Well its interesting to see how normal its to use bitcoin here, i bought a water bottle with 1$ today and yesterday i bought pupusas and a beer with lightning, i spent like around 6$ for 5 pupusas, my favorite one was cheese with albahaca i simply needed to repeat that one, the beer was like 2.95 i think or i don't remember i would need to see my wallet right now but i am tired to do it, the zonte is really fun i am not an expert in surfing but one class of surfing cost me 35$ and normally renting a surfing table is like 25 to 30$, i managed to stand up like 3 times and well of course people are experts here i can't compare to them but it was good enough, i have to say the prices are a little bit high for me because i come from the third world however in the long term its good foreigners come and invest here, bukele has done a great job cleaning the streets from gangs and the maras, fuck them, for sure the sovereign individual predicts higher petty crime but it was imposible to live in el salvador before, people would tell me, that if you wanted to go to another area you needed to pay a tax at least of 1$ if you werent a local from that area, salvadorians were really oppressed by the gangs.
Of course bukele has done some mistakes, for example someone told me at the very beginning in 2021 which was where the gangs finally got purged and crushed some people were mistaken as gang members, for example, they told me the story of a tatoo artist, which was a friend to them that he was forced to do some tatoos by the gangs in the middle of the purge and when the purge came the fucking mareros told the police the tatoo artist was with us while the tatoo denied that, by situational context i think poor guy because there are diferent tatoos and mareros have their clear tatoos that separate them from the rest, however fuck them, they kill people and in the end it was that fucking gang group that got an innocent person arrested so yeah fuck them and i hope they stay in jail for a long time, things are so much safer here that personally i couldn't really consider the salvador to be more safer than my country but bukele turned things around, for example i knew the rumour that there was a deal between the gangs and the goverment was a lie because a random salvadorian in the street asked me hey do you have lsd for me and i told him sorry no maybe in my home country but i wouldn't risk it in the frontier, the fact that some locals didn't have drugs while in my home country i just needed to go to any tourist area and get whatever i want makes my life more sardonic, its fucking funny how drug dealers were purged or at least hidden at plain sight for the moment being.
So the gangs are purged, you can use bitcoin and the pacific ocean is amazing and i wish i had a way to stay longer and live here because i don't want to use fiat garbage but personally the cost of living are still too high for me, this is literally the promised land of bitcoin however not everything are pearls, locals are a little bit distrustfull of the local org, i suppose they are teaching some kids english and random courses like how to weld but other than that the work here was bitcoin early founders that didn't need to make an org just to launder some dollars, there is one more complain i heard which i heard right now, when bitcoin beach was celebrated in 2021 there was this local coconut woman that was selling her coconuts for 2$ and she in total sold only 40$ while there are more exclusive places that are i would say more fancy, more expensive, for example another restaurant that was selling coconuts at 4$, well i don't know the sales of the restaurant but they were much much higher than the coconut lady, when you travel plz spend on the poor places because those are the people that need bitcoin much more, i am not saying don't just randomly give your bitcoin to anyone but poor people need it more, the guy i was talking he remembers a spaniard that confronted the other bitcoiners and that he would spend a lot of money on the non fancy restaurants, if you ask me i can see a divide forming here where the right side is being built for basically western americans and the other side is full of locals, in one sentence don't spend money on people already with money but try to spend your bitcoin on the people that need it the most. Also i think they found it really cringe the culture of lambos and rockets in the middle 2021, "crypto" is diferent from bitcoin however i think some of the toxicity that we see in shitcoins was pretty clear to me it comes from bitcoiners as well, the ones holding their tik tok and youtube, someone like bitboy is the type of guy that would be streaming in the middle of the beach while ignoring the coconut, so yeah nothing more to say other than spend in local business that need it the most.
At the end of the day i have to say, salvadorians love the tourist, they are more happy with them than without them and bitcoiners that come here and spend a lot of money, are friendly with the locals and basically become cohabitors are appreciated, specially the main guy that helped this place, i think he is called michael peterson which really made el zonte become mainstream among bitcoiners and helped build the local economy because they invested a lot here, the early bitcoiners really did an amazing job starting here like for example water projects and that job for example is being finished by bukele, still i don't want to exagerate bitcoins importance some salvadorians told me el zonte was developing anyways and that bitcoin was a push but el zonte was already advancing good enough with the us dollar, a lot of locals still don't use bitcoin and don't want to deal with the complexity of it, they will only adopt it more if more foreigners come and spend their sweat bitcoin because for example they wonder what is the bitcoin ngo even doing here, someone told me they could do more or that they are not needed, also probably some damage of the Bitcoin image here comes from them because the Bitcoiner has a reputation of a rich person, rather than only going to bitcoin conferences and doing local presentantions about the history of money which locals don't care about they should be investing in the actual business here, i suppose my critique lacks another counteropinion however i am just saying what i heard, basically people distrust them and they wonder why they have a bitcoin donation page if they are already rich as fuck, i talked to a salvadorian and he said el salvador is becoming a fiscal paradise, the bitcoin ngo does some nice things like people sure they teach english and some random courses like welding bitcoin but they would argue with me i don't know how we benefit from them that than maybe the fact they could be helping with are money laundering, still the fud was minimal and people are happy that outsiders come here but basically only if you have money, if you have bitcoin some people really want to start accumulating and you sure should use your bitcoin to locals that don't have fancy restaurants, because for the moment while i met some bitcoiners we still need more and this place to become a shining example of what bitcoin can do need to industrialize it, create business and create jobs and not just buy some land displacing the locals and buying in the richest areas of el zonte that accept bitcoin, either way it would be interesting to know if there are other cryptocurrencys allowed here as legal tender or just bitcoin, personally i think bitcoin needs to be admitted everywhere and all the other shitcoins can fuck themselves the only ones i support are monero and maybe storage as service coin but other than that fuck etherium and all that centralized garbage, i have the mission of building a local economy when i come back but thats a long term project, i do know that the long term goal of getting rid of Fiat will be worth it, technology is inevitable and its inevitable the us will put those printing machines back at work again in 2024, but this time around bitcoin will stay stronger because the escape velocity of people using it more and more it will make bitcoin more resilient to the feds gangbangs to the economy, enough adoption and its over for them.
Thanks for reading this guys, this was a pleasure,