Six months after El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal tender, dozens of citizens, economists, and developers detail cracks in the country's crypto revolution
By December, users were reporting bitcoin vanishing from their Chivo wallets, so this Rest of World reporting is less a surprise than a consolidation — dozens of firsthand accounts turning scattered complaints into a documented pattern at the halfway point of year one.
First-order effects
Citizens who adopted Chivo face direct financial harm — vanished balances and an unreliable wallet — while the government's $30 incentive has bought signups but not sustained everyday bitcoin commerce.
President Bukele's administration now owns a public ledger of failures from its own constituents, economists, and developers, undercutting the showcase narrative the rollout was built to project.
Second-order effects
International lenders and investors reading these cracks alongside later reports of funding sources drying up have reason to price El Salvador as riskier, tightening the fiscal room the bitcoin policy depends on.
Other governments weighing legal-tender adoption get a cautionary dataset instead of a template, shifting the burden of proof onto advocates like the foreign crypto evangelists Bloomberg later blamed for cheering the project on.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, state-level bitcoin adoption becomes a harder sell globally — the experiment shifts from proving national currency adoption works to explaining why it didn't, with IMF-style conditionality likely to force retrenchment before voluntary reversal.
The deeper structural lesson points to infrastructure over ideology: a national crypto rollout fails or succeeds on wallet reliability and merchant usability, not legal-tender decrees — a distinction future adopters cannot skip.
The trend: National bitcoin adoption is moving from headline experiments toward accountability audits, with El Salvador's first-year cracks setting the evidence base other governments will judge the model by.
Six months ago, El Salvador became the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. How's that going? @leomschwartz and @AnnaCat_Brigida went on the ground to speak to citizens, developers & economists about the country's ambitions - and its reality https://restofworld.org/..…
This will end up bad for full-time grifter & part time El Salvador President Bukele and the laser eyes people https://restofworld.org/... https://twitter.com/...
“A DJ played techno and pop songs, including a cryptocurrency-themed version of “Despacito,” the lyrics “Tengo que bailar contigo hoy” (I have to dance with you today) replaced with “Tengo que comprar un bitcoin hoy” (I have to buy a bitcoin today)” https://twitter.com/...
Bukele PR stunt with Bitcoin has caused El Salvador over $200 million+ an increasing debt default. He has used poor people's money for a lavish personal project. https://restofworld.org/...
“Why did [Nayib Bukele] do this?... He did it for self-interest and to get famous.” Something you rarely read in the crypto press: how actual users are struggling with it https://twitter.com/...
Am I drawing a line of similarity between the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the invasion of El Salvador by Bitcoin? ("We came to El Salvador without a political agenda. We came to El Salvador because we are Bitcoiners.") https://restofworld.org/...
It's just sad to watch dictators use phoney populism of crypto and twisted language of Silicon Valley's worst technolibertarianism excesses to mask the plundering of their own countries. https://restofworld.org/...
In Sept, El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender. For the past 6 months, @AnnaCat_Brigida and I have been working to answer what it means for a decentralized currency to be run by a wannabe autocrat. Our feature for @restofworld: https://restofworld.org/…
El Salvador's association with Bitcoin began in 2019 on Bitcoin Beach, where an evangelical surfer teamed up with a local restaurant manager to transform a small coastal town's economy around the cryptocurrency. https://restofworld.org/... A thread about our latest feature: