Brian Quarmby
The president of El Salvador’s bill to make Bitcoin (BTC) legal tender in El Salvador passed congress with a supermajority just before 6 am UTC. In a Twitter Spaces conversation that began just after 5 am UTC with 22,000 listeners, President Nayib Bukele said he would sign off on the historic law later tonight or first thing tomorrow.
“It goes into effect immediately,” he said, clarifying the government would allow 90 days for the infrastructure to be put into place.
He said that accepting Bitcoin would be mandatory for all businesses. “They have to take it by law,” he said of merchants in the country. “If you go to Mexico they have to take your pesos.”
“In the case of El Salvador Bitcoin is going to be legal tender just as the US Dollar.”
Marie Huillet
China’s stance toward decentralized cryptocurrency trading appears to be getting even tougher. Chinese journalist Colin Wu and crypto news site 8BTCNews have both claimed that as of Wednesday, search results for some of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges are pulling up zero results.
Cointelegraph’s staff in China have themselves searched for cryptocurrency exchanges on the search engines and confirmed that results are inaccessible. However, a compound search such as “Binance Academy” or “Huobi Research Center” does still seem to be passing through the censors.
Greg Thomson
The cost of using the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains is on the rapid decline, as evidenced by a 93%–95% reduction in average transaction fees over the past couple of months.
Fees are paid to the miners who process transactions on a typical proof-of-work blockchain. The size of the fee depends on the size of the transaction in bytes and how many transactions a coin has gone through in the past (as these need to be checked every time a coin is moved). Supply and demand for space also dictate the size of a transaction fee since blockchains have limited capacity.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum saw their transaction costs surge to all-time highs in 2021 in April and May, respectively, coinciding with their rising coin valuations and price peaks.
Bitcoin’s average transaction fee hit $62.77 on April 24 — a figure that exceeded the $55 all-time high from December 2017, which stood for more than three years. By Sunday, fees had fallen as low as $4.38. That marked a 93% reduction and sent Bitcoin’s average fee back to levels not seen since December 2020, prior to 2021’s market pump.
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