Why bitcoin adoption is not going to happen, unless…

By Mario Guevara, Director of The Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador, October 8, 2026

All bitcoiners agree that adoption should happen. Far fewer agree on how.

When El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender in 2021, my first reaction was excitement, though I assumed it would change little for me personally. I had known about bitcoin since 2017, when my long-standing interest in technology first led me to it. At the time, I understood it mainly as secure, decentralized money with a promising future. What I had not yet grasped was its deeper purpose.

That understanding came later, largely thanks to a bitcoiner I worked with, who taught me first how bitcoin works and eventually what it was built to solve. Many of the problems he described were already familiar to me: fractional reserve banking, the use of the dollar to shape markets, economies, and even entire nations, and a financial system whose controls have been captured by a privileged few. But what truly made it click was a single line of text embedded in bitcoin's very first block, mined on January 3, 2009: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

I had felt the 2008 financial crisis firsthand. I remembered the housing collapse, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the marches of the 99%, the banks rescued with public money while ordinary families lost their homes, and the executives who collected their bonuses anyway. Reading that headline, I understood that bitcoin was not simply a new technology. It was a direct answer to that moment: a response to a monetary system that creates money out of thin air, where those closest to its source capture the benefits first, and where control over money is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful people. Everyone else pays the price through the steady erosion of their purchasing power: the worker saving for retirement, the family setting money aside for a home, the small business owner trying to plan for the future. They absorb the consequences of decisions they had no part in making.

With that understanding, I began to see El Salvador’s experiment differently. It was not just a new payment method; it was a country attempting, for the first time, to step outside that system. But good intentions did not make the beginning any easier. When the Bitcoin Law took effect in 2021, its first days were chaotic. Lines formed at Chivo ATMs as people rushed to withdraw their $30 bonus, and many later discovered it had been stolen. Most Salvadorans knew little or nothing about bitcoin, and many dismissed it as a “government coin.” Without meaningful education, the majority treated the bonus as a one-time subsidy, withdrew it, and moved on.

Five years later, the experiment remains widely misunderstood. When the law was amended in 2025 to make acceptance voluntary, many bitcoiners abroad declared it over, and some even left the country. Yet on the ground, very little changed. The original law required merchants to accept bitcoin, but that requirement was never enforced. Businesses that accepted bitcoin did so by choice, and most still do. Today it remains possible to live in El Salvador paying almost exclusively in bitcoin, from groceries at Super Selectos, the country's largest supermarket chain, to retailers like Walmart and PriceSmart, to utility bills. Some families still receive their remittances in sats. And by my own observation, adoption is broader now than when the law first took effect.

This reveals something essential. The law earned El Salvador credibility among bitcoiners worldwide, drew global attention and tourism, and delivered the first real test of bitcoin in a nation's live economy. But it did not create the adoption that exists today. People did, specially by bitcoiners who came to El Salvador and the Salvadorans who joined. Having lived through this experiment from its first day, and now working to advance adoption through The Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador, I have come to a conclusion that many bitcoiners may find uncomfortable: everyday bitcoin adoption is not going to happen, unless we fundamentally rethink where it begins. This article explains why, and what we intend to do about it.

The real problem: bitcoin isn't the measuring stick#

Imagine a government decides to fully switch its economy to bitcoin. On conversion day, it sets the exchange rate at the current market price. If one bitcoin is worth $75,000, then an apple that costs $1.50 becomes 2,000 sats. On paper, the transition is simple.

The difficulty begins the day after. Bitcoin's price against the dollar moves constantly, often by several percent in a single day. If bitcoin falls 20%, should the apple now cost 2,500 sats? If it rises 20%, should it drop to roughly 1,670? The merchant faces a choice: reprice everything continuously, or keep thinking in dollars and simply convert at the moment of sale. Almost every merchant chooses the second option, and that choice reveals the real problem.

Money serves three functions: a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. The unit of account is the measuring stick, the currency in which people think, set prices, and keep their books. As long as prices are set in dollars, a price in sats is simply a dollar price in disguise.

El Salvador demonstrates this clearly. Though ambitious, the Bitcoin Law still established in Article 6 that the dollar would remain the reference currency for accounting, a provision that survived the 2025 reform untouched. From the very first day, the law never attempted to make bitcoin the measuring stick. The reform made this even more explicit in a subtle way: Article 3 originally stated that every price could be expressed in bitcoin; it now states that every price can be converted into bitcoin.

On the ground, the pattern is the same. Merchants who accept bitcoin display their prices in dollars, payment processors calculate the amount in sats at the moment of payment, and many businesses convert those sats back to dollars immediately. In practice, bitcoin has largely functioned as a payment rail, not as money in the full sense. Friction made it harder still: stores that displayed an on-chain QR code instead of a Lightning invoice left customers waiting at the register for a confirmation, an experience that rarely made a convincing case for everyday use.

The few exceptions prove the rule. At the bitcoin farmers' market in San Blas, some vendors price their goods directly in sats. But these are merchants already immersed in the bitcoin community. Ordinary businesses that accept bitcoin set their prices in dollars, and even a sale paid entirely in sats is ultimately reported in dollars to the Ministerio de Hacienda for tax purposes. On paper and in practice, the dollar remains the unit of account.

The merchants' behavior is entirely rational. Their rent, wages, suppliers, and taxes are all paid in dollars. A business that prices in sats while paying its costs in dollars takes on exchange-rate risk with every sale, and most small businesses cannot afford that risk. Consumers face their own version of the same logic, described by what economists call Gresham's law: when two forms of money circulate together, people spend the one they value less and hold on to the one they value more. My aunt is a good example. She once believed bitcoin was little more than a tool for money laundering. After seeing it used in daily life around her, her opinion gradually changed, and she began buying and saving bitcoin herself. Experience and education changed her mind in a way the law alone never could. But notice what she does with it: she saves it. Here lies one of bitcoin's great paradoxes. The more people believe in it, the less they want to spend it.

The challenge, then, is not getting people to accept bitcoin. Even legal tender status could not make bitcoin the measuring stick. To understand why, we have to look beyond El Salvador's borders, at the currency against which nearly every price in the world is ultimately measured.

You can't escape the dollar alone#

El Salvador has changed its currency before. In November 2000, Legislative Decree No. 201 adopted the United States dollar as legal tender, and the colón was converted at a fixed rate of 8.75 per dollar. The government set the rate, and from then on, prices simply floated in the new currency. In many ways, that is exactly the kind of transition a bitcoin standard would require. But there is one crucial difference: in 2001, El Salvador moved to a more stable currency. A transition to bitcoin would mean moving to a far more volatile one, in a world that still runs on the dollar.

It is worth understanding how deep that dependence goes. Since the end of gold convertibility in 1971, most of the world's currencies are no longer formally tied to the dollar. Yet nearly all of them are measured against it and depend on it. The U.S. dollar is on one side of 89% of all foreign exchange trades, and it still represents roughly 57% of the disclosed reserves held by central banks. Oil, wheat, metals, and most of the world's commodities are priced in dollars, and a vast share of international debt is owed in dollars. The dollar's power does not come from any formal agreement. It comes from a network effect: everyone uses it because everyone else uses it.

This is why a country that adopts bitcoin does not escape the dollar. It simply becomes one more floating currency in a dollar world, with far higher volatility and no central bank to cushion it. El Salvador could, in theory, move its internal economy to sats, but its fuel suppliers, wheat sellers, and foreign creditors would still demand dollars. Every import would pass through the BTC/USD exchange rate, making it vulnerable to volatility.

The consequences would split the economy in two. Imported goods would reprice almost immediately with every move in bitcoin's price, while local goods, wages, and rents would adjust slowly, if at all. If bitcoin doubled against the dollar, imports would suddenly become cheap in sats, while Salvadoran labor, exports, and tourism would become twice as expensive for the rest of the world. If bitcoin fell by half, the price of imports like fuel, food, and medicine would double in sats overnight, while salaries stayed the same. For a national currency, a drop like that would be considered a severe crisis, the kind of rare and traumatic event that makes headlines around the world, wipes out savings, and pushes families into poverty. For bitcoin, it is not rare at all. Bitcoin has lost more than half of its value against the dollar several times in its history, including in 2018 and again in 2022, and recovered each time. Bitcoiners who hold for the long term can live with those swings. A country whose families depend on imported food and fuel cannot. Volatility would redistribute wealth almost at random.

In practice, the most likely outcome is that people would quietly keep thinking in dollars. Merchants would set prices in dollars in their heads and convert to sats at checkout, and the dollar would return as the unofficial unit of account.

This changes the nature of the competition. Bitcoin is not only competing with a local currency for the price of an apple or a pupusa. It is competing with the dollar's entire global network. And that raises a question every bitcoiner should take seriously: does adoption have to win from the top down, as a neutral settlement asset between countries and in international trade, before it can succeed in everyday life? Or can it grow from the bottom up, with local circular economies serving as the proving ground that eventually forces trade to follow?

History offers a useful guide. The dollar itself was once the challenger, and the currency it replaced, the British pound, now appears in just over 10% of global foreign exchange trades. How that transition actually happened holds a lesson that most discussions of bitcoin adoption miss.

A lesson from history: how the dollar replaced sterling#

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British pound was the world's money. Trade between countries was invoiced in sterling, financed in London, and settled through British banks. What makes this remarkable is that the United States had already overtaken Britain as the world's largest economy decades earlier, around the 1870s. Yet the dollar had almost no international role. Even U.S. exporters shipping cotton relied on sterling.

The reason was not size, technology, or the quality of the currency. It was credit. International trade runs on financing: a merchant shipping goods across the ocean needs credit to cover the months between sending the cargo and getting paid. That credit came from London, in sterling. The United States did not even have a central bank, and U.S. banks were restricted from operating abroad. There was simply no way to finance trade in dollars.

That changed in 1913, when the Federal Reserve Act created a central bank and allowed banks to open branches abroad and finance international trade. For the first time, a merchant could obtain trade credit in dollars, and the new Federal Reserve actively supported that market. Then came the First World War, which drained Britain's finances and turned the United States from a debtor into the world's creditor.

According to research by economist Barry Eichengreen and his colleagues, by the mid-1920s more international trade was being financed in dollars than in sterling, barely a decade after the Fed was created.

But the transition was neither quick nor linear. The Great Depression devastated the U.S. banking system, the dollar was devalued against gold, and sterling regained ground in the 1930s. It took a second world war and the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 to formally place the dollar at the center of the global monetary system. Even then, sterling remained an important reserve currency for Commonwealth countries for years. Its decline continued through the Suez Crisis of 1956, the devaluation of 1967, and the dismantling of the sterling area in 1972. Depending on what you measure, the dollar's victory took somewhere between thirty and sixty years.

The most important lesson lies in how merchants actually changed currencies. They did not wake up one day and decide to think in dollars. A merchant invoiced in whatever currency his bank could finance most cheaply and reliably. Once New York offered dollar credit on good terms, merchants began borrowing in dollars. Their costs followed their financing, their prices followed their costs, and only at the very end did their thinking follow their prices. The unit of account was not the first thing to change. It was the last.

Two further lessons stand out. First, network effects carry enormous inertia: a dominant currency can keep its position for decades after the fundamentals have shifted against it. Second, the moments that accelerated the transition were crises, two world wars that weakened Britain far faster than any gradual change could have.

For bitcoin, the takeaway is not that bitcoin needs a central bank or a credit market copied from the dollar system. It is that people changed the way they thought about money because they had a strong economic incentive to do so. Merchants did not choose the dollar out of conviction; they chose it because their financing, and therefore their costs, were in dollars, and pricing in the same currency reduced their risk. For bitcoin, the question is not whether people can be convinced to think in sats. It is which incentives are strong enough to make thinking in sats the rational choice. The most effective will be those that reach the cost side of the economy, where people buy their inputs, pay their workers, and owe their debts, and that are large enough to outweigh the risk of bitcoin's volatility. Credit could be one such incentive, though not the only one.

The volatility trap#

If incentives are what change behavior, volatility is what they must overcome. Every merchant who prices in sats, every worker who accepts a salary in sats, and every borrower who takes on a debt in sats is exposed to bitcoin's swings against the dollar. The more volatile bitcoin is, the larger the incentive has to be to make that exposure worth it.

This creates a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Volatility falls when a market becomes deep and widely used, because no single buyer or seller can move it much. But businesses will not use bitcoin for trade, wages, or credit until volatility falls. Each condition waits for the other. History suggests two ways such a loop can break. The first is slow, steady growth: bitcoin's market keeps expanding until it is large enough that no single flow can move it much, and its swings gradually become manageable. There is evidence this is already happening. Bitcoin's volatility has trended down over its history, from extreme swings in its early years to lower, though still high, levels as institutional investors and exchange-traded funds entered the market. The second way is a crisis. If trust in the dollar were seriously shaken, people might move to bitcoin before it is "ready," much as two world wars pushed the world off sterling faster than any gradual change could have. But it would be a mistake to assume that any adoption reduces volatility. The kind of adoption matters as much as the amount.

Speculative adoption can make volatility worse. Buyers using leverage are forced to sell when prices fall, triggering cascades of liquidations. More of that kind of participation means sharper crashes, not calmer markets. Institutional adoption brings its own complication. Large investment funds don't hold only bitcoin; they hold stocks, bonds, and many other assets at the same time. When something shakes the broader financial markets, such as a stock market crash or a sudden rise in interest rates, these funds often reduce their risk by selling a bit of everything, bitcoin included. They may also need to sell their most liquid assets to cover losses elsewhere. The result is that bitcoin's price can fall for reasons that have nothing to do with bitcoin itself. This is what happened in 2022, when the U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates aggressively and bitcoin fell alongside stock markets. The more bitcoin is held by institutions, the more its price is tied to the moods of the traditional financial system, the very system bitcoin was created to be independent from.

Everyday use is different. When people earn and spend sats in their daily lives, they create steady flows in both directions. Their sats are not sitting on exchanges, and their owners are not reacting to every price movement, because they are not thinking in dollars. Everyday adoption gradually moves bitcoin out of the hands of speculators and into the hands of users. It does not eliminate speculation, since much of today's trading happens through derivatives that never touch actual bitcoin, and a thinner supply on exchanges can make the remaining market easier to move. But over time, it shifts bitcoin's center of gravity toward people who hold it for reasons other than its price.

How bitcoin is held matters too. Wider ownership reduces volatility only when the owners are genuinely diverse, with different motives and time horizons, so that when some sell, others buy. Millions of small holders who all panic at the same moment behave like a single giant one. And ownership spread on paper is not the same as control spread in practice. If millions of people hold bitcoin through the same exchange, fund, or custodian, decisions and selling can still be concentrated in a few institutions. This is one more reason self-custody matters. It is not only about security; it makes the entire market more resilient.

Finally, there is a structural limit to keep in mind. When demand for dollars suddenly rises or falls, the Federal Reserve can respond by adjusting how many dollars are in circulation, cushioning the impact on the dollar's value. Bitcoin has no such mechanism. Its supply follows a fixed schedule that does not respond to demand, so every shift in demand, whether a rush to buy or a wave of selling, shows up entirely in its price. Gold illustrates this well. Like bitcoin, its supply cannot be quickly expanded when demand rises, and even after thousands of years of use as money around the world, gold's price still swings noticeably more than major managed currencies like the euro or the yen. Bitcoin's volatility will likely keep falling as adoption grows, especially adoption through everyday use, but because its supply cannot adjust, it may never be as stable as a currency actively managed by a central bank. That does not have to prevent its adoption; it means bitcoin’s stability will have to come from the depth and breadth of its use, not from anyone’s management.

That raises the natural question: what would actually change if bitcoin did become stable?

What changes when bitcoin becomes stable#

Imagine bitcoin's volatility falls to a level comparable with major currencies. The effects would ripple through the economy like a chain reaction.

Merchants could finally price in sats. If bitcoin's value no longer swings 10% in a week, a menu in sats can stay unchanged for months, just like a menu in dollars, and merchants no longer need to convert every payment the moment they receive it. Workers could accept their salaries in sats without fearing that next month's rent will become unpayable, which is a decisive step toward closing the circular economy.

Credit in sats would become possible. Today, borrowers avoid sat-denominated loans because if bitcoin doubles in value, so does the real weight of their debt. With stability, a loan in sats becomes simply a loan. This is the step that breaks the loop previously described, bitcoin's equivalent of the moment in 1913 when the Federal Reserve made dollar trade credit possible. International trade would follow: a 90-day shipping contract in bitcoin would no longer be a gamble, so goods could begin to be invoiced in sats. Companies, institutions, and even central banks would find it far easier to justify holding bitcoin as a reserve. For El Salvador, there is an especially important effect. Remittances are a lifeline for many Salvadoran families, and a stable bitcoin would allow them to receive and keep that money in sats without fearing it will lose value before they spend it.

Most importantly, stability would feed itself. A stable bitcoin attracts more everyday use, everyday use creates deeper markets, and deeper markets bring more stability. The chicken-and-egg loop would begin running in reverse, in bitcoin's favor. And as volatility falls, the incentives needed to change people's behavior become smaller and easier to sustain.

But stability has a price.

In financial markets, lower volatility usually comes with lower returns. A stable bitcoin would most likely appreciate more slowly, and the days of buying and watching one's investment multiply tenfold would be over. Much of today's adoption is driven precisely by that hope. With fewer dramatic price movements would come fewer headlines, fewer traders, and less of the speculative attention that currently funds much of the ecosystem.

Governments would also respond differently. Today, most governments tolerate bitcoin largely because its volatility keeps it from competing with their own currencies. As long as bitcoin's price swings wildly, people treat it as a speculative investment rather than as money, and they continue to earn, spend, save, and pay taxes in the national currency. A stable bitcoin would change that. It would become a genuine alternative to the national currency, one that people could use for everyday life, and every person who switched would reduce the government's control over its own monetary system. Governments that ignore bitcoin today might resist it far more seriously once it can actually replace their money. Even dollar-backed stablecoins like USDT, which many people use precisely because bitcoin is too volatile for payments, would lose much of their purpose.

Which leads to what may be the most important insight of this entire discussion: stability alone does not solve the spending problem. As long as bitcoin is expected to rise dramatically in value, people will continue to hold it rather than spend it, as Gresham's law predicts. A stable bitcoin that still gains 50% a year would remain a savings asset, not a currency. But if stability comes with slower appreciation, closer to the pace at which the economy itself grows, the incentive to hoard weakens. Holding sats would feel like holding a savings account with a modest return, and people would spend them as naturally as they spend dollars today.

In other words, for bitcoin to become everyday money, it may have to become boring, which I feel like it’s starting to.

The day after: a deflationary economy#

Volatility is the problem of the transition. Deflation is the problem of the destination. Even if bitcoin replaced the dollar entirely, and there were no other currency left to swing against, prices in sats would not stay still. They would gradually fall.

To see why, imagine a small island with 1,000 coins and an economy that produces 1,000 apples a year. Roughly, one apple costs one coin. The next year, farmers acquire better tools and produce 1,100 apples, but there are still exactly 1,000 coins. The same money is now spread across more goods, so each apple costs about 0.91 coins. Prices have fallen by about 9%, and there is no dollar anywhere on the island.

A global bitcoin economy would work the same way. The world produces more every year, but the supply of bitcoin is essentially fixed. Prices would tend to fall at roughly the pace of economic growth.

Some bitcoiners respond that bitcoin is infinitely divisible, since a single sat can be divided into thousandths on the Lightning Network. But divisibility answers a different question. Cutting a pizza into more slices does not create more pizza. Divisibility ensures that prices can keep falling without ever hitting a floor, which is what makes a deflationary money workable. It does not make it any less deflationary.

It is worth noticing that productivity improves in today's economy too. Every year, businesses find better ways to produce goods: better machines, better processes, better technology. On its own, that should make things cheaper. But in the current system, the money supply grows faster than production, and central banks deliberately aim for around 2% inflation a year. Productivity gains are absorbed by new money, and prices keep rising anyway.

Consider a baker who buys a new oven that lets him produce bread 10% more efficiently. In today's economy, that saving rarely reaches the customer as a lower price. Over the same period, inflation raises the cost of his flour, his rent, and his employees' wages, and the efficiency he gained is quietly consumed by those rising costs. The price of bread stays the same or goes up, and his progress becomes invisible.

With bitcoin's fixed supply, there is no new money to absorb those gains, so they appear where they naturally would: as lower prices. The same baker, competing with others who also improve, would gradually be able to sell his bread for fewer sats. Multiply that across every industry, and a fixed-supply economy becomes one in which progress shows up directly in what people pay.

We have already seen what this looks like in one corner of the economy. Televisions, computers, and phones have become dramatically cheaper and better over the past decades, because their productivity improved so fast that it outran inflation. In a bitcoin economy, the same pattern would extend, more slowly and gently, to everything else: food, clothing, housing materials, services.

This changes how ordinary people benefit from progress. A worker would not need a raise to become better off; a salary that stays the same in sats would buy a little more each year. A family's savings would grow in purchasing power simply by being held, without needing to be invested in stocks or real estate to keep up with inflation. And prices themselves would become more honest signals. Today, when a price rises, it is hard to tell whether the product became more costly to make or whether the currency simply lost value. In a fixed-supply economy, a falling price would tell you that someone, somewhere, found a better way to produce it.

In that sense, deflation under bitcoin would not be caused by the currency. It would be caused by progress, and the currency would simply stop hiding it.

The critics' case#

Not all deflation is the same, and critics focus on the harmful kind. Prices can also fall because people suddenly stop spending, as in a crisis, when fear rather than productivity drives the economy. The most serious concern is debt. Imagine a family that borrows to buy a home, with a monthly payment of 1 million sats while earning 2 million sats a month. Half of their income goes to the loan. Now imagine a downturn hits. Businesses sell less, wages are cut, and the family's income falls to 1.6 million sats. But the loan payment does not change: it is still 1 million sats. Now it takes more than 60% of their income instead of half.

To keep up with their payments, the family cuts back on everything else: fewer meals out, fewer purchases, no new clothes. The problem is that thousands of other indebted families are doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Businesses lose even more customers, so they cut wages further or lay off workers. Incomes fall again, the debts weigh even heavier, and families cut their spending even more. The economist Irving Fisher called this vicious cycle "debt deflation," and he used it to explain how the Great Depression became so severe.

Critics also point out that a fixed-supply money removes the tools governments rely on in emergencies. During a crisis, a central bank can lower interest rates, inject money into the economy, and act as a lender of last resort when banks face a run, as happened in 2008 and during the pandemic. Their strongest historical evidence comes from the gold standard, which also limited the money supply: during the Great Depression, countries that abandoned gold earlier generally recovered faster than those that held on.

The bitcoiners' response#

Bitcoiners look at those same tools and see the problem rather than the solution. Money creation is, in our view, a hidden tax: the dollar has lost more than 85% of its purchasing power since 1971, and the people who pay the most are those who save in cash, often the poorest. New money is not distributed equally either. Those who receive it first, such as banks, governments, and asset holders, benefit before prices rise, while ordinary workers receive it last, after prices have already gone up. Bailouts encourage recklessness, because institutions that know they will be rescued take bigger risks. And recessions, painful as they are, clear out bad investments that cheap money made possible.

Another thing to point out is that falling prices and prosperity are not incompatible. The United States experienced long stretches of falling prices in the late nineteenth century alongside strong economic growth, and technology becomes cheaper every year without destroying the electronics industry. When deflation comes from productivity, wages need not fall. A worker whose salary stays the same while everything he buys gets cheaper is becoming richer.

El Salvador offers an interesting perspective here. Since dollarizing in 2001, the country has had no ability to print its own money, set its own interest rates, or act as its own lender of last resort. Salvadorans already live without the emergency tools critics consider essential, even if the dollar they use remains inflationary.

In my view one of the strongest cases for Bitcoin is its decentralization. Acknowledging the absolute centralization of the dollar and it’s immense effect on the global economy, there is no question that Bitcoin is the best choice.

"Unless"#

Every argument in this article points in the same direction. Bitcoin cannot become everyday money while it remains a payment rail for prices set in dollars. A law could not change that. The dollar's global network will not simply step aside. And history tells us that the unit of account is the last thing to change, not the first: people begin thinking in a new currency only after their financing, their costs, and their prices have already moved to it.

This is why most adoption efforts struggle. They begin at the end of the chain, persuading a café or a store to accept bitcoin at the register. But if that business's rent, suppliers, and wages are all in dollars, the sats it receives are converted right back to dollars, often within minutes. Bitcoin passes through the economy without ever staying in it. So here is the conclusion this article has been building toward: everyday bitcoin adoption is not going to happen, unless it begins where costs begin, not where payments end.

That means a few things in practice. Sats have to reach the people at the base of the economy, the producers and suppliers whose prices determine everyone else's costs. Merchants need a real economic reason not only to accept sats, but to keep them and spend them on their own inputs. And bitcoin has to spread into the hands of people who use it in daily life and hold it themselves, because that kind of ownership is what gradually makes it stable. Stability, in turn, is what opens the door to wages, contracts, and eventually credit in sats.

There is a historical irony in where bitcoin stands today. Before 1913, the U.S. economy grew for decades on sterling credit, because credit in dollars simply did not exist. Bitcoin's economy is in a similar position now. Most bitcoin-related lending today consists of dollar loans backed by bitcoin as collateral, which keeps the dollar as the unit of account even within the bitcoin world. The transition will come when borrowing and owing in sats starts to make sense.

When that moment comes, bitcoin's credit system should not repeat the mistakes of the one it seeks to replace. The collapse of lenders such as Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi in 2022 showed what happens when institutions lend out deposits they have promised to return on demand, with no one to rescue them when withdrawals spike. Honest credit in sats would look different: savers lending real savings for agreed periods, and institutions proving their reserves publicly, something bitcoin makes possible in a way no previous money could. It would be smaller and slower than the credit we are used to. That may be exactly the point. None of this will happen through a single decision, by a government or anyone else. It will happen one supply chain, one community, and one incentive at a time, until thinking in sats becomes the rational choice rather than an act of conviction.

That is the bet we are making at The Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador.

From theory to practice: the pupusa chain#

If adoption has to begin where costs begin, the natural place to start is the base of a supply chain. That is why we are planning a one-year pilot built around one of El Salvador's most local and most beloved supply chains: the pupusa.

The ingredients of a pupusa, corn, beans, cheese, and loroco, can all be produced in El Salvador, even though the country imports a significant share of them today. By partnering with local producers, the pilot keeps sats in Salvadoran hands rather than leaking them back to dollars through imported costs, while supporting the domestic farmers and producers who need it most. The chain is also short, from producers to distributors to the pupuserías found on nearly every street, and if a model works for one pupusería, it can be replicated across thousands.

The idea is simple. We want to partner with producers of these basic ingredients to sell their products at a discount when paid in bitcoin, while continuing to sell in dollars at the regular price. The discount, funded through donations to the embassy, would be passed down the chain at decreasing levels. Distributors, resellers, and large buyers who benefit from it would agree to offer their own customers a discount for paying in bitcoin, and they would need to show that they are actually doing so in order to keep receiving it. A pupusería that buys its ingredients more cheaply in sats has a reason not only to accept sats from its customers, but to keep them, because its own costs are lower in sats than in dollars. This is the kind of incentive described earlier in this article: one that reaches the cost side of the economy.

Locally, the goal is simple to explain and difficult to achieve: to get sats to travel through several steps of a supply chain before anyone converts them to dollars. Today, a sat spent at a Salvadoran business usually makes a single stop before becoming a dollar. If our pilot can show sats moving from customer to pupusería to distributor to producer, even in one small chain, it will demonstrate that a closed-loop, local circular economy can be built from the bottom up.

Globally, the goal connects to everything discussed in this article. Every sat that moves into the hands of producers, merchants, and families who use it in daily life is a sat held by someone with a long time horizon and a reason to spend it rather than speculate with it. The more bitcoin spreads among real users who hold it themselves, the less its price depends on a small group of traders, and the more stable it can become. Small, local projects will not change bitcoin's volatility on their own. But replicated across communities and countries, they could be part of what breaks the chicken-and-egg loop.

We approach this as an experiment, not a certainty. If merchants keep converting their sats immediately, if the discount is used only by people who already hold bitcoin, or if the loop holds only while the subsidy lasts, we will have learned exactly where the chain breaks, and we will share those results. If sats begin to stay in the chain, we will have something even more valuable: evidence.

Built on relationships#

The pilot does not stand alone. A producer will not change how he sells his corn because of an article or an app; he will do it because he trusts the people asking. Building that trust is the everyday work of The Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador. Every Friday afternoon, our Incubator Fridays open the embassy's doors to young Salvadorans pitching bitcoin projects, and the most promising receive mentorship, investor connections, and direct funding. For almost two years, we have hosted weekly Sunday football games at the Chapupo sports center, covering the field fees so that no local player or neighborhood kid is left on the sidelines for lack of money. And in March 2026, we partnered with the Match Point tennis club in Zaragoza to bring daily workshops, wallet setup assistance, and hardware wallet giveaways to the Torneo Bitcoin UTR, putting self-custody, the kind of ownership this article argues makes bitcoin more resilient, into the hands of a growing local community.

These activities may seem far removed from monetary theory, but they are its foundation. If El Salvador's experience teaches anything, it is that people, not laws, create adoption. Football fields, tennis courts, and Friday pitch sessions are where relationships begin. The pilot is where those relationships become a supply chain.

You can check current activities here: https://bitcoinembassysv.org/activities/

How you can help#

This article began with a simple observation: all bitcoiners agree that adoption should happen, but fewer agree on how. We have proposed an answer. Adoption will not come from laws, slogans, or a register that converts sats to dollars the moment they arrive. It will come from incentives strong enough to make thinking in sats the rational choice, starting where costs begin.

Testing that idea requires resources, and this is where you come in. Donations to The Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador will fund the pupusa chain pilot, along with the grassroots work that makes projects like it possible: funding for young entrepreneurs at Incubator Fridays, uniforms so our Sunday football team can enter local tournaments, and new community events and workshops already in the pipeline. And there is something unusual about supporting this work. Your sats will not simply pay for adoption; they will become adoption. The discounts they fund will put bitcoin directly into the hands of producers, distributors, and pupuserías, the people whose costs and prices shape the rest of the economy. Every donated sat is meant to stay in circulation.

El Salvador's greatest bitcoin success was never the law. It was the community that grew around it: Salvadorans and newcomers from around the world who kept building, using, and teaching bitcoin long after the headlines moved on. No other country has a bitcoin community quite like it, and that community has the potential to influence how bitcoin is adopted far beyond our borders. Your support helps that community move from enthusiasm to evidence.

We will share what we do, what works, and, just as importantly, what does not. At the end of the pilot, we will publish the results, including where the chain broke if it did, so that anyone working on adoption anywhere in the world can learn from them.

If this article changed how you think about bitcoin adoption, we invite you to be part of it.

Donate: https://bitcoinembassysv.org/donate/ (Donations are processed through a BTCPay Server provided by our sponsor, Move To El Salvador)

Bitcoin adoption is not going to happen on its own. Unless we make it happen, one supply chain at a time.

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About the author#

Mario Guevara is a Salvadoran psychologist, a graduate of Universidad Tecnológica de El Salvador (UTEC), and the director of The Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador, a community hub in San Salvador dedicated to grassroots bitcoin adoption through education, local partnerships, and real-world experiments in the Salvadoran economy. He has lived El Salvador’s bitcoin experiment from its first day. His background in psychology shapes his approach to adoption: understanding how incentives and trust change the way people think about money. Fluent in Spanish and English, he works to bridge the local community and bitcoiners arriving from around the world. He is also the CEO of Move To El Salvador, a relocation company and sponsor of the Bitcoin Embassy.

Follow the Embassy on X at @BTCEmbassy_SV and learn more at bitcoinembassysv.org.