This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi traveled to “Bitcoin Beach,” a small coastal town in El Salvador called El Zonte that has created a bitcoin economy.
American Mike Peterson, a former financial planner who moved to El Salvador, is the man behind the initiative.
That someone was Chris Hunter, a tech entrepreneur who saw an opportunity to deliver a faster and cheaper way to transact with bitcoin using the new Lightning Network.
After being rejected by every venture capitalist his company approached, Hunter said he read an article about Peterson in Forbes.
Hunter and his Galoy team knew the wallet had to be an easy-to-use experience that, at its most basic level, helped locals save and spend their money through bitcoin.
That means a person who bought a coffee with bitcoin had to wait half an hour for their funds to move into the merchant’s account.
Instead, Hunter’s new wallet app took advantage of the Lightning Network layered on top of bitcoin’s blockchain, a technology that expedites the transaction process.
That is when President Nayib Bukele put a law into effect requiring Salvadoran businesses to accept bitcoin, making El Salvador the first country in the world to make cryptocurrency legal tender.
Even though users pay with bitcoin, the wallet shows the equivalent value of the transaction in any currency, so they know exactly how much they are spending.
It may all feel very high-tech for a beach town with no paved roads.