Bitcoin News
By Jean-Luc Maracon
1 / 15
Financial Inclusion That Never Really Arrived. The core promise was inclusion. Get the unbanked population onto a digital financial system, cut…
2 / 15
The IMF Deal and a Quieter Bitcoin Law. The retreat came officially in 2024. El Salvador struck a $1.
3 / 15
On the Ground: A Different Picture. Walk through San Salvador and the gap between policy and practice is pretty clear.
4 / 15
Five years in. That's where El Salvador stands with Bitcoin, and the picture is messy.
5 / 15
When President Nayib Bukele announced the Bitcoin legal tender move at a Miami conference in 2021, the pitch was straightforward: financial inclusion, foreign investment, a new…
6 / 15
The core promise was inclusion. Get the unbanked population onto a digital financial system, cut remittance costs, build something new. It didn't play out that way.
7 / 15
Dr. Tobias Boos from the University of Vienna found that Bitcoin adopters in El Salvador were mostly young, educated, and already banked.
8 / 15
Remittances are probably the clearest sign of how limited the impact has been. Remittances make up a big chunk of El Salvador's GDP.
9 / 15
Not really the revolution anyone advertised.
10 / 15
The retreat came officially in 2024. El Salvador struck a $1.4 billion agreement with the International Monetary Fund, and part of that deal meant pulling back on Bitcoin's role…
11 / 15
That's a hard line to read five years after the fanfare.
12 / 15
More context: Bitcoin Policy Institute Pushes AI Giants to Give Bitcoin Coders First Look at Frontier Models
13 / 15
Bukele's administration didn't disappear from the Bitcoin conversation, though. His leadership stayed tied to the narrative, even as the economic argument weakened.
14 / 15
Walk through San Salvador and the gap between policy and practice is pretty clear. Reports from on-the-ground visits found that only a small fraction of shops readily accepted…
15 / 15
But there are pockets where it works. Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte is the most cited example — a grassroots project that actually predates the national experiment.
The Currency Analytics
Want the full story?