My Week in El Salvador

Adopting Bitcoin Conference and El Zonte

We’re still early to Bitcoin. This fact is even evident within the country that made bitcoin legal tender in September, 2021. When I decided to come to El Salvador to check out the bitcoin scene, I was expecting things to be a lot more developed than they are. The truth is that things are still in progress.

Despite what President Bukele says on twitter, and what bitcoiners might tell you, El Salvador is still largely a dollarized nation. In retrospect, I was a bit naive to think that the whole country would have adopted bitcoin just 6 months after El Salvador announced that they’d make bitcoin legal tender.

Nonetheless, the Adopting Bitcoin conference was a massive amount of fun, and extremely eye opening. There is so much positive momentum happening in the bitcoin space and I hope that you can take away some of the insights I gathered from the conference.

Buying Things with Bitcoin in El Salvador

It was pretty cool to buy things over the lightning network. Contrary to belief though, not everyone accepts bitcoin, or needs to accept it. There is still a lot of financial literacy that needs to take place before people understand the benefits of accepting and saving in bitcoin.

One of the realities here in El Salvador is that people don’t make much money in their jobs. My Ubers were $2.00 each compared to paying $15 for the same distance in Halifax. A good meal costs $8.00. A particular individual ran the numbers and informed me that people generally make about $8.00 per day.

The implication here is that people don’t exactly have a ton of money to save with. Living paycheque to paycheque is the norm, so the concept of bitcoin as a “savings technology” is something that needs to be taught.

The Chivo Wallet is Not Exactly Functional

One of the first things we discovered when we arrived is that the government sponsored lightning wallet “Chivo” is not exactly functional. Furthermore, there are several unappealing aspects about the Chivo wallet that need some clearing up.

First, the Chivo wallet is not necessarily interoperable with all lightning wallets. We’ve got mixed feedback from the people of El Salvador with respect to how the Chivo wallet is used. On the one hand we’ve heard that bitcoin on the Chivo wallet can only be sent to other Chivo wallets. Ask any bitcoiner and they’ll tell you that this is a very anti-bitcoin feature.

On the other hand we’ve had a direct experience wherein we used the BlueWallet to pay a taxi driver using the Chivo Wallet. Regardless, this confusion suggests that things are still a work in progress as the kinks are being worked out.

The whole idea of bitcoin and lightning is to have a payments network that is wallet agnostic. Having a wallet only be able to talk to the same wallet defeats the purpose of having bitcoin in that wallet in the first place. Nonetheless, people in San Salvador still accepted bitcoin in other wallets like the Wallet of Satoshi, or the Bitcoin Beach Wallet.

Bitcoin at Bitcoin Beach (El Zonte)

When we arrived in El Zonte, there was a much different vibe than in the capital, San Salvador. The whole village was much more familiar, and well versed in bitcoin. They knew not to use the Chivo wallet, and were readily prepared to accept bitcoin lightning payments in their wallet of choice.

People were selling food, t-shirts, souvenirs, jewelry, and drinks for bitcoin. Everyone was wearing bitcoin swag and it appeared that everyone was genuinely please to be participating in a bitcoin economy. The sentiment in San Salvador was quite a bit different.

The Bitcoin Airdrop was Sold for USD

One of the things the government of El Salvador did when launching bitcoin as legal tender, was airdrop $30 worth of bitcoin to every citizen. Mrugakshee and I asked the border guards about their airdrop and what they did with it. One guard said that he immediately sold it for dollars and used it to fix his car. Another person we spoke to said his friends immediately sold it for dollars and used it to buy alcohol.

As I was saying before, there isn’t exactly a mentality of saving. People have lives here that are completely removed from the paradigm of saving money. They have bills, and priorities other than contemplating the type of money they’re using.

Many of them are living paycheque to paycheque and don’t have time to ponder the nature of inflation and its effect on their money. You need to have money in order to be worried about or even notice it decreasing in purchasing power. This made me recognize the privilege I have.

Adopting Bitcoin Highlights

Honestly, the conference was a lot of covering topics already thoroughly discussed within the bitcoin community. That being said, I had an appreciation for some folks that were genuinely doing novel thing within the bitcoin space. It is those things that I’m choosing to highlight here.

Ben Arc from LNBits

Ben Arc is creating amazing bitcoin hardware devices. Mrugakshee and I had the opportunity to interview Ben Arc on our podcast, so stay tuned for when that episode drops. He gives 100 ideas of how to make peoples lives better through the technology he is working on; LNBits. In a nutshell, Ben creates novel bitcoin hardware devices.

He guided a workshop at the Adopting Bitcoin conference wherein he walked people through creating an offline POS device that accepted bitcoin payments for less than $20. Yes, an Affordable Offline Lightning POS Device. Epic. Go follow Ben on twitter, and don’t lose track of his innovations, they’re making a difference by significantly lowering the barrier to entry into the bitcoin space.

Aleks Svetski from Amber.App

If you don’t already know Aleks Svetski, you should. He is unapologetically bull, bull, bullish on bitcoin. He is a bitcoin maximalist, a freedom maximalist, and a really nice guy. I remember one of the first times I heard him speak, it was on the Pomp Podcast in 2019. Mrugakshee and I were on our way home from giving a talk on blockchain. We started listening to this episode with this guy that was making a ton of sense pushing bitcoin. That was an important moment for me and my bitcoin journey as it was then that I started thinking of bitcoin as a tool for freedom, not just for money. Aleks’ speech at Adopting Bitcoin was exactly this.

Aleks pitched the case for bitcoin not integrating with the rest of society on purpose. The car didn’t integrate with society, neither did electricity, or modern medicine. Each of these revolutionary technologies had to radically depart from the paradigms that birthed them. We don’t need mass adoption, we need mass reconstruction.

Honorable Mentions

Synonym.to — New Bitcoin based framework for building the decentralized web. No utility tokens, governance tokens, or NFTs needed. Just Bitcoin.

Thndr Games — Play to Earn (P2E) games based on bitcoin. Mobile games wherein you can earn satoshis for playing. Follow Darlene Dickerson for more details.

John Vallis — It was simply an honour to meet John Vallis in person. He is a super easy person to respect for his vibe of honesty and authenticity. He is the host of the Bitcoin Rapid Fire podcast and an all around nice guy. Check him out.

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I’ve given you a good number of things to go out and check out. Don’t sleep on bitcoin… Pretty epic things are taking place, right before our eyes.

Regards,

Keegan

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