Nicolas Burtey Narrates: The country of El Salvador gets all the attention as being the first country to adopt Bitcoin, but it’s important to know that there is a small team, in a small village that sparked all this. Those people don’t get the recognition they deserve.
I spent time in late 2020 in El Zonte, El Salvador. It’s a village of 3,000 people. I was so excited when I arrived that I was looking at the first tienda to buy something in Lightning. Bought some milk, eggs and vegetable for $4.
Bitcoin and lightning were accepted in many places at this point in El Zonte at this point! My payment was instant, from the Bitcoinbeach wallet to the walletofsatoshi. This was magical. A time I’ll always remember. I was feeling the future of payment as it was happening.
But this tienda didn’t accept bitcoin overnight. It really started with Jorge Valenzuela Bitcoin Beach. Before focusing on bitcoin adoption with Bitcoin Beach, Jorge was working in a restaurant, Olas Permanentes (the best in town if you ask me).
The first shop/tienda to adopt bitcoin was Jorge’s mother. She probably didn’t have much choice. From then, the next step was to convince the ~50 commerces in town, 1-by-1, to accept bitcoin.
This is a tremendous amount of work! It’s said that on average people need to have 7 touch points to start considering something. So it was an everyday job for 2 years. Yes this has been work in progress since 2019.
People are creatures of habit. Why should they change it? How do I know this bitcoin thing is not a scam? Private key?! Sat?!!? “I lost 20% yesterday. I knew it was a scam”. The list is long!
And to make things more challenging, there are real scams. People get scammed for many reasons. Met a beautiful man online living abroad that suddenly needs some money because his sister has an emergency surgery? Bitcoin is more convenient? Things like that happen every day.
Bitcoin gets all the blame for it, because it’s new, misunderstood and easy to attack. When was the last time the Fed got blamed after a bank heist for printing bills and facilitating transfer of value?
Twitter Handle Milessuter spent a lot of time in El Zonte, he knows the challenge ahead. This is why he’s now focused on education. This is needed, and fast! If you can help, reach out to him.
Roman Martínez (chimbera), community leader gave me my first surfing lessons. Him and many others have been evangelist to bring adoption in this village. Salim has been doing support relentlessly day and night lately.
Bitcoin is hope. But there is tremendous pressure right now. Adopting a new currency has a lot of ups and down. They know better than anyone because they lived it already. They know that when some greedy folks will scam others, they’ll get all the blame.
So please give them a big shout out because they need it! For the journalists that are reaching out, I think this is a story that requires more attention. This experiment was key in Nayib Bukele. Adopting the Bitcoin standard and not go for another useless CDBC.
