nayib Bukele is to be believed, it can be said that the Bitcoin investments of the El Salvador government are in danger, as they have started generating losses. During the day on Sunday, according to nayibtracker.com, losses in Bitcoin amounted to about $2.11 million, or about 1.72% of the estimated treasure of more than $117 million.
After several weeks of growth, the cryptocurrency fell very close to the $40,000 threshold this Sunday, hitting a peak of $49,000. This is a strange behavior of the market, because the approval of an ETF based on Bitcoin (an exchange-traded fund based on the cryptocurrency) in the United States predicted the opposite.
Bitcoin had hit Wall Street: Instead of buying the cryptocurrency directly on an exchange, you could now invest in an exchange-traded fund, the same way you could buy shares of Google or Apple.
lDoubt over government purchase of Bitcoin
Apart from what the president on vacation said in his Which organization protects these funds?
“There is no official information beyond President Bukele’s tweets,” Frank Mussi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), told BBC Mundo. Bitcoin has been a campaign currency, although it has not been the president’s most successful currency. It is also doubtful that such purchases were made in light of Bukele’s decision to use graphs from a third party, the website nayibtracker.com, as evidence that El Salvador’s cryptocurrency reserves were turning a profit.
That December 4, when Bukele celebrated and attacked his opponents while he was black, many of his colleagues, including New Ideas representatives in the Legislative Assembly, made similar calls attacking the free press.
The president’s story was also supported by information operators such as Porfirio Chica, a former substitute deputy from the ARENA party and former advisor to Antonio Saka, who now, despite not officially holding any position in Nayib Bukele’s government, Are close to that administration.
It was this last person who helped confirm that the graph shown by Bukele on December 4 to celebrate that “El Salvador’s Bitcoin investments were in the black” belonged to the website nayibtracker.com and contained an error. There was also a problem which was fixed by the same website. same day.
In the graph published by Bukele, the dollar value of bitcoins reportedly acquired by the El Salvador government is $130.89 million, with a unit price of $41,631.3. Dividing the first number by the second number results in 3,144 Bitcoins. Therefore, this will be the total number of cryptocurrencies purchased.
Porfirio Chica wrote a message on his goat pet.
The image they used to show these alleged earnings has the title “Nayib Bukele Portfolio Tracker” in its header, making it clear that it belongs to nayibtracker.com.
Unlike the photo published six hours later by the vacationing president, this one, as in the page above, contained a total in Bitcoins: 3144, the figure given by dividing the total by the unit price in Bukele’s graph. So there was no doubt that it was the same graph.
However, the website nayibtracker.com wrote in the afternoon of December 4 that it had made a mistake, which caused the total investment to increase. The correct cryptocurrency deposit number was 2,762.
Why did the President publish false totals of the Bitcoin treasure allegedly held by El Salvador? Don’t know the number of purchased cryptocurrencies?
However, according to technologist Mario Gomez, this is not the underlying problem. The price may also touch the sky in the coming days. But there will be loss. Salvadorans should ask themselves what is gained by accumulating a million-dollar fund, without generating interest (for example, in a simple installment deposit) or investing it in normal profitable operations.
“The President says he doesn’t sell. If we believe the President’s words that he actually bought this benefit, it is never concrete, it is imaginary. Gomez says, “Did the $117 million investment pay off?”
This question becomes more obvious when it is borne in mind that the government’s sources of financing are depleting.
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