EL ZONTE, El Salvador — After El Salvador’s congress made the bitcoin legal tender this week, eyes turned to this rural fishing village on the Pacific coast.
Some 500 fishing and farming families use bitcoin to buy groceries and pay utilities, something the government envisions for the country at large.
Bitcoin, intended as an alternative to government-backed money, is based largely on complex math, data-scrambling cryptography — thus the term “cryptocurrency” — lots of processing power and a distributed global ledger called the blockchain, which records all transactions.
In El Zonte this week, construction worker Hilario Gálvez walked into Tienda María to buy a soda and snacks to share with his friends.
donor heard about community projects through the nonprofit Hope House where he works and began working through another American who lives in El Zonte.
Martinez said El Zonte residents did not have bank accounts, had no access to credit and were forced to handle all transactions in cash.
Some said they didn’t have higher-end cellphones needed to download the app, while others said they had doubts about how it worked.
Walking through town, a woman who only gave her name as Teresita, was asked if she used bitcoin.