President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele posted a video showing preparations for Bitcoin mining at one of the geothermal energy facilities.
First steps…
🌋#Bitcoin🇸🇻 pic.twitter.com/duhHvmEnym
— Nayib Bukele 🇸🇻 (@nayibbukele) September 28, 2021
The footage shows containers bearing the government logo arriving at the site and ASIC miners being connected to the grid.
Bukele added a volcano emoji to the Bitcoin hashtag in the tweet.
“First steps,” wrote the head of state.
In another post, he punned on the words “volcano” and “node”.
Volcanode
— Nayib Bukele 🇸🇻 (@nayibbukele) September 28, 2021
On 10 June 2021, the day after Parliament approved a bill recognising the first cryptocurrency as an official means of payment, Bukele proposed to organise mining on volcanic energy.
He noted that this concerns a new geothermal well with a capacity of 95 MW drilled by the state energy company LaGeo.
On 7 September the law legalising Bitcoin came into force. To facilitate exchange of cryptocurrency and fiat the government established a $150 million fund and bought 550 BTC. Later, authorities bought an additional 150 BTC on a price dip.
The population of the country has not uniformly welcomed the cryptocurrency legalization, experts and international financial institutions differed in assessing the consequences of this step.
Less than three weeks after Bitcoin was recognised as an official means of payment, Bukele said that a third of the country’s population actively uses the Chivo crypto wallet.