El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment turns 5: ‘It was for us, not them’

“The ‘soft adoption,’ as we refer to it in one of our articles, never led to mass adoption for payments. I am not aware of any instances where tax payments were made using Bitcoin, and the infrastructure has largely remained unused.”

What Bitcoin actually did achieve

If El Salvador failed to turn Bitcoin into everyday money, it still managed something no country had done before: it made nation-state Bitcoin adoption real.

Before 2021, the idea of a government adopting Bitcoin was still largely hypothetical; El Salvador made it real. As Samson Mow, chief executive of Bitcoin infrastructure firm JAN3, tells Magazine:

“The question in front of every president or finance minister shifted from whether a sovereign could hold Bitcoin to why it hadn’t.”

The experiment also thrust El Salvador into the center of the global Bitcoin movement, with many prominent Bitcoiners, including Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, making Bitcoin country their new home. Herbert later became director of El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office, showing just how closely intertwined parts of the Bitcoin movement have become with the government.

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Bitcoin Beach, the grassroots project in El Zonte that predated the national experiment, is still one of the clearest examples of a functioning Bitcoin economy, with local businesses, hotels and tourism operators continuing to accept Bitcoin, even after the government made acceptance voluntary.

Nakamoto’s reporting has also documented several concrete success stories for everyday Salvadorans, including Mama Rosa, who saves Bitcoin from her pupusa stand, and Napo, who expanded from one taxi to a fleet.

Bukele’s government even went further than simply holding BTC on its balance sheet or making it legal tender by promoting plans for Volcano Bonds and Bitcoin City.

After repeated delays, the IMF agreement effectively kneecapped those projects’ progress, but the symbolic impact still matters. Mow explains:

“Bitcoin gained a proof of concept, and El Salvador gained a global platform.”

There’s also an important distinction between what El Salvador achieved for Bitcoin and what Bitcoin achieved for El Salvador.

Boos argues that the symbolic significance has largely been “for” the international Bitcoin community, rather than evidence of economic success “in” El Salvador. Nakamoto says:

“It looks more like a marketing campaign for foreigners than a genuine economic strategy for Salvadorans. It’s beautiful branding, pointed at people with the passports and the capital. Bukele is a razor-sharp operator. He knows exactly who’s watching and who’s clapping. The Bitcoin country strategy, it’s not for them. It breaks my heart to say it, but it’s for us.”

The uncomfortable part: Bitcoin and Bukele

Perhaps the hardest question is what El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment says about the relationship between Bitcoiners’ ideals of individual freedom and the government that imposed it.

IMF Executive Board approves 40-month fund facility. Source: IMF

Bukele has concentrated power during his time in office, and the state of emergency introduced to combat gang violence in March 2022 remains in place more than four years later.

Human Rights Watch says the government has continued to remove checks on executive power, and local and international human rights groups have documented mass arbitrary detention and due process violations under the state of emergency.

But judging Bukele only through that lens risks missing why he remains so popular at home. El Salvador was once in the grip of powerful gangs, with many Salvadorans living with daily threats of extortion, violence and death. The official homicide rate fell from 53.1 per 100,000 people the year he took office, to just 1.3 per 100,000 in 2025.

Bukele’s crackdown has transformed public security, and many Salvadorans view the trade-off between security and civil liberties very differently from critics abroad. Nakamoto says:

“It’s a country that has serious scars. Bukele has saved the nation in many ways. He kicked out the gangs and also he has done wonderful things for Bitcoin in terms of putting it on the world map.”

While Mow acknowledges the positive impact of Bukele’s gang crackdown, he says the broader implications of normalizing emergency powers cannot be ignored:

“In the hands of someone with restraint, those same powers can accomplish real things, like El Salvador’s crackdown on the gangs. But it’s important to think ahead. What serves a leader with restraint today can just as easily serve one without restraint once there’s a change of guard.”

For Bitcoiners, that leaves an uncomfortable tension. El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has become inseparable from the government that made it possible, and from a president whose record is far more complicated than the Bitcoin success story alone suggests.

That may ultimately be the most difficult part of assessing El Salvador five years on: Bitcoin gave Bukele a global platform, and Bukele gave Bitcoin something it had never had before — a nation-state willing to put it at the center of its economic strategy.

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