Are cryptocurrencies currencies? Bitcoin as...
URL: https://data.niaid.nih.gov/resources?id=dryad_z8w9ghxjm
A currency's essential feature is to be a medium of exchange. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment––El Salvador as the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender––to study a cryptocurrency's potential to be used in daily transactions. The government also launched and provided incentives to download and use a digital wallet named Chivo, which shares features with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and allows users to trade bitcoins and dollars. Were Chivo Wallet and Bitcoin actually adopted after this "big push"? Conducting a representative face-to-face survey and relying on blockchain data to obtain all Chivo transactions, we document how usage of digital payments and Bitcoin is low, concentrated, and has been decreasing over time. We find that privacy concerns are key barriers to adoption, which speaks to a policy debate on crypto and CBDCs that has had anonymity at its core. We also estimate the technology's adoption cost and its network externalities.
Methods
We provide the data from the survey implemented in El Salvador by Cid Gallup, and the codes required for the analysis of these data. The blockchain data, which is used in the last section of the paper, was obtained from Crystal Blockchain B.V (crystalblockchain.com), and we share the Stata code and data required to generate all the figures in the paper.
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Additional Information
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Data last updated | December 4, 2024 |
| Metadata last updated | December 4, 2024 |
| Created | December 4, 2024 |
| Format | ZIP |
| License | Creative Commons CCZero |
| Has views | False |
| Id | 994142d3-33df-461a-8b83-959531276a3a |
| Package id | a616e410-600a-4956-9f50-439dbf032145 |
| Position | 0 |
| State | active |