El Salvador Trip report - 6/8

Backlink to Part 5

El Tunco is dense enough that you can walk into every single restaurant, bar and shop and ask if they accept Bitcoin. Not all do, but there are enough to exclusively live on Bitcoin for one out of four days you are staying here, assuming you don't always want to eat the same things. There might have been far more places accepting Bitcoin at some point, judging from the "Acceptamos Bitcoin" stickers all around.

The absence of a local Bitcoin community becomes more notable. There is nobody here who can help local businesses use Bitcoin to their advantage. But the absence of such a community also gives the impression that Bitcoin adoption is a lot more organic, and there is a very high diversity of apps and services that businesses are using. Blink, which is the number one app in Berlin and El Zonte, is completely absent in El Tunco.

🐷 El Tunco: 🛏️ My hotel takes Bitcoin, but only in person, and only at the reception. So when paying at the adjacent bar and restaurant with its beautiful ocean view, the waiter has to print the bill and walk with me across the courtyard to the hotel reception, where I wait almost 10 minutes for the receptionist to find the tablet they use to process payments. They're using PaySea, and I encountered them in El Tunco before, but never anywhere else.

🥗 For my first dinner I head out to a restaurant serving salads, falafels and tacos. The staff seem a bit hesitant when I ask about Bitcoin, but eventually agree that yes, they take it. They're using Strike as a payment processor, but instead of using the checkout system, they are using the app, and are asking me for my help with requesting the payment.

🥤There are about four convenience stores in El Tunco, and one of them takes Bitcoin through the Chivo app. They are also a bit hesitant at first about whether they really want to accept it, but with some guidance we swiftly process the payment. The owner opts to convert the balance to USD and the next time I buy something here, he knows what to do.

👜Of the plenty souvenir stalls, only two accept Bitcoin payments. If we agree that Bitcoin serves largely as the payment method of choice for foreign tourists and surfers, this may make sense. I buy from one of these vendors, and they accept payments through Chivo and opt to convert the payment to USD.

🥡There's a local food court that seems very appealing. There are maybe 10 shops serving food here in total, and more than half of them have some indication they accept Bitcoin. Only two restaurants do, and one of these does not have a sign. The signs are primarily from Strike, and if you don't know that Strike is a Bitcoin/Lightning payment processor, you wouldn't be able to tell from the sign that you can pay with Lightning here.

🥯 I have a bagel at Point Break Cafe at the food court, where they confidently know how to use the Strike checkout to process my payment. From here, I can also see the Chivo ATM.

💸There are two Bitcoin ATMs in town, and both can both accept and dispense dollars. One machine is a General Bytes BATMThree from an unknown operator, and the machine is out of service. The other is a Genesis Coin Satoshi1 operated by Chivo. As I sit in the cafe, three people are using the ATM, all seemingly cashing. Chivo also seems to have an employee on standby, and I wonder what issues they typically have to help with. During my day here onchain fees dip to below 20 sat/vB, so I head over and buy $120 used dollar bills with nonsequential serial numbers (only invest in fiat currency what you can afford to lose!). To do that, I have to use the phone number of a friend. I make the onchain payment from my Muun wallet, and while for about two minutes nothing happens, to my surprise I'm given the cash right away, without waiting for confirmations. I do wonder how that works and how easy it would be for somebody to double-spend the transaction. The people in front of me did appear to have to wait for their onchain confirmations, as they all made two trips to the machine. One to deposit sats, another to retrieve the cash. Chivo's rate is incredibly competitive. I pay a 40 bip fee, far less than what I assume you would pay at any of the four bank ATMs in town. Even my onchain transaction only cost me 3000 sat (US$2.1), far below the typical bank ATM withdrawal fee. If you have access to an El Salvadorian number, maybe you can sign up for the Chivo wallet yourself, then you can deposit your sats over the Lightning network and withdraw instantly from the Chivo ATM. The rate is likely subsidized, but for the moment withdrawing cash from Chivo machines in El Salvador is far superior over using your bank card, and in my case did not take any longer. In the long run, what rates will the market converge to?

🥟There's a hip Asian fusion place nearby that I try out for dinner. They use Strike to process payments and know what they are doing. I may be eating too much on this trip, and I also notice how difficult it is in El Tunco to find the typical local foods that were so ubiquitous in Berlin. In El Tunco, everything is either branded as "American", "Healthy" of "Fusion", and most of all, it has to be hip.

🥞 There's one prominent papusa stand in El Tunco, and sadly I did not get to go. But as I walk past I do see two tourists settling their bill over Bitcoin.

💳 The only time a fiat payment had to be made since I left San Salvador was at a local restaurant that advertised Bitcoin payments at the door (through PaySea), but wasn't willing to accept it when it came to settling the bill. Luckily a friend was with me who could handle the blasphemous act of paying with card.

🍻 Michela is a small local bar that is very popular with foreign young tourists. They were the only business I encountered using Athena Pay, which has this odd "onchain," "lightning," "Chivo" or "Strike" prompt, as if these were four different payment methods. As a Lightning "maximalist" I found this unnecessary, and the staff found this very confusing. They also impose a minimum $5 spend when paying with Bitcoin, which they probably inherit from their card payments. When I passed it around 9pm, it was the only busy place in El Tunco, full of young foreign surfers and travellers. I don't think any of them paid with Bitcoin, though.

🌴 Sunzal: On the eastern bank of the small river demarking El Tunco lies Sunzal. On my previous visits it was not easily possible to cross over, but now the river has been artificially backed up and you can cross on dry foot via a sand dam. Walking along the beach is beautiful but also exhausting, even when the sun is low. Sunzal consits of a couple of walled beach resorts, but for the most part you walk past undeveloped land with cows and horses grazing right by the beach. Quite obviously there is enormous growth potential in this beach town, but unlike in El Tunco, there appears to be no construction here.

🌊 The Cafe Sunzal isn't quite a cafe, it's a full scale high-end restaurant with multiple floors that each have a magnificent view over the pacific, El Tunco and all the way to La Libertad. It's a great place to watch the surfers ride into the sunset. The place was last verified on BTCMap as accepting Bitcoin in November 2022, around the time of the second Adopting Bitcoin conference. I try my luck, and am informed by staff that they do not take Bitcoin. However upon paying, the card payment does not go through so I'm asked to come to the counter, where I ask about Bitcoin again and successfully make my payment through Chivo.

🗞️On the road between Sunzal and El Tunco are a couple of Ditobanx advertisments. I encountered the Ditobanx app once on my trip, but it has been pitched to me as a great local debit card that can handle Lightning deposits and withdrawals. The advertisment seems to focus on the Mastercard partnership, hinting that providing you access to debit cards may be more of a selling point than providing access to the Lightning Network.