El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law: Understanding alternatives to government intervention By Cointelegraph

Last year, El Salvador dominated headlines as the first country to adopt as legal tender. The move is controversial both in and outside of the country, heralded for its potential to bring financial services to large portions of El Salvador’s unbanked population and criticized for its top-down implementation. This has created a sense of uncertainty and made some Salvadorans feel they lacked a choice, despite locations like El Zonte already accepting Bitcoin (BTC) as payment through organic developments that predate the law.

These arguments, while for and against the law, don’t actually exist in contradiction to one another. While the decision may have been made by the government, it is bringing financial services to new portions of the population. Not all governments, however, are interested in declaring Bitcoin a legal tender, leaving us to consider a new question: How can we encourage crypto adoption in emerging markets like El Salvador without involving governments?