FIRST BITCOIN PAYMENT ALL MONTH — the beach that banked on spending meets money too hard to spend

Jon Atack, a Bitcoin Core contributor since 2019 and an El Salvador resident since 2022, paid for lunch in El Zonte on August 24. “After I paid, they told me it was the first bitcoin payment there all month,” he reported — the vendor called bitcoin payments “dead.” The adoption showcase now runs almost entirely on card rails, and the coverage attributes it to holding: users expect the asset to buy more later. The Technologist read: the payments layer did not fail — the incentive did the math. Nobody spends the hardest money while expecting it to buy more next month. Gresham runs the register, and the medium-of-exchange story sleeps whenever store-of-value is winning.