Mexican President Says No Plans to Adopt Bitcoin (BTC) as Legal Tender
The Mexican president has cleared the air around bitcoin saying the country is not interested in adopting BTC as legal tender.
Mexico Not Keen on Making BTC Legal Tender
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a press conference on October 14 said the country is not interested in adopting bitcoin as legal tender. At least, not yet.
Responding to journalists’ questions on the possibility of Mexico making BTC legal tender, Obrador said:
“We are not going to change in that aspect. We think that we must maintain orthodoxy in the management of finances [and] not try to innovate much in financial management.”
In fact, the president said that rather than changing Mexico’s policy to make it pro-crypto, the government is interested in developing mechanisms to evade tax evasion. He said:
“We want to make sure that there are no privileges, that everyone contributes with their taxes and that is enough.”
For the uninitiated, El Salvador’s radical move to make bitcoin legal tender set a wave of pro-crypto regulations in motion across Central and South America.
To date, various countries in the region have introduced legislation seeking to establish friendlier crypto regulations to attract more capital investments. At the same time, by embracing the bitcoin standard, countries are keen on reducing their dependency on the greenback and mitigate the dollar hegemony.
As previously reported by BTCManager, Panamanian Congress member Gabriel Silver had floated a bill designed to make bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies legal tender in the country.
Crypto Regulations in Mexico
Mexico is not particularly a crypto hotbed per se, however, there is enough demand for digital assets among Mexicans that the nation’s leading institutions and businessmen are taking a close interest.
As previously reported by BTCManager, Mexican retail and banking corporation Grupo Elektra had announced it would introduce support for the Bitcoin Lightning Network to enable quick BTC transfers for the country’s residents.
In similar news, BTCManager reported that Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas went on to call fiat currencies a fraud and recommended that bitcoin should be a part of every investor’s portfolio.
At press time, bitcoin trades just shy of $60k.
