One thing that comes to mind is that you could do small but substantive education things, e.g., "El Salvador is going to be at the heart of the new economy" and you create a program that's like an accelerated, btc-focused computer science curriculum for young people in your country, or btc + AI to make it more broadly palatable.

You enroll like fifty people into it per year, hire a handful of hackers / teachers to help them, and give them an education with some kind of public service component. This costs negligible money, but could produce non-negligible results on the btc ecosystem to spit out a bunch of csci-type devs bootstrapped with the proper expertise, especially if you framed it as a prestige thing -- the 50 most promising kids in ES get free rides. Or do it in cohorts of 20 per semester, and each semester helps the kids in the previous semester. Lots of ways to design it if it's a govt program. And the bar is way lower than w/ normal govt stuff -- you don't have to help everyone to make a substantial contribution.

Probably wouldn't be hard to get some super seasoned btc devs / general software types to come in and mentor the students, teach classes, take them as apprentices, etc. You turn it into the Chaincode of the South, give people a free and picturesque place to stay, etc. Play matchmaker w/ btc-centric companies in the North, etc.

Makes me excited to hear that people are thinking that way! Any examples of "indirect returns" that were tossed around in those conversations?