El Salvador, the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, is seeing an almost total abandonment of BTC payments by merchants. An agreement with the IMF signed in 2024, involving $1.4 billion in aid, made accepting these payments optional, when it was previously mandatory. A Bitcoin Core developer living in the country found that BTC transactions have become practically nonexistent, including in the town of El Zonte, the historic birthplace of the Bitcoin Beach project. Merchants now prefer classic bank card payments, citing BTC volatility that makes conversions risky and potential losses too significant.
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