El Salvador President Makes Mockery of Crypto-skeptic Steve Hanke

• President Bukele called crypto skeptic Steve Hanke fake economist on Twitter.
• Hanke had predicted that Bitcoin city wouldn’t make a reality due to an energy deficit.
• A new report shows El Salvador now exports over $33 million worth of electricity.

Nayib Bukele, the Bitcoin-lover president of El Salvador, mocks the staunch crypto-critic Steve Hanke on Twitter as his country moves closer to making the Bitcoin city dream a reality.

Bukele said, “remember when [Steve Hanke] said Bitcoin City was unfeasible because El Salvador imported 22% of its electricity? Time proved [Hanke] is a fake economist.”

Ten months ago, critic Hanke derided president Bukele that El Salvador had an enormous energy deficit since it imported 22% of its electricity use, and by implication, building a Bitcoin city was a mirage.

In an exciting turn of events, the Central American arm of Forbes published a finding that “El Salvador went from being an energy importing country to exporting $33 million between January and August of this 2022.”

Bukele quote-tweeted the news, calling Hanke “a fake economist and a henchman of the banks.”

Although the statement that El Salvador has an energy deficit was an unsubstantiated claim: the president countered the comment that his country could produce twice the energy it consumes. He extracted data from available sources proving that the “maximum energy consumption in El Salvador was 1,030 megawatts (MW), while the installed capacity can produce 2,065.79 MW.”

Furthermore, the president clarified that the country imported energy because it was part of a regional open market where energy producers in other countries still beat local producers in price. Happily, the reality in El Salvador has changed. An official in the Forbes report said:

We have the capacity to complete the energy matrix, including exporting energy to neighboring countries such as Guatemala, our energy is the cheapest in the region.