Get a $0.20 per gallon discount on petrol when paying with Bitcoin.

[Wiwo]

Global Bitcoin adoption is on the rise as El Salvador approved bitcoin as a legal tender some months ago, haven't rolled out thousands of Bitcoin ATMs the government has gone further to place a subsidy on petroleum ⛽ when paying with Bitcoin using the government-owned Bitcoin wallet.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-introduces-fuel-subsidy-of-0-20-per-liter-to-locals-who-pay-in-btc

[Upgrade00]

The article raises some obvious concerns which is worth discussing. Starting from the launch, many were skeptical of the government's reason to stipulate that people use a particular wallet service as it goes against free will that bitcoin promotes, now the discount policy only applies to people that pay using the designated wallet service. Creating a business and having a whole country patronize you would yield good profits.

The other criticism was about who pays for the discount; the obvious answer would be the government through tax payers money, so the citizens are paying for it.

[zanezane]

This is pretty useful especially for the people that's using gasoline a lot and drives a lot either for work or something that requires driving a lot, a .20 USD discount can't be ignored because if you think about it, that's 73 USD saved for a year per gallon of gasoline.

[Vaskiy]

On an average common man will purchase half a gallon per week. This might differ with the people, but majority fall under this segment. With this one can make a profit of $5.4 in an year. This doesn't look like a big thing to make people use bitcoin. Even in my country for every litre of petrol purchased through cards gets us rewards. This rewards on reaching specific number can be used to purchase petrol. What El Salvador government have taken forward looks similar.

Expect more progressive forms of adoption to happen with the people.

[Kakmakr]

I have been saying for years that merchants accepting Bitcoin was implementing it wrong. You cannot expect people to go through all the effort to learn a new technology and also to go through the effort to switch to a new payment option, if you do not incentivize it.

A merchant that previously accepted Credit cards and now switched to Bitcoin... already saved a ton of money on fees that it had to pay to Credit card companies.... why can they not use some of that saving to offer discounts to the customers that are paying with Bitcoin. (Take only a small percentage of the savings and push it toward discounts)

Well done ...once again to El Salvador for doing this.. it just shows what creativity they have... to push the change.  

[tyz]

Global Bitcoin adoption is on the rise as El Salvador approved bitcoin as a legal tender some months ago, haven't rolled out thousands of Bitcoin ATMs the government has gone further to place a subsidy on petroleum ⛽ when paying with Bitcoin using the government-owned Bitcoin wallet.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-introduces-fuel-subsidy-of-0-20-per-liter-to-locals-who-pay-in-btc

According to official statements there are not thousands of ATMs installed yet, the official numbers speaks about 205. Here is a tweet from Bukele who shares these information
https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1442533230540886019

The discount on gasoline is no wonder, as the government continues to try to enforce Bitcoin. After all, the official figures also say that over 2 million have installed the Civo Wallet so far, which is around 1/3 of the total population. By the way, you get $30 in Bitcoin for free on this wallet. So this new promotion fits in well.

[DeathAngel]

I’m not sure how many people from El Salvador use the forum but I’m guessing not that many. I think Bukeke is a legend though & his forward thinking & risk taking is going to be really good for getting the people of El Salvador out of poverty. People doubt him but I think he will go down in history as one of the best South American presidents ever.

[dupee419]

I’m not sure how many people from El Salvador use the forum but I’m guessing not that many. I think Bukeke is a legend though & his forward thinking & risk taking is going to be really good for getting the people of El Salvador out of poverty. People doubt him but I think he will go down in history as one of the best South American presidents ever.

The people of El Salvador, some of them doubts him, I don't know if you said 'Bukeke' on purpose but reading it cracked me up  , anyways, it really is risky to actually pursue Bitcoin but they seem to be committed on their plans for Bitcoin and for their people, meanwhile, the discounts on gas stations, this is one of their plans to actually convince everyone to use Bitcoin rather than using dollar, but still, the majority of them remained unconvinced, they probably need to do more than just offering discounts to the people of El Salvador.

[avikz]

Global Bitcoin adoption is on the rise as El Salvador approved bitcoin as a legal tender some months ago, haven't rolled out thousands of Bitcoin ATMs the government has gone further to place a subsidy on petroleum ⛽ when paying with Bitcoin using the government-owned Bitcoin wallet.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-introduces-fuel-subsidy-of-0-20-per-liter-to-locals-who-pay-in-btc

It seems Mr. Bukele is determined to make bitcoin actually usable among their citizens. First he has announced free 30 USD bonus, second he has announced the bitcoin mining using geothermal energy and now a whopping discount of 20 cents per liter. It seems he will leave no stones unturned into his venture of making bitcoin popular among its citizens. Good for the crypto market in general because granular level of adoption is what we all are looking for.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

The promo is only valid through to the 14/10/2021, so despite it being a 5% discount per gallon (be it paid in BTC or USD I presume), it’s not going to sum up to that much saving really. It applies to Puma and Uno, but have left out the largest supplier by number of stations: Texaco. This could either be deliberate, or that Texaco was not willing to accept the conditions and cover at least part of the said discount.

This is ok from the perspective of a Fidelity Club or such, but from a government made initiative, I’d expect them to try not to infer influence and divert traffic (pun intended) to certain stations over others within the country (that’s likely what the promo will achieve).

[MrcMrc]

El Salvador government has always been looking for a way to encourage it, citizens, to use Bitcoin for their daily lives and transaction. Haven’t given each citizen $30 worth of Bitcoin as an airdrop giving 0.20 cents on a gallon is quite huge, most especially the heavy users of petroleum will benefit big this time.

[electronicash]

I’m not sure how many people from El Salvador use the forum but I’m guessing not that many. I think Bukeke is a legend though & his forward thinking & risk taking is going to be really good for getting the people of El Salvador out of poverty. People doubt him but I think he will go down in history as one of the best South American presidents ever.

maybe. there are already latin countries also interested to make BTC as legal tender like Brazil. these are the presidents that will be appreciated by their people whenthey do it at the right time and i think its the right time to do it while the world is also i n transistion to digitize everything.

companies now will be using the blockchain technology.

[The Cryptovator]

The other criticism was about who pays for the discount; the obvious answer would be the government through tax payers money, so the citizens are paying for it.

There will be always criticism for every big step. I have read the articles where a few citizens talking about that. You have given the perfect answer. Although governments carrying out this 0.20 USD from the taxpayer, but citizens directly getting this offer from the government. It's a scope getting benefits from the government.

It seems El Salvador strongly promoting Bitcoin and encouraging citizens to use that. The president realized he should take the advantage of Bitcoin trends and improve the economic system. It's a real-time decision for a country to bring the next financial ecosystem. Hope other countries will follow El Salvador.

[Ucy]

Interesting.
Guess we could say the government is incentivizing people to use its wallet rather than compelling them. Well, as long as the government has good reasons why it wants users on the wallet. I think the good reasons should outweigh the subsidy cost.
It's OK to make price of petrol cheaper if it really beneficial. The benefits should be able to cover the subsidy costs  and make the whole scheme profitable. The result produced by this in the future should determine how useful & worthwhile the subsidy is to the people/country.  So, it should be well done.

[stompix]

This is pretty useful especially for the people that's using gasoline a lot and drives a lot either for work or something that requires driving a lot, a .20 USD discount can't be ignored because if you think about it, that's 73 USD saved for a year per gallon of gasoline.

Isn't this a bit ironic?
Those that will be the beneficiaries of the subsidy will be the ones that could afford a car and the gas in the first place, Salvador has 41 cars /1000 peoples, Europe has 524, 12 times more.

The other criticism was about who pays for the discount; the obvious answer would be the government through tax payers money, so the citizens are paying for it.

Of course, who do you think would pay for it?
The same was with Venezuela, it's not like gas was extracted and refined at 1 cent, it's just that everyone subsidized that price, even the ones that didn't have a car.

I suspect the motive is to drive poeple into converting $ to BTC and then keep those BTC in the state wallets while paying the gas stations from $ funds.
It does make sense from an investor point of view but one should know it comes with risks also.

[JohnBitCo]

Global Bitcoin adoption is on the rise as El Salvador approved bitcoin as a legal tender some months ago, haven't rolled out thousands of Bitcoin ATMs the government has gone further to place a subsidy on petroleum ⛽ when paying with Bitcoin using the government-owned Bitcoin wallet.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-introduces-fuel-subsidy-of-0-20-per-liter-to-locals-who-pay-in-btc

That's a great initiative to make people use bitcoins instead of fiat paper currency. However i would like to know what is the current price of petroleum gallon in el-salvador so we may know how much percentage is this discount.  As per my understanding, its 0.2$ per gallon and not litre, so it won't be much savings.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…> However i would like to know what is the current price of petroleum gallon in el-salvador so we may know how much percentage is this discount.  As per my understanding, its 0.2$ per gallon and not litre, so it won't be much savings.

This site provides reference average prices, although updates are monthly:
https://es.globalpetrolprices.com/El-Salvador/gasoline_prices/

The latest average price per gallon on the site (27/09/2021) is 3,891 $, so 20 cents on the gallon makes it just over 5% as I stated before (although applicable only for another week and a half). Not much, and not for a sustained amount of time either.

[NotATether]

This doesn't make sense for people who drive sparingly, because the transaction fees of converting to and from bitcoin dwarf the fuel discounts they might get from refilling seldomly.

Fuel tanks hold at least 40 liters, four liters is about a gallon so that's about 10 gallons or $2. Compare that to transaction fees of $5 on a busy day [and don't even get me started with conversion fees]. So it puts these kind of customers at a net loss.

[Upgrade00]

It seems El Salvador strongly promoting Bitcoin and encouraging citizens to use that. The president realized he should take the advantage of Bitcoin trends and improve the economic system. It's a real-time decision for a country to bring the next financial ecosystem. Hope other countries will follow El Salvador.

It is definitely a big step and one that would expose millions of their citizens to Bitcoin and its advantages.
But the government isn't juts promoting Bitcoin, they are promoting their Bitcoin wallet service and encouraging people to use that, if I were to be interested in Bitcoin, I would want to decide which wallet I use based on functionality.

Also, are Bitcoin trends capable of fixing an economic system? It's a speculative asset with growth potential, but improving an ecconomy would take a lot more than accepting Bitcoin as a legal tender.

[BIN-BIN]

This is a right move in the right direction, as this move will encourage people to adopt Bitcoin and will further strengthen the existing legal backing to the use of Bitcoin in that country. Petroleum is one of the most

 consumed commodity within the society.