El Zonte, El Salvador
August 2022 - April 2023
5,503 Words
You would be forgiven for assuming that the following anecdote took place on any nameless side street in any out-of-the-way developing nation and not, instead, in the only existing model of a physical Bitcoin economy: I was walking home with a friend one night when an elderly man shuffled past us towards a plastic chair outside of a tienda. He muttered something and my friend whipped her head around, clearly concerned, and said something back to him without breaking stride. A moment and several steps later she asked me if I’d heard what he said; my gringo Spanish is just barely on the better side of embarrassing and thus I get lost in late-night, slang-ridden, drunken slurring like this. “He said, ‘I’m gonna die alone and nobody cares.’” I turned around and saw him slumped in the aforementioned chair at the center of a sphere of light emanating from the sole lightbulb above the tienda window where waiting customers tap a coin on a protective rebar grid to summon an attendant, the unpaved road before him a quagmire whose puddles became mirrors in the light despite the rainy season having ended months ago, the ditches for electrical and sewer work still wide open despite having been dug weeks ago. This is El Zonte, El Salvador, and there would be no way of knowing from this scene alone that every business in this town is legally required to accept payment in Bitcoin, that denizens and tourists alike may be walking around with untold digital fortunes in their pockets, that this is Babylon if the Lottery existed in coded electrical signals running through the air. There would be no way of knowing until, after perhaps a few days, certain details became impossible to ignore, like the Bitcoin logos spray-painted on public trash cans, the t-shirts with slogans like “Bitcoin Country,” and the government-sponsored billboards on the highway into town advertising Bitcoin’s status as legal tender, and whether these details registered as ominous or auspicious, unsettling or comforting, dystopian or utopian, would be a matter of whether you choose to believe what you see or what you’re told to see.
This story began in 2019 with the founding of the nonprofit Bitcoin Beach (which is sometimes metonymically referred to as Hope House, the name of the physical building where the nonprofit is headquartered, but in this essay the organization will be referred to as Bitcoin Beach and the building will be referred to as Hope House) which undertook the endeavor of creating a circular Bitcoin economy in El Zonte. Through outreach and educational programs, installing Bitcoin ATMs, and creating their own Bitcoin Beach Wallet, they had locals using Bitcoin in town long before President Nayib Bukele followed suit in late 2021 with two distinct administrative actions. The first was a law mandating that businesses in El Salvador must accept Bitcoin as a form of payment, and the government-backed Chivo Wallet and government-installed Chivo Bitcoin ATMs were meant to help with this new requirement. The second was the purchase of (at the time) 40 million USD of Bitcoin which is still of “unclear” ownership and intent despite numerous additional purchases that now cumulatively amount to, as of February 2023, 2,381 BTC. These decisions brought mixed reviews from the crypto world. Some said this is a step toward the future by empowering a developing nation to move away from dependency on the West and forge its own eco-friendly economic path out of poverty while others called it antithetical to everything Bitcoin represents if a government is haphazardly forcing it onto its own population without sufficient preparation.
I was in El Zonte from mid-August until April and can confidently say that, one year after Bukele’s decisions, Bitcoin is going stronger here than anywhere else in the country and possibly the world. The most famous pupuseria in town has concrete flooring, tin roofing, a generational oral recipe for hand-shaped dough, and a cashier with Chivo Wallet on her phone that can generate QR codes for payments in bitcoin. The Adopting Bitcoin Conference spent an entire day in El Zonte with Bitcoin Beach promoting a surf contest, a pupusa eating contest, and a modernized corrida de sortija while doling out prize money in bitcoin. Even the women selling neon-colored minutas from pushcarts on the beach, and even the guy who sells quesadillas from a cooler strapped to the bicycle he rides around town, accept bitcoin. The most commonly used wallets (Chivo Wallet, Bitcoin Beach Wallet, and BlueWallet) all make use of the Lightning Network, making it possible to complete these transactions without an egregious fee or wait time. My cash withdrawals from Athena and Chivo ATMs did take up to 20 minutes since they force on-chain transactions, but the ~$1 fee, despite being nonzero, is significantly less offensive than the amounts charged by traditional ATMs for international withdrawals. Now is a good time to mention that USD has been the official currency in El Salvador since 2001, which has since led to "increased economic stability. . . tight integration with the U.S. economy, and . . . high correlation between the two countries’ business cycles." This is why Presidential, American Innovation, and Sacagawea dollar coins are commonplace here, the US Mint selling them to countries like El Salvador since most Americans stomped their feet and pouted at the coins’ attempted introduction to their home country. So, funnily enough, physical gold coins are exchanged about as regularly as bitcoin is, and while these coins and their paper counterparts are minted outside of El Salvador, bitcoin gets to the wallets of Salvadorans via injections from Bitcoin Beach, sign-up vouchers in Chivo Wallet, or from the expenditures of individuals who purchased it via other means such as exchanges or mining. Exactly how much bitcoin is being circulated would be difficult to determine, and that’s partially due to the fact that Bitcoin is difficult to trace and non-geographic by design, so another way of looking at where and how often bitcoin is being “circulated” is to simply look at where most people can and do use it. Since El Zonte is still the Bitcoin capital of El Salvador thanks to the aforementioned injections sponsored by the anonymous donation to Bitcoin Beach and their extended efforts to increase adoption, it would be safe to say that the nonprofit is the strongest force keeping bitcoin circulated in El Salvador, distantly followed by the government and, eventually, individuals.
Public opinion of Bitcoin in El Zonte seems to be dictated by its price. The grandmother heading the aforementioned barebones pupuseria told me that she loves it when it’s up and hates it when it’s down, and that they use the the Chivo ATM at Hope House to exchange their bitcoin for cash as soon as they receive any. On the other hand, my French-Canadian friend prefers payment at his oceanfront café in bitcoin so he can hold it until the price goes up. This perfectly illustrates the two competing schools of thought on Bitcoin in EL Zonte: a currency for everyday use or an asset waiting to explode in value. The economic reality of El Salvador undoubtedly has an affect on this; if you’re living on the national average of 10 USD per day and are using Bitcoin then the consequence of a price crash is that your family isn’t eating, and so it’s incredibly risky to hold and hope that the price will increase. This is why Galoy, the software company hired to make the Bitcoin Beach Wallet, recently implemented a feature called StableSats. “Sats,” as in “Satoshis,” as in 1 bitcoin = 100,000,000 sats, as in “Price for 100,000 sats: $17.44,” are the unit the wallet uses to denominate the value of the user’s bitcoin. StableSats, then, are held in a separate account in the wallet that users can transfer their bitcoin to (and USD from) instantly and without fees. StableSats do not change in USD value because Galoy makes use of a financial instrument called a perpetual inverse swap to open a short position against Bitcoin of equal value to the amount converted to StableSats. If the price of Bitcoin decreases, the profit yielded by the short position is used to maintain the USD value of the StableSats. If the price of Bitcoin increases, Galoy uses the resulting profit, which is unrealized by the user since they’re holding StableSats, to compensate for the loss on the short position. Even with such an effort there are some establishments that still don’t accept bitcoin despite the Bitcoin Law mandating that “every economic agent must accept bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service.” I asked several of these businesses why they didn’t use Bitcoin and each one cited its volatility. I didn’t ask any of them if they had heard of StableSats because I also got the impression that they were uninterested in another outsider peddling some version of The Next Big Thing in their town.
My consumption strategy in El Zonte was to keep all of my crypto assets on a Ledger Nano X and transfer 50 USD worth of Bitcoin to my Bitcoin Beach Wallet at a time. Bitcoin has been fluctuating between mid-teens and low-twenties since I’ve been here and so when StableSats were implemented I immediately started moving all of the bitcoin in my wallet into a StableSats account and would only move the necessary amount back to Bitcoin immediately before a purchase. This sounds more painstaking than it is and in fact it does work for using bitcoin to purchase items priced in USD as I didn’t have to worry about the amount of USD in my wallet suddenly being insufficient for a purchase I needed to make. With these conversions the overall amount of Bitcoin changes in accordance with the price since the StableSats are converted back to Bitcoin at a different price than when they were initially converted. This doesn’t matter in El Zonte because everything that can be purchased with Bitcoin is priced in USD, and thus the USD value of a user’s bitcoin, not the actual amount of bitcoin, is what’s important. So the only reason all of these financial, software, and mental gymnastics exist is to keep Bitcoin priced in sensible and consistent amounts of USD in order to maintain the existing mental framework for appraising and purchasing items in USD.
Unsurprisingly, I am not the first person to realize this. Nassim Taleb, the notoriously skeptical hedge fund guru and philosopher whose books The Black Swan and Antifragile detail the investment and life philosophies that yielded him $330 million from the 2008 Financial Crisis, argues Bitcoin’s instability resembles the behavior of a tradable asset, not a currency. He argues that the quintessential feature of a currency is that it maintains its value. It is well documented that Bitcoin utterly fails at this, and according to Taleb, this effectively makes it an asset. This explains why I felt like spending Bitcoin was a cheat code to not have to spend real money; the transactional utility simply isn’t the same as with physical money or even a plastic card because, according to Taleb, I was actually selling an asset that I previously didn’t have an easier way to sell. I also didn’t care that I was technically selling at a loss (the price of Bitcoin has gone down a lot, to say the least, since I purchased it) or that the price might skyrocket later because the immediacy of my demand for day-to-day products overrode my discipline for holding assets long enough to sell them for a profit. In other words, the ability to actually pay for goods with Bitcoin brought its long-lasting identity crisis to bear and I was literally paying the price for transacting an asset masquerading as a currency. This was made possible by the elimination of transaction fees and the ease of QR codes, and perhaps Taleb’s most relevant point is that “there is a conflation between ‘accepting bitcoin for payments’ and pricing goods in bitcoin. To ‘price’ in bitcoin, bitcoin the price must be fixed, with a conversion into fiat floating, rather than the reverse.” My spending behavior is compelling evidence that he’s right, and he further explains that bitcoin will remain an asset being traded with USD, regardless of how frictionless those transactions are, until prices are fixed in bitcoin, incomes are fixed in bitcoin, revenues are fixed in bitcoin, and businesses deploy capital in fixed amounts of bitcoin. Bitcoin Beach is upfront about this being their ultimate goal, and after considering Taleb’s arguments it’s easy to see why, but the conceptual shift from USD to Bitcoin is, apparently, a hard sell. I know some single-storefront restaurants and small-time construction operations who receive payment in bitcoin from their customers and thus pay their employees with it if they prefer, but these salaries are being paid in USD-equivalent sums of bitcoin, as in however many bitcoin is worth $10 at the moment and not a consistent 0.0001 bitcoin (or whatever), and these employees are immediately taking their Bitcoin to the ATM and cashing out. When I asked one of these business owners about paying their employees in a fixed amount of bitcoin they summed it up pretty succinctly: “that would be stupid.”
It’s not, however, outlandish to imagine the town getting to the mindset that Taleb describes, but the path there requires some parsing out. Nick Szabo, perennial candidate for being Satoshi Nakomoto because of his hypothesizing on proto-cryptocurrency Bit Gold, who is also cited by Vitalik Buterin for his precursory thinking on smart contracts, describes the beginning of that path in a phenomenal essay on the history of currency. Applying his history to Bitcoin places El Zonte at the beginning of a journey to normalizing a Bitcoin-first mental model of commerce. From Szabo’s research it’s clear that the factors that have influenced currency adoption and usage don’t have much to do with exclusive usage or even consistent value; they have to do with sentiment. Currencies as we know them evolved from what Szabo calls “collectibles” like jewelry and art which were created to satisfy what seems to be an innate human instinct to “explore, collect, make, display, appraise, carefully store, and trade collectibles.” Primitive Homo sapiens used these collectibles as an intermediary item when trading with other tribes for food in order to solve problems of multiple tribes having ample food supplies at different times of the year due to the differing migration patterns of their unique prey (incredibly simplified hypothetical example: beaver-hunting-tribe gives reindeer-hunting-tribe some jewelry now in exchange for half of their reindeer since it’s reindeer season, and when beaver season arrives and the reindeer have migrated elsewhere, reindeer-hunting-tribe can give beaver-hunting-tribe some jewelry in exchange for half of their beaver). As tribes developed better food storage techniques, such problems of timing began to fade away until high-value collectibles were the primary items exchanged in events like war, marriage, and familial inheritances. Coins were soon created to function like collectibles that possessed physical characteristics that were better for spending, appraising, and carrying at much higher frequencies and velocities. After detailing this history Szabo observes that “it is no coincidence that the attributes of collectibles are shared with precious metals, coins, and the reserve commodities that have backed most non-fiat currencies. Money proper implemented these properties a [sic] purer form than the collectibles used during almost all of human prehistory.” Those properties are: “1. More secure from accidental loss and theft. For most of history this meant carriable on the person and easy to hide. 2. Harder to forge its value. An important subset of these are products that are unforgeably costly, and therefore considered valuable. 3. This value was more accurately approximated by simple observations or measurements. These observations would have had more reliable integrity yet have been less expensive.” Szabo then states that no collectible has ever satisfied all three properties, the implication being that Bitcoin does. For some reason he neglects to add his own reasoning as to why so I’m going to fill in my own: 1. Thanks to hash functions and public-key systems it is effectively impossible (for now) for someone to seize ownership of Bitcoin directly from the blockchain. It is, however, quite easy for someone to get access to the account controlling the wallet or breach the security of a custodial exchange/wallet, but that is a problem with the defi system and careless/uninformed users, not the Bitcoin blockchain, and this is also why cold storage exists; not your keys, not your coin. 2. Similar to 1, the only way to put more bitcoin into circulation is via mining; counterfeit bitcoins can’t be coded and pumped into a digital wallet. 3. This is the most crucial point: it is possible to accurately approximate the value of a bitcoin with a simple observation or measurement if it is being valued against a digital commodity, but not if it’s being valued against a physical commodity. Although it doesn’t exist yet, I can imagine a way to easily express the price of digital items in bitcoin based on a conversion of memory space of said item to CPU power required to mine Bitcoin (e.g. a 100 mb album from Bandcamp costs however much bitcoin can be mined with 100 mb of CPU power, or something like that).
Being able to quote prices solely in Bitcoin using this method would also be a step towards satisfying Taleb’s requirement that a currency must “track a weighted basket of goods and services with minimum error.” As stated above I don’t believe this is possible unless the Bitcoin economy is exclusively digital. If Bitcoin prices are based on data storage and computing power then how on Earth could something like a pupusa or a bag of cement be priced in Bitcoin? So perhaps it’s more appropriate to think of Bitcoin as the first collectible, and eventually the exclusively-used medium of exchange, in a digitally-native world. As Szabo says about the evolution of collectibles in ancient times, “the gains to be made, by one or both parties, from [transferring wealth in marriage, death, or war], were so great that they occurred despite high transaction costs. Tribes therefore often spent large amounts of time on the seemingly frivolous tasks of manufacturing and exploring for the raw materials of jewelry and other collectibles.” Consider then Bitcoin’s extra-monetary value, in spite of high transaction costs, to people who spend most of their time online searching for raw material for memes or using computing power to solve frivolous math problems to earn bitcoin. These people belong to the Internet and its communities in the way that humans have traditionally belonged to geographic areas, religions, families, and more recently nation states, neighborhoods, and fanbases. So in the way that an ancient human would feel spiritually connected to the Earth by wearing a gem made up of the environment where she, her ancestors, and her Gods lived; or the way a high school quarterback would get social capital for wearing his Letterman Jacket to the movies in rural Texas; or the way an aristocrat feels more worldly winning a rare painting at a Sotheby’s auction; possession and knowledge of Bitcoin, NFTs, and Metaverse land gives clout and status in the forums and livestream chats at the forefront of Internet culture. That means something to a lot of people. It just does. That alone is enough. That doesn’t mean that it means something to everyone, but the Internet does a great job of making anything housed in it seem like the pinnacle of meaning and importance and thus has fooled many people who have lives outside of the Internet into thinking that Bitcoin can do something for them. So perhaps as time goes by Bitcoin will relegate itself exclusively to the domain of those whose immersion in online culture is such that the value of owning Bitcoin is meaningful for its own sake; just like all subcultures, it will become an insulated community with its own rules of meaning and value that don’t make sense to anyone outside of it. In many ways Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general, is already a subculture, but the point it needs to reach is one where its members don’t care about the USD value of their digital assets; instead, all that will matter is their signifying power or how much bitcoin people are willing to trade them for their NFT or Metaverse acreage. At that point it will truly be a grassroots circular economy where people think, act, and transact in cryptocurrencies beyond the realm of fiat currencies and nation states. Again, that makes sense in a digital space, but not in a physical space, and I’m unconvinced that space is desirable. I see it as a world where everyone spends their days indoors while the industrial machine gobbles up the outdoors to pave way for building more isolated domestic capsules streamlined to make us “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” Does that sound familiar? Do you want to go back to that?
As much as I don’t, the push towards the use of Central Bank Dollar Coins (CBDCs), which are government-backed attempts at completely digital (and sometimes blockchain-based, see pg. 16) versions of national currencies, indicates to me that there is no turning back. At first, CBDCs don’t appear to work any differently from the pixels on a bank app displaying how much cash is in a checking account. The key difference is that a central bank (i.e. a government-controlled bank, which is still a financial institution), not a private bank, controls and stores CBDCs, so an individual’s general distrust of them can be measured by if they think it’s more likely that their government will freeze their CBDCs (see “Controversies”) or arrest them if they do something unfavorable in the government’s eyes, or if the person running the crypto exchange they use will make reckless financial decisions and lose their Bitcoin. I’m not in the business of predicting how many countries will eventually implement CBDCs, and I don’t even think that CBDCs are inherently worse than Know Your Customer cryptocurrency exchanges run by assholes, but let this be an indicator that the type of society that politicians and entrepreneurs are envisioning for the future is one where digital payments are so normalized, ubiquitous, and centralized that they constitute a sandbox for governments and tech companies to continue misappropriating the Internet for surveillance and data mining. So if you believe that the world is only getting more digital, then soon Bitcoin will not only have the space and justification to function as a currency that satisfies Taleb and Szabo’s criteria, but all of its privacy features will become tools necessary for retaining individual autonomy instead of just being ways to buy narcotics online or explain random price explosions.
But that’s only if Bitcoin is used in a way that allows those features to actually work. Bitcoin was created to function as a “mechanism. . . to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party” (see “Introduction”) and to prevent “financial institutions” from gathering “more information than they would otherwise need” from their customers, but the same Bitcoin infrastructure in El Zonte that allows it to be circulated on the path towards satisfying Taleb and Szabo’s criteria for a true Bitcoin adoption also gathers personal information from spenders and requires numerous trusted parties to facilitate transactions. It begins with SIM cards which, upon purchasing, require a phone call to the cell provider to register the user’s name, birthday, address, and passport number/national ID to the phone number. This matters because a phone number is the only required piece of identifying information in the Bitcoin Beach Wallet. The government-backed Chivo Wallet is unsurprisingly far worse, requiring the user’s passport number/national ID to be registered in the app along with a photo of the user. Furthermore, withdrawals from both the Chivo and Athena ATMs in El Zonte require entering a verification code in the ATM that is sent to the user’s phone via SMS after entering the number in the ATM. This means that there is a government-recognized piece of identification attached to every Bitcoin transaction in El Salvador that a governmental organization could use to easily find a person of interest by cross-referencing the publicly available time of a transaction on the blockchain with the identifying information associated with said transaction in the records of the app or ATM. Furthermore, Bitcoin Beach Wallet and Chivo Wallet are custodial, meaning that Galoy and Alphapoint (previously Athena) handle ownership of any Bitcoin in their respective wallets, not the user, who, technically speaking, is merely requesting that Galoy or Alphapoint transfer the user’s Bitcoin on their behalf. This means that not only are these wallets allowing for the capability to track the whereabouts and actions of their users, but they also allow for the revocation or freezing of funds by the overseeing software company or government. After putting all of this together I purchased (with cash) a new SIM card and gave a fake name and passport number to the cell provider (I was uncertain about how this would go until the operator sounded like I was the only thing preventing her from going home for the weekend). The point here is not that mobile wallets are impractical for illegal transactions. The point isn’t even that it’s difficult to get around this problem; in fact it’s quite easy. The point is that in El Zonte a government, bank, or software company has the ability to revoke access to Bitcoin, find persons of interest, and tax businesses all from traceable information gathered through Bitcoin transactions, which they are not exactly against doing, and now with the way Bitcoin is being implemented they have yet another method for finding people whom they dislike for any reason which, lately, they have a lot of. And as if Foucaultian manipulation of technology for surveillance and oppression isn’t enough, the bigger picture is that Bitcoin is no longer an anonymous and decentralized currency in El Zonte even if the government or software companies choose not to conduct these actions; they’re still influencing a financial system that imposes rules and laws on individuals and they’re still requiring individuals’ trust to not misuse personal data that these institutions don’t need in the first place. No, user data is not collected nearly as invasively as it would be from purchases with credit cards linked to Facebook and Amazon accounts, but Galoy and Bitcoin Beach are still serving as information-gathering intermediaries that can stop and reverse transactions despite the fact that Bitcoin was created explicitly so that such actions wouldn’t happen. And no, I don’t think Bukele rolled out the Chivo infrastructure solely for the purpose of surveilling his citizens, but as his power continues to grow (see “At What Cost?”) Bitcoin is becoming another tool at his disposal to increase surveillance in order to keep and exercise his power, bolster his public image with the International and tech-friendly communities while he continues to violate human rights in his country, and undermine the culture and economic prospects of his citizens in the name of making El Salvador tourism-friendly enough to turn a profit. Bitcoin may not be the most powerful tool he has for these endeavors, but it is one he is using to transform his country from the terror-ridden gangland that once was El Salvador into a digitalized replica that he can control and profiteer more easily.
What unsettles me is that despite all of this the impression I get as an everyday consumer in El Zonte is that any transaction with Bitcoin is peer-to-peer and private; it’s not a full-on propaganda campaign, but it is certainly misleading when I hear locals, blow-ins, and high-ranking disciples of Bitcoin Beach touting these features. There are even signs in and around town advertising Bitcoin as the future of currency for these very reasons. The truth is that there are so many additional elements implemented by trusted parties that Bitcoin spenders are getting none of the benefits of Bitcoin’s ideological basis and in fact may be more exposed to the problems that it aimed to solve in the first place. Think of it this way: if El Salvador’s government owns thousands of bitcoins, controls the Chivo wallets and Chivo ATMs many people use to transact it, and can use Bitcoin spending as a way to track citizens they don’t approve of regardless of their usage of Bitcoin, then isn’t Bitcoin functioning as a CBDC? Furthermore: if the primary mode of Bitcoin transactions is custodial mobile wallets that allow for the rejection or reversal of transactions, if the circular Bitcoin economy in El Zonte is solvent only because of injections from Bitcoin Beach, and if Bitcoin’s functionality as a currency requires complex financial instruments implemented by Galoy to keep its value within a familiar USD mental model, then isn’t the El Zonte Bitcoin economy reliant on and influenced by trust-requiring institutions that are functioning as banks? If that’s the case then El Salvador, contrary to what Bukele and Bitcoin Beach may say or even believe, has subliminally nullified Bitcoin’s intended opposition to the global financial system. I don’t believe these institutions are at fault or ill-intentioned and even if they are I’m not interested in blaming or dismantling them (see philanthropic/positive examples above). I’m not even arguing that everything, including Bitcoin, is permanently bound to its origins and should never change. But something, somehow, is happening that has allowed El Salvador to burden Bitcoin with the exact problems it was created to solve while everyone involved is acting like they’re not destroying what they are so deeply committed to; the anti-establishment is unwittingly becoming the establishment.
I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; Bitcoin can mean different things to different people. But if Bitcoin is, to you, a cutting-edge tool for forging a path towards a financial life independent of the broader global financial system while still using the Internet, then using Bitcoin in the spoon-fed, institutionally-backed manner in which it currently exists in El Zonte will only set you back. That makes sense; if the mainstream financial system is adopting Bitcoin then why would it advertise Bitcoin as a way to beat the system itself? That’s obvious when it’s written here, but as I’ve shown it is far more illusory if you live in El Zonte, and again although I have no claim that this newly default usage of Bitcoin is wrong, it does concern me that a byproduct of this process seems to be that the idea of Bitcoin as as an anti-establishment form of currency is being taken for granted to the point that people still view it as such because that is what they’re told despite their everyday reality being the opposite. El Salvador, it seems, is still the “symphony of illusions” described by Leonel Gomez Vides in Caroline Forche’s “What You Have Heard Is True,” only now the symphony is playing a tune so harmonious it’s hard to discern the symphony even exists. But as I’ve shown it’s still possible to use anonymous and decentralized Bitcoin in El Zonte; what has changed is that there are now myriad ways to use Bitcoin in an un-anonymous and centralized way. The problem with Bitcoin used to be discovering and deciphering its esoteric methodology, but that at least kept it anonymous and decentralized throughout its niche userbase. The problem now is seeing past Bitcoin’s newfound ease and friendliness that, despite increasing its userbase, reputation, and (sometimes) price, also by nature makes it easy to ignore that it does not adhere to its intended function as anonymous and decentralized currency. I can’t fault anyone for taking advantage of this development, but if you have different ideas about Bitcoin then just remember that the default usage is not what you are looking for. If you want to use anonymous and decentralized Bitcoin then you need to purchase it with cash or mine it yourself, use a custodial wallet responsibly, and use a device for transactions that is in no way associated with a government-recognized name or ID number. If the way you currently use Bitcoin doesn’t satisfy all of these conditions then, like it or not, you’re helping the system more than you’re hurting it. But perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that it still requires conscious thought and effort to use Bitcoin to beat the system; perhaps it always will, and perhaps that’s the whole point.