Bitcoiners - Live From Bitcoin Beach

Is Bitcoin still legal tender in El Salvador? Plenty of people say it isn't, so Mike put the question to a Salvadoran lawyer who has followed every change to the law.

You've seen the IMF headlines and decided the experiment ended. What you can't see from outside is how the El Salvador economy looks to someone who was born here, practiced law through the worst years, and now builds his firm on Bitcoin.

Mike sat down with Jose Rodriguez, founder of Nodeman, a Bitcoin-centric legal service provider in San Salvador. Jose became a lawyer in 2008, lost money on a taxi app before Uber arrived, got fired in 2016, went surfing at Sunzal to celebrate, and never went back to a job.

Jose has compared more than 15 jurisdictions, and he'll tell you what still makes El Salvador legal tender law different from every one of them, even after the changes cut articles out of it. He and Mike don't fully agree on what El Salvador IMF pressure should have changed about the government's options, and that disagreement is the best part of the conversation.

Then there's El Salvador tax. In 2021 you could pay Ministerio de Hacienda in Bitcoin through Chivo Wallet. Today there's no direct option, and Mike pushes Jose on why the government hasn't set up a third party to convert it the way it already accepts cards. Jose's answer comes down to who carries the risk, and it isn't the answer Mike wanted.

For anyone weighing El Salvador business opportunities, Jose is blunt about what an El Salvador business still runs into: company formation, corporate structure, banking. Nodeman grew from one desk to a 10-person team and has kept adding people since, and he turns clients away when they don't fit.

Living in El Salvador through 2012 and the years since gives Jose a longer memory than most people arguing about this country online. He calls this a renaissance, and he says it while admitting the government still runs a fiat treasury with a Bitcoin treasury off to the side.

A Salvadoran lawyer who reads every Bitcoin book he can find and gives his baby son a self-custody wallet is exactly who this country needed in the room!
If you're deciding whether El Salvador is still a place to build on Bitcoin, listen to this one before you make the call. Part two comes next week.

—Bitcoin Beach Team

Learn more about Jose Rodriguez:
X: https://x.com/nodemanbtc
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nodeman
Website: https://nodeman.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nodemanbtc/
Email: j@nodeman.co

Support and follow Bitcoin Beach:
X: https://www.twitter.com/BitcoinBeach
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bitcoinbeach_sv
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livefrombitcoinbeach
Web: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com

STAY AT BITCOIN BEACH:
https://www.stayatbitcoinbeach.com/punta-mango-villas

Browse through this quick guide to learn more about the episode:
00:00 Intro
00:59 Who is Jose Rodriguez, the Bitcoin lawyer in El Salvador?
05:26 What was it like starting a tech business in El Salvador before the Bitcoin Law?
10:09 Are electronic signatures and digital contracts legal in El Salvador?
13:09 How did the pandemic change the legal industry in El Salvador?
16:05 What happened in El Salvador when Bitcoin became legal tender in 2021?
19:01 How do you go from shitcoiner to Bitcoin maxi?
23:43 What is Nodeman, the Bitcoin law firm in El Salvador?
31:29 Is Bitcoin still legal tender in El Salvador after the IMF?
35:04 Can you pay taxes in Bitcoin in El Salvador?
Live From Bitcoin Beach

Would you put your kids in public schools in El Salvador, 40 to a class and no English spoken, to give them a future you couldn't see in Canada? Charity Hagenaars did. Her family of five lives on $3,000 to $3,500 a month, and if you've searched cost of living in El Salvador you've probably seen her videos on living in El Salvador. What you can't see from a video is whether rent in El Salvador comes with a stove, or whether a public school takes report cards printed in Ontario.

I sat down with Charity, a retired Canadian government worker, former foster parent, and YouTuber who moved her family from Ontario to Lourdes in August 2024. Her $850 house has four bedrooms and sits in a complex with pools and soccer fields, where six families of expats living in El Salvador have built a small community. Getting there meant Marketplace listings that were photos of posters on telephone poles, and leases where leaving early costs the full year.

Car shopping took a friend, a mechanic, and seven phone numbers, because the Chivo ATM caps withdrawals at $1,000 a day per number and she needed $7,000 in cash for a car she ended up passing on. Opening a bank account took a residency card and an hour in the waiting room, and then Banco Agrícola made her wait three months before YouTube could wire her a dollar. Bitcoin and Wise carried the family's money down instead. She'll also tell you what happened at Dollar City when the cashier skipped Lightning.

The school story is the honest one. Her daughter got the same classmates two years running, was bullied, and stopped learning, so she's in a homeschool hub now. Her older son is out too, halfway through grade 11. Charity funded the school's parking lot and paint through her channel anyway. Then there's the spare bedroom. Two months ago Maria, the grandmother of two boys from Charity's Saturday English class, lost her home, and Charity offered the room. The boys swim every day.

Her WhatsApp group grew to almost 200 members, about 30% already here, four more arriving this week. Some came to retire in El Salvador on a pension, and young families came because they couldn't see a future where they were. If you want an expat El Salvador group that screens out the salesmen, she runs one. Charity describes what it costs a foreigner to live here so nobody arrives with the wrong picture, then chose to stay and put eight people under one roof. That's what belief in this country looks like! If you're weighing moving to El Salvador with kids or a pension, listen to this one.

—Bitcoin Beach Team

Learn more about Charity Hagenaars:
X: https://x.com/HagenaarsFamily
WhatsApp: 503-7291-1480
Website: https://hagenaars.com/
Email Address: YouTube@Hagenaars.com
YouTube Channel(Main): https://www.youtube.com/@HagenaarsFamily
YouTube Channel(2nd): https://www.youtube.com/MakingItInElSalvador

Support and follow Bitcoin Beach:
X: https://www.twitter.com/BitcoinBeach
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bitcoinbeach_sv
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livefrombitcoinbeach
Web: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com

STAY AT BITCOIN BEACH:
https://www.stayatbitcoinbeach.com/punta-mango-villas

Browse through this quick guide to learn more about the episode:
00:00 Intro
02:53 Why are Bitcoiners moving to El Salvador from Canada?
07:23 Is Canada safe for Bitcoiners after frozen bank accounts and the trucker convoy?
09:10 How to rent a house in El Salvador as a foreigner
12:47 Where do expats live in El Salvador: Lourdes, the beach, or San Salvador?
15:47 How to buy a used car in El Salvador and what to check first
25:40 How do expats move money into El Salvador with Bitcoin, Chivo ATM, Wise, and banks?
35:46 How much does it cost to live in El Salvador for a family of five?
42:15 What is life like for an expat family in El Salvador?
48:15 Are public schools in El Salvador good for expat kids, or is homeschooling better? 
Live From Bitcoin Beach

How long does Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador have to work before the press admits it worked? Kevin Rivera has been covering this country since the Bitcoin Law passed, and he'll tell you the people writing the obituaries are measuring adoption with a broken clock. He grew up in Chiltiupán, the municipality El Zonte sits under, about 15 to 20 minutes up the road from Bitcoin Beach. He was 20. He heard people down at the beach were taking some kind of digital payment, Googled it, hit the words decentralized technology, and bounced off it completely.

He landed at Diario El Salvador covering the economy with zero background in economics, right as the country was about to pass the Bitcoin Law, so he picked up The Bitcoin Standard and started hunting interviews. Max Keiser is the one who took him down the rabbit hole. Kevin saw a tweet saying Max was in the country, cold messaged him, showed up, and got him explaining how Bitcoin works and the role it plays in the financial ecosystem, coming at it from a traditional finance background.

Then came Cubo Plus, and this is the part most Bitcoiners outside El Salvador still sleep on. The economics track starts with money itself, how we ended up trading with gold, and how the financial system really works, and only then moves into cypherpunk philosophy and cryptography. Pierre Rochard explains the mining side and Giacomo Zucco is the main teacher, through Plan B Network, which links Cubo Plus El Salvador to students in Lugano and around the world. Kevin says around 1,000 students have come through the program. What they walk out with is the switch from asking how do I survive to asking what can I build.

That switch is why he launched TH3 Labs the day we recorded. They build platforms for digital asset service providers, handle asset tokenization on Liquid and Taproot Assets for the new capital markets forming on Bitcoin, and Kevin gets into how L402 Lightning opens the network to AI agents so agentic payments can happen between them without payment server errors breaking the process. His read is that El Salvador's economy will grow through technology and innovation, especially once the small businesses that make up 90 percent of the businesses here get tools to export.

Kevin also wants to bring something back to Chiltiupan, which still has poverty in some areas while the rest of the country runs ahead. That part stuck with me. He's trying to be the guy kids in his hometown can point at. If this one hits, subscribe and send it to the friend who still calls Bitcoin a Ponzi at family dinners. Then drop a comment telling us what you'd build if you had legal clarity, two solid devs, and a government that wanted you to ship. Kevin's already building, so the clock's running.

—Bitcoin Beach Team

Learn more about Kevin Rivera:
X: https://x.com/kealrive22
X: https://x.com/th3labssv
Web: https://www.th3labs.com/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kevinrivera_token

Support and follow Bitcoin Beach:
X: https://www.twitter.com/BitcoinBeach
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bitcoinbeach_sv
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livefrombitcoinbeach
Web: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com

STAY AT BITCOIN BEACH:
https://www.stayatbitcoinbeach.com/punta-mango-villas

Browse through this quick guide to learn more about the episode:
00:00 Intro
02:58 What did locals think when Bitcoin Beach started in El Zonte?
07:55 How to learn Bitcoin from zero without a finance background?
10:59 What did Max Keiser teach a Salvadoran journalist about Bitcoin?
15:14 What is Cubo Plus and what do you learn in the program?
21:47 What is the Plan B Network and what do they teach in Lugano?
25:58 How Bitcoin changed the builder mindset in El Salvador
29:11 How to start an AI and Bitcoin company in El Salvador?
34:58 What is L402 and how do AI agents pay each other on Lightning?
42:58 Is Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador actually working? 
Live From Bitcoin Beach

Would you sell your house, go all in on Bitcoin, and move to El Salvador without ever setting foot in the country? Jon Byrne did exactly that. I sat down with the BitTasker founder to hear how a kid from Ireland grew up around the violence of the Troubles era, then apartheid-era Johannesburg, then the Celtic Tiger collapse, and finally took one last look at the fiat world and decided sound money was worth betting everything on.

Before selling it all, Jon had to orange pill his partner Roxanne. Every morning they'd sit down for "Coffee with Jon" and talk Bitcoin for an hour or two until the penny dropped. Then one day she told him to sell the house, buy Bitcoin, and go to El Salvador. His advice for couples on the stacking journey comes down to patience, because nobody should get dragged into a low time preference life they haven't chosen for themselves.

Then we dig into BitTasker, a KYC-free tasking app built on the Nostr protocol that helps Salvadorans earn Bitcoin instead of just buying it. No middleman ever touches the funds, and earned trust travels with you, because your reputation lives on your keys instead of some company's server.

Here's the part that earned my respect: the whole idea started when Jon met a guy in Australia who went from cleaning up dog poop on Airtasker to running a construction company. Instead of rushing to build, Jon spent a full year grinding out odd jobs on that same platform, taking the worst tasks to learn the gig economy from the inside. That's when he knew the same ladder could work even better on a Bitcoin standard, where proof of work applies to people too.

If you're thinking about your own move to El Salvador, we cover the boots-on-the-ground details too, from renewing residency barefoot at the beachside immigration office in Punta Roca to the workshops BitTasker runs at the El Zonte community center right here in Bitcoin Beach. Jon's also plugging into the circular economy movement in Costa Rica, Brazil, Ireland, and beyond. If this one has you ready to sell the house and buy Bitcoin, maybe have a few coffees with your spouse first. Then subscribe, share it with a friend who's still stuck in fiat, and drop a comment: would you move to a country you'd never visited?

—Bitcoin Beach Team

Learn more about BitTasker:
Website: https://bittasker.com
X: https://x.com/bittaskerdotcom
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bittasker
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bittasker
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BitTaskerdotcom
Nostr (Primal): https://primal.net/bittasker
Youtube:  @BitTasker

Support and follow Bitcoin Beach:
X: https://www.twitter.com/BitcoinBeach
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bitcoinbeach_sv
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livefrombitcoinbeach
Web: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com

STAY AT BITCOIN BEACH:
https://www.stayatbitcoinbeach.com/punta-mango-villas

Browse through this quick guide to learn more about the episode:
00:00 Intro
01:24 How to orange pill your wife before selling everything for Bitcoin
01:56 Why people are leaving broken fiat economies for El Salvador
06:47 Why Bitcoiners left Australia after the COVID lockdowns
09:11 How to stop trading shitcoins and go all in on Bitcoin
13:37 Is it safe to move to El Salvador without visiting first?
17:23 What is BitTasker and how do you earn Bitcoin in El Salvador?
24:26 How BitTasker onboarded 1,000 Salvadorans to earn Bitcoin in 8 months
31:45 How to get residency in El Salvador as a Bitcoiner
43:45 How does non-custodial Bitcoin escrow work on Lightning?
Live From Bitcoin Beach

Would you trust two brothers with zero aviation experience to run El Salvador's helicopter tours, plane charters, and Bitcoin travel experiences? Thousands of Bitcoiners already have. Today on Live From Bitcoin Beach, I sit down with Mauricio and Diego Villeda, founders of Bitcoin Life, the Bitcoin tourism and concierge service company that convinced El Salvador's Minister of Defense to lend them Air Force helicopters. I wanted the full story of how two guys orange-pilled by a $5K Bitcoin client built the most Bitcoin-native travel operation on the planet, and they didn't hold back.

It all started with a free Notion page built to help Bitcoiners travel El Salvador, covering transportation, places to stay, and spots that accept Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. Three days after launch, Stacy Herbert retweeted it, and strangers at the Adopting Bitcoin conference were showing the brothers their own guide without knowing who made it. That one retweet turned a side project into a company, and it proved something maxis have said for years, that proof of work beats marketing budgets.

These days the brothers run helicopter tours to places most tourists never see, including Lake Ilopango, a lake that had zero tourism when gangs controlled the area. They fly clients beyond El Zonte, land in soccer fields, and pay the local caretakers in sats to clear the space. For Bitcoiners flying in from abroad, they also run VIP airport pickups that take you from immigration straight to a helicopter, plane charters connecting El Salvador with Próspera in Honduras for around $3,000 per group, and real estate guidance for investors front-running the nation-state adoption wave. Every booking, vendor, and ticket runs on Bitcoin, feeding the Bitcoin circular economy that fiat skeptics love to claim doesn't exist.

Their biggest project is still ahead, a Bitcoin Street in the Centro Histórico of San Salvador where every business accepts Bitcoin, complete with an academy, an art gallery, and rooftop coffee shops. The brothers are raising from investors before Bitcoin Histórico this November, and I love their case for it. A district that was too dangerous to visit a few years ago deserves a permanent Bitcoin landmark, and low time preference built this country's turnaround.

If you've ever wanted to see El Salvador from a military helicopter while paying in sats, these are your guys. Subscribe for more stories from the ground, share this with your favorite nocoiner, and drop a comment telling me which tour you'd book first.

—Bitcoin Beach Team

Learn more about The Bitcoin Life:
X: https://x.com/thebitcoinlife_
X (Diego Villeda): https://x.com/DiegoVilledaa   
X (Mauricio Villeda): https://x.com/itsMauriVilleda
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebitcoinlife_
Website: https://www.bitcoinlife.sv/
WhatsApp: +503-6865-6540

Support and follow Bitcoin Beach:
X: https://www.twitter.com/BitcoinBeach
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bitcoinbeach_sv
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livefrombitcoinbeach
Web: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com

STAY AT BITCOIN BEACH:
https://www.stayatbitcoinbeach.com/punta-mango-villas

Browse through this quick guide to learn more about the episode:
00:00 Intro
01:36 How to get started with Bitcoin as an entrepreneur in El Salvador?
04:36 What was the first Bitcoin meetup in San Salvador like?
07:48 How to build a Bitcoin travel guide that goes viral?
11:42 How to book a helicopter tour in El Salvador with Bitcoin?
14:20 Is Lake Ilopango safe to visit now?
19:27 How does VIP airport pickup work in El Salvador?
21:31 How much does a private flight from El Salvador to Próspera cost?
23:24 What is Bitcoin Street in San Salvador?
29:51 Where can you spend Bitcoin in El Salvador? 
Live From Bitcoin Beach