Jon Atack paid for lunch at a restaurant in El Zonte, El Salvador—the coastal town marketed globally as Bitcoin Beach—and was told by staff that his transaction was the first bitcoin payment the establishment had processed in a full month. Atack has contributed to Bitcoin Core since 2019 and has lived in El Salvador since 2022, giving him firsthand exposure to payment adoption in the country most closely associated with bitcoin as legal tender.
"Lunched in El Zonte (Bitcoin Beach) today. After I paid, they told me it was the first bitcoin payment there all month, going on to describe how before, they used to see many payments in bitcoin, and that now it's practically non-existent. Pretty depressing," Atack said.
When Atack asked a staff member how most customers paid, she said almost everyone used card. He then offered a tip in sats—the smallest denomination of bitcoin—and the server told him she had forgotten how to use her bitcoin wallet app and did not want any. Her description was blunt: "It's dead."
Atack acknowledged the data point is anecdotal. The staffer had worked at the restaurant for three years and had watched the full arc of bitcoin payment adoption in the zone—from early days of heavy use to near-total disappearance of on-chain and Lightning Network transactions at the register.
El Zonte earned the Bitcoin Beach label years before El Salvador passed its bitcoin law in 2021, which initially required merchants to accept bitcoin as legal tender. That mandatory acceptance clause has since been dropped. Under revisions tied to El Salvador's loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund, merchant acceptance of bitcoin became voluntary rather than compulsory, removing one of the structural drivers that put BTC in everyday commerce.
The decline Atack observed fits a pattern critics of bitcoin-as-currency have flagged for years. Bitcoin holders broadly treat the asset as a long-term store of value rather than spending money. With bitcoin's price having risen sharply over the past two years, spending BTC on a restaurant meal carries an opportunity cost that paying by card does not. Juan Galt, a bitcoin reporter, called this an "economics problem" that no one is taking seriously. Galt described the behavior needed to sustain a circular bitcoin economy as altruistic—holders would need to spend BTC even when holding it is financially superior. He said that given the expectation of bitcoin rising in price, such spending behavior is "counter-economic at its core."
Not everyone who responded agreed that adoption in the region has collapsed. One user said she had just returned from El Zonte and paid with bitcoin without issue, though she added a qualifier: "We paid by card to our hotel, but there were signs everywhere that they accept bitcoin, so I assume they do." That distinction—acceptance signs present, actual transactions absent—captures the gap between infrastructure availability and active use.
Atack himself did not frame his observation as a total indictment of El Salvador's bitcoin experiment. "Sometimes I begin to take for granted what we have in El Salvador and forget that it is a pioneering frontier and how far ahead it is of other places in adoption and forward-thinking legislation," he said.
Still, the conversation Atack's report generated exposes a structural tension in the bitcoin payments thesis. El Zonte was the proof-of-concept that convinced early bitcoin adoption advocates the circular economy model could work at the community level. If voluntary merchant acceptance and a holder mentality have reduced bitcoin transactions there to near zero, the evidentiary base for that model weakens.
Atack was temporarily arrested in El Salvador last year, a detail that adds context to his standing as an embedded observer rather than a tourist passing through. His years in the country and his work on Bitcoin Core—the primary software implementation underpinning the network—place him in a position to recognize the difference between transient slowdowns and structural retreat in payment behavior.
