El Salvadore President lost $12 million of public funds in Bitcoin

moneycontrol.com:

For El Salvadore, dabbling in bitcoin may have resulted in more monetary losses than its originally intended benefits, if recent calculations by Bloomberg are to be believed.

Going by the information on President Nayib Bukele's Twitter posts, the estimate is that the country currently holds around 1,391 bitcoins. Given that each bitcoin was averagely priced at around $51,056 per BTC, the value of this entire holding would amount to around $71 million.

Given that bitcoin saw a brutal start to 2022, touching new lows and registering an overall decline of 17.5 percent over the last few weeks, the present total value of the bitcoins held by the Salvadorean government would be worth $59 million.

This means that Bukele's bitcoin purchases have cost the country almost $12 million in public funds. However, all these losses remain on paper if the country has not let go or sold any of its bitcoin, which happens to also be its legal tender and the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Decrypt, an online portal covering cryptocurrency news reported that Ricardo Castaneda, an economist at El Salvador’s Central America Fiscal Studies Institute, mentioned how "there’s no official information about the amount of Bitcoin the government has purchased, the price they paid or how much is in reserve.”

Lack of Transparency

When it comes to disclosures around bitcoin reserves, transactions and policies in the country, there is shockingly little transparency or information available in the public domain.

Per Decrypt, BlockBank's head of operations Nolvia Serrano noted how there are "so many things that are not being disclosed, like who’s holding the private keys to these Bitcoin, what is the criteria for saying, ‘Oh, today, we’re