How a taxi driver in El Salvador got rich with Bitcoin

SAN SALVADOR: Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in Bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador.

He credits President Nayib Bukele's decision to bank on Bitcoin three years ago with changing his life.

"Before I was unemployed [...] and now I have my own business," said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in Bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company.

Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put Bitcoin into legal circulation in a bid to revitalise El Salvador's dollarised, remittance-reliant economy.

He invested hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the cryptocurrency, despite warnings about volatility risks from global institutions.

Osorio credited the US founder of the NGO "My First Bitcoin", John Dennehy, with encouraging him to accept payment in the cryptocurrency.

He now has 21 drivers working for his Bit-Driver brand and has made enough profit from the currency's rise to be able to buy four rental vehicles.

A divorced father of two teenagers, he also no longer struggles to pay for their education.

Offered as option

While Osorio has grown relatively wealthy with Bitcoin, a study by the University Institute for Public Opinion showed that 88% of Salvadorans had yet to use it.

"From the beginning [...] it was clear that it was clearly an ill-advised measure that the population rejected," the director of the institute, Laura Andrade, told AFP.

One-quarter of Salvadoran GDP comes from remittances sent home by family members, mostly from the United States.

But in 2023 only 1% of the transfers were made in cryptocurrencies.

In an interview with Time magazine in August, Bukele acknowledged that while "you can go to a McDonald's, a supermarket, or a hotel and pay with Bitcoin" it had "not had the widespread adoption we hoped for."

He added that "the positive aspect is that it is voluntary; we have never forced anyone to adopt it. We offered it as an option, and those who chose to use it have benefited from the rise in Bitcoin."

He also confirmed that he had around $400 million in Bitcoin that is kept in a public "cold storage wallet" — a way of storing Bitcoin offline.