The beach town of El Zonte on El Salvador’s Pacific coast is a laid-back surfer’s haven, with white beaches, palm trees and a small population of 3,000 people.
The low-income community has no banks and only one cash machine, but a trailblazing local economy based in large part on bitcoin. Signs line the roadside urging people to “pay here” with the cryptocurrency for anything from utilities bills to a can of soda.
The town boasts a bitcoin teller machine, the country’s only one, where people deposit cash US dollars El Salvador’s official currency into a personal bitcoin “wallet.”
They then use