The first day of the Adopting Bitcoin conference featured prominent personalities on stage. One of them was Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and CTO of Bitfinex, who underlined the consequences that the adoption of Bitcoin as a legal currency in El Salvador can bring to the rest of the world.

In his speech, Ardoino compared the Salvadoran case with Bitcoin to the "butterfly effect." The butterfly effect is a concept that suggests that small actions or events in a complex system can have a significant and often unpredictable impact on the future of that system. It stems from the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one place in the world can set off a chain of events that ultimately causes a major change (such as a tornado) elsewhere.

In the first place, Ardoino argued, El Salvador thus gets rid of a very important form of control that governments have, which is control over money. In this case, "the government says, 'If we get bad, you have a choice, so you don't have to trust us.'"

"If a government creates a way for people to circumvent its authority, it means that those people are really free," Ardoino said. Then, he also expressed that "Bitcoin comes to the rescue from governments that want to control money and the country."

What the Salvadoran government did from the Bitcoin Law, promoted in 2021 by the administration of Nayib Bukele, is the opposite of what happens in much of the world, where "governments want to take alternatives away from people to force them to use the solution they provide." "To control money is to control the country," reinforced the CTO of Bitfinex, a company that collaborates with the government of El Salvador on Bitcoin-related developments.

Beyond El Salvador's borders, Bitcoin also already has a very important function, Ardoino said. Humanity faces a problem it never had, which is financial surveillance. In other words, governments have more and more oversight and control over what citizens do with their money, something that has never happened before with cash or other instruments of commerce in previous centuries.