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@ NacionBitcoin
2025-05-23 22:47:55How Bukele’s bold bitcoin move gained global attention but left the public behind
In a quiet coastal town called El Zonte, where dusty streets meet ocean waves, an amazing experiment began in 2019. A Christian surfer named Mike Peterson arrived with an anonymous bitcoin donation, given with one condition: it must be used only in bitcoin.
This sparked the birth of Bitcoin Beach, a micro-economy powered by Bitcoin, and unknowingly laid the groundwork for the most radical financial experiment ever attempted by a government.
At the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, appeared via video, making a shocking announcement: his country, El Salvador, would become the first in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender.
Just three days later in under five hours, with no public consultation or economic analysis. The Bitcoin Law was approved by El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly—This happened shortly after Bukele had removed the Constitutional Court and Attorney General, effectively eliminating institutional checks.
The government launched its official digital wallet: Chivo Wallet, offering $30 in bitcoin to every citizen who downloaded and registered.
But what was promised as a financial revolution quickly turned chaotic:
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The app was riddled with technical failures.
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Thousands of Salvadorans couldn’t access their funds.
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Identity theft became rampant, with fake accounts created to fraudulently claim the bonus.
Public confidence plummeted, and trust disappeared. For most Salvadorans, bitcoin became a ghost.
According to verified reports:
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$150M went to a conversion fund ( liquidity for the Chivo wallet)
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$30M to the Chivo bonus
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$23.3M to ATMs and infrastructure
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$2M to marketing and tools
With total cost above $200M USD.
Meanwhile, no audit has ever been released, and most government data is classified.
What did the Salvadoran people get?
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79% of Salvadorans never used Bitcoin after taking their 30 USD out of the Chivo wallet.
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Only 10% of businesses accept it
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Remittances via BTC? Just 1.5% of the total
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Foreign investment? It actually dropped after the rollout
But yet in El Zonte, where "the bitcoin beach" is located, locals are now being pushed out as land prices soar. A luxury Bitcoin Beach Club is evicting families. The town that started it all is now being sold off—one beach front at a time.
But Bukele won the spotlight
Bitcoin was born as open-source money—neutral, permission-less, and voluntary. No Bitcoiner came to it by force; we each arrived for our own reasons: financial sovereignty, censorship resistance, or simple curiosity. That spirit of freedom stands in sharp contrast to any top-down attempt to impose it on an entire population.
In January 29 2025, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly hurried through a set of amendments to the 2021 Bitcoin Law. The reform scrapped the mandate that every merchant must accept BTC and removed bitcoin’s status as legal tender, turning it into an optional payment instrument.
Those changes came just days before the IMF approved a US $1.4 billion Extended Fund Facility. The new agreement explicitly required “unwinding” state participation in Chivo and dropping bitcoin as legal tender.
Bukele once framed bitcoin as a symbol of “financial freedom,” yet the 2025 rollback shows the opposite: His government needed Bitcoin’s headline power more than Bitcoin needed state endorsement. True adoption will come, if it comes at all, because Salvadorans choose it—just as millions worldwide already do—not because a decree tells them to.
While the people saw few benefits, Bukele gained international fame. He became the “Bitcoin President,” speaking at conferences, meeting with bitcoin whales, and podcasters, positioning El Salvador as a bitcoin paradise. This is far from reality. The legal tender label is gone, but El Salvador’s citizens remain free to experiment with BTC on their own terms—and many eventually will.
Sources:
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Bukele: El Señor de los Sueños – Ep. 4\ Produced by: Central Podcast & Radio Ambulante Studios
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reported by Silvia Biñas and Gabriel Labrador
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Official transcript: centralpodcast.audio/transcripcion/episodio-4
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Verified data from FES, Yahoo Finance.
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