El Zonte used to be the place you passed through on your way to a wave. Today it’s where people fly in to use the best money humanity has ever known.
That shift has a lot to do with Roman Martínez, co-founder of Bitcoin Beach, a community project that started with beach clean-ups and English classes and ended up inspiring a nation to make bitcoin legal tender.
In a conversation with Bitcoin News, Roman kept circling back to the same simple truth: give people hope for a better future and they’ll build one. Bitcoin just happened to be the tool that gave Salvadorians that hope.
From Surf Lessons To Sats
Long before the headlines, Roman and co-founder Mike Peterson were running small, unflashy programs: English lessons, basic computer skills, and surfing.
“Surfing is also like a lifestyle… there is a lot of life philosophy in the surfing culture,” Roman said. The programs delivered results: kids learned English, secured better jobs, and launched small businesses. Progress came one class at a time.
Then 2019 happened.
An anonymous American donor gave bitcoin to support the work, with one rule. As Roman put it, “the only requirement… was that we could not convert it.” No cashing out to dollars. Instead, they had to “teach the community how to use Bitcoin.”
So they did. Kids earned sats for community work and classes, and a local shop took bitcoin for basics. The learning curve was brief; the impact wasn’t.
When 2020 hit and tourism fell off a cliff, they moved fast. “We on-boarded all the families… more or less 500 families into Bitcoin,” Roman said. Wallets went on phones. Sats flowed for basics like internet, food, and school. What began as a reward system became a safety net and a market.
That’s when a quiet insight landed: people who once said they couldn’t save were suddenly saving. “The problem was not that the salary was too low,” Roman explained.
Without bank access, families had been stuck in a spend-it-all cycle. With Bitcoin, they finally had a place to hold value over time that didn’t lose purchasing power the longer you held it.
“The same family, now having a place where they can actually store value… families started saving money.”
No Cash? No Problem!
One of Roman’s favorite examples of Bitcoin empowering both locals and tourists involves a coconut vendor.
Before Bitcoin, a tourist with only a credit card couldn’t buy from him. No bank account, no point-of-sale system, no sale. After Bitcoin, the same tourist asks, “Can I pay in bitcoin?” The answer: yes.
Using Bitcoin as money isn’t theory anymore. It’s a sale the vendor couldn’t make before because they couldn’t accept credit cards. That’s the point, Roman argues.
For many locals, Bitcoin isn’t a portfolio holding. It’s the equivalent of banking access. “It’s equal opportunity,” he said. “Participating in what’s happening in the growth of the community.”
For businesses already accepting cards, Bitcoin offers another advantage. Every credit card payment carries fees that eat into their revenue. The math is simple. Eliminating those fees means keeping more of what you earn.
“You Don’t Change Bitcoin. Bitcoin Changes You”
Roman credits Bitcoin with something bigger than payments: financial education. “Before Bitcoin, most people really didn’t know about money,” he said. Learning how money works changes how people act, what they buy, how they plan, even how they take care of their health. Hope stretches time.
He’s seen vendors who started taking tiny Lightning payments when bitcoin was around $5,000, later return with “10–15k worth of Bitcoin in their savings.” Not everyone saved, he’s quick to add. Some did. And those families became examples for others.
If you want the one-liner he lives by, it’s the Max Keiser mantra Roman quoted with a smile: “You don’t change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you.”
From One Beach To Many
In 2021, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender. The world took notice. Investors came. Builders came. Curious skeptics came and made their first Lightning purchase in El Zonte. And Roman’s phone blew up.
“There is not a secret,” he tells people who ask how to copy the model. “There is just hard work and believing in what you’re doing.”
To help other communities skip the guesswork, the team wrote a simple Bitcoin Beach “white paper.” It’s not code, but a 10-page guide anyone can apply “to any reality, any community, any country.”
They also launched a fellowship that brings local leaders to El Salvador to see Bitcoin in daily life, plus a grants program. Roman says they’re now working with around 70 bitcoin circular economies worldwide, many in Africa.
The gatherings are growing too: an International Bitcoin Circular Economy Summit in El Salvador earlier this year; a regional summit in Mauritius alongside the Africa Bitcoin Conference; and another international summit back in El Salvador this January.
The goal is simple: shorten the path from “curious” to “running.”
Why Bitcoiners Should Spend And Replace
Roman has a direct message for Bitcoiners , especially those flying in to visit: use it.
He knows the pushback: “Never spend your bitcoin.” He’s heard it a thousand times. But to him, that misses the mission.
“Bitcoin is everything. It’s an asset. It’s a store of value. It’s money. It’s a monetary network,” he said. If we don’t use the money side, he worries we’ll lose the freedom it offers.
His practical nudge: pick a Bitcoin circular economy for your next trip. “If you’re already coming to El Salvador, you will spend money,” he said. “Why don’t you convert that money to bitcoin and spend it as bitcoin?”
Or use the classic spend-and-replace approach: pay in sats, then top up your stack. Businesses get signal and volume. You keep your long-term plan.
There’s another shift Roman sees when people visit: values get personal. You might not want to hand Starbucks your sats. But paying a street vendor in a bitcoin economy? That feels different. “For that person in the street… it’s access to the opportunity that they never had before.”
Gratitude
If Roman could ask Satoshi Nakamoto one question, what would it be? He laughed.
“I would not ask a question. I would just say thank you.”
That fits the man. He isn’t selling a grand theory. He’s pointing at a beach where kids earn sats for cleaning up their town, where a mom can sell more coconuts, and a dad who is finally saving something for his family.
He’s pointing at a country that took a bet, and a network of towns copying the recipe without waiting for permission. As Roman notes:
“Bitcoin is a collective dream. Some people build circular economies. Some educate. Some write. Some host. And some spend. We all do our part.”
El Zonte showed what happens when those parts click. The waves are still good. The money is, too.
