Hundreds of Salvadorans claim money is vanishing from Bitcoin accounts

Hundreds of Salvadorans claim that money has gone missing from their digital wallets following El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender.

In September, the government gave each citizen US$30 in bitcoin via each person’s Chivo wallet – a digital account set up by the government. The currency could be used for shopping, or to pay taxes.

But hundreds of citizens are claiming that their payments haven’t been received by stores, and that funds have disappeared from their accounts.

A Salvadoran engineer who tweets under the name El Comisionado but wishes to remain anonymous due to fears of government reprisals has collated more than 50 examples on Twitter alone of missing bitcoin from Chivo wallets.

“The government has not responded, nor does it acknowledge the errors,” he told New Scientist. “It’s one of the things people are demanding, that they respond to their complaints. Many have waited several months for a response to get the money back.”

Zaira Navas, who served as inspector general of the EL Salvador National Civil Police and is head of legal at Cristosal, a human rights organisation, personally lost funds from the app and is now representing a total of 886 people who have had the same problem, reports La Prensa Gráfica. She hopes to force a resolution through the courts.

French bitcoin commentator Rogzy says he encountered similar issues when he visited El Salvador to see the experiment for himself. When he was shopping, funds left his account, but didn’t reach those of the stores.

Chivo is run by a state-owned company, also called Chivo, and its source code is private. Rogzy thinks Salvadorans should use independent open source bitcoin wallets instead. “I don’t think [Chivo] is secure and no one can verify it since the code is not open source,” he says.

This isn’t the first stumbling block that Chivo has encountered. The government has already had to remove a function that allowed users to freeze prices for 1 minute when previewing them, because economic traders were exploiting it to make a profit.

“Today very few people use [Chivo], because many do not know how it works,” says El Comisionado.

The company behind Chivo, the President’s office and the El Salvadorian embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment.