Squid Game, El Salvador, and Crypto as Legal Tender
· Jerwin Arnado
Archive note: this is a backdated post, written years later while rebuilding this site. It’s dated to the moment it covers, but the hindsight is real.
September produced two stories that don’t seem related until you look twice.
On September 7, El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender — government wallet, $30 airdrop per citizen, businesses required to accept it. Launch day featured the Chivo app buckling, BTC dropping double digits, and street protests. On September 17, Netflix released Squid Game, a Korean drama about 456 debt-crushed people playing children’s games for money while the rich watch. It’s on pace to become the biggest series launch Netflix has ever had, and the tracksuits will be at every Halloween party on the planet.
One is monetary policy, one is television. Both are about the same thing: what people will accept when the normal economy has already failed them.
Why Squid Game hit this hard
Korean media has been building to this global moment for years — Parasite took the Oscar in 2020 — but Squid Game’s timing is surgical. After eighteen months of pandemic precarity, a show where ordinary people (a laid-off worker, a migrant laborer, a failed fund manager) gamble their lives because ordinary life was already unsurvivable doesn’t play as dystopian fantasy. It plays as exaggeration of the news.
The detail everyone quotes: the players are shown the door. They vote to leave. Then they look at their actual lives — debt collectors, sick parents, no prospects — and come back voluntarily. The horror isn’t the games. It’s that the games are competitive with reality.
Why El Salvador rhymes
Strip the crypto-twitter noise and El Salvador’s bet is a desperation story too: a heavily remittance-dependent economy (sound familiar?) where fees eat workers’ transfers, a population largely unbanked, betting national monetary policy on volatile software because the conventional path wasn’t working. Maybe it’s visionary. Maybe it’s the president gambling the treasury with the confidence of the guy posting green candles in the group chat. Honestly, the launch-day price dip already gave citizens their first lesson in what “volatile” means when it’s your salary.
The Philippines watches this with more than curiosity. We’re one of the world’s top remittance economies; OFW transfer fees are a real tax on real families; and our own play-to-earn experiment has already proven Filipinos will adopt strange new economic rails fast when the old ones underdeliver. Whatever happens in El Salvador is a preview of arguments coming to our own policy table.
The common thread
Squid Game’s villains film the desperation for entertainment. Crypto’s worst actors monetize it through leverage and exit liquidity. But in both stories, the people opting in aren’t stupid — they’re unserved. They looked at the legitimate options and found them rigged or empty.
That’s the part worth sitting with, beyond the memes and the candlesticks: every strange thing people flocked to this year — P2E grinding, meme stocks, national Bitcoin experiments — is a referendum on the systems that were supposed to serve them. Fix the underlying scoreboard, and the desperate games lose players.
Until then: gganbu, and mind your debt.