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José Cabezas / Reuters
José Cabezas / Reuters
Michael Peterson became the so-called father of Bitcoin Beach, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Through an anonymous donation, Peterson helped El Zonte widely adopt the currency. Salvadoran lawmakers have since voted to adopt cryptocurrency as legal tender. See more stories on the Insider business page.
Michael Peterson, 47, fell in love with El Zonte, a beach on El Salvador’s Pacific coast, 17 years ago, on a surf trip.
The city grew because of him and he and his family began dividing their time between their homes in California and El Salvador, where they supported mission groups and small development projects through their Evangelical Christian Church.
This church put him in an unlikely scenario that turned El Zonte into Bitcoin Beach and made Peterson his father figure.
A June 16 Bloomberg Businessweek article, titled “Bitcoin Beach: What Happened When an El Salvador Surf Town Went Full Crypto,” documented how Peterson helped convert El Zonte payments into cryptocurrency. Today, almost every household in the city and four dozen local businesses use Bitcoin.
“It’s crazy how quickly Bitcoin has spread,” Peterson told Bloomberg reporter Ezra Fieser. Peterson did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment for the story.
The concept was born in 2019 when an anonymous Californian offered to donate his Bitcoin fortune to El Zonte to create a local cryptocurrency-based economy. Peterson was introduced to the donor, who remains unknown, through the church.
At first, Peterson thought it looked like a scam, Bloomberg said, but then the idea of transforming El Zonte made him rethink.
“It allows everyone from the poorest to the richest to participate on the same playing field,” he told Bloomberg.
Adopt “magic money on the Internet”
Having a long-standing relationship with the community already helped Peterson get locals to embrace the idea, he said in a CoinDesk podcast on June 11.
“When I said to them, ‘Hey, we’re going to start using this magic money on the internet, and we’re going [get] stores to accept it, we’re going to get people to start putting their wages into it, ”they just looked at me like“ OK, Mike, ”” he said on the podcast.
The experience really took off when El Salvador’s tourism industry struggled amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Peterson has given hundreds of local families around $ 35 in Bitcoin each month through an app created for small crypto transactions. El Zonte stores wanted to profit from the currency, so Peterson launched the Bitcoin Beach Wallet in September.
Now Bitcoin has become the norm.
Thanks in part to the El Zonte experience, El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as a currency. He then asked the World Bank to help him implement cryptocurrency as legal tender, but was quickly rejected.
Due to the “insane amount of interest” since the currency’s legal adoption, Peterson plans to help other cities across the country emulate the El Zonte experience.
“For many of these people, it is the first time that they hope to be able to build a future in El Salvador, that they will not have to follow their parents’ path to sneak into the United States illegally and work in dead end job. They can build a bitcoin based business, “Peterson said on the CoinDesk podcast.” It really opens up the world to them. “
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