Salvadorans don't even dislike bitcoin itself, for the most part. A few have concerns with money laundering in a country riddled with drug gangs, the CO2 produc

Salvadorans don't even dislike bitcoin itself, for the most part. A few have concerns with money laundering in a country riddled with drug gangs, the CO2 production and so on - but the main objections are (1) this was forced on people (2) Chivo is unreliable rubbish. This is a great series of posts from Bitcoin Italia, a very pro-bitcoin podcast. They tried to do a holiday in El Salvador entirely on bitcoin. They proclaim it a huge success, while I read it and see a huge amount of optimism for a system that barely works and is barely supported: https://bitcoinitaliapodcast.it/missione-el-salvador https://bitcoinitaliapodcast.it/missione-el-salvador But if you want a positive report, that's the one to read through. It turns out you can't use bitcoin everywhere - you have to find the one shop in a town where it's accepted, then they have to find the one guy who knows how it works. Often a shop sets up one of the non-subsidised wallets (typically Bitcoin Beach or Muun) and you wait 10 minutes for your transaction to be confirmed on the base chain, because the shop hasn't figured out the Lightning bit. Or Lightning in or out of Chivo just doesn't work (which is deliberate, because Chivo throttle it). Or you see an "Aceptamos Bitcoin" sign, and it just means the shop has Chivo but only know how to use it with dollars. Quite a bit of Bitcoin Italia's "bitcoin" use turned out to involve buying gift cards via Bitrefill - that is, they cashed out bitcoins into dollars, which Bitrefill then used to buy the gift cards. They did withdraw dollars for bitcoins from a Chivo ATM later to see how the machines work. They discovered that if you deposit bitcoins, then you can get dollar bills out immediately - for an on-chain transaction with zero confirmations, before it's hit the blockchain. A replace-by-fee transaction with a higher fee could override that unconfirmed transaction - giving you free money, for only the cost of the replace-by-fee transaction. Chivo seems to me a huge wasted opportunity. There are private payment networks, but this was government supported. A good and reliable official electronic payment network could have been really useful for the local economy. But trust is the hardest thing for a payment network to build, and the easiest to lose.