El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender

It's interesting and nice to see how progressive and creative El Salvador has been. Some failures are perfectly understandable when one is willing to try new things. Their approach to crime is another thing that comes to mind that was lambasted and ridiculed by the "international community" and "experts". Yet in the space of a single decade they went from murder capital of the world to safer than New Zealand (in terms of homicide rate), which is just staggering.

I love that they are innovating and experimenting and trying their own things, and don't let the stuffy pompous status quo hold them back.

They just offered to accept any criminal of any nationality (including American citizens) from the USA for a fee. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/politics/el-salvador-p... It's creative but hard to see as progressive, importing the idea of a for profit prison system from the USA.

Yes I am certain that not everything El Salvador does is progressive, even before reading this link.

Some people called Obama progressive and he definitely helped destroy Libya and Syria, ordered the extrajudicial execution of a US citizen under presidential immunity, droned poor brown people living on the other side of the planet, let Citi group pick his cabinet, etc. Nevertheless, the progressive things that Obama did do were still progressive.

Let's be 100% clear on this

Assad and Ghadaffi destroyed Syria and Lybia respectively being asshole dictators that caused revolutions and that attempted to stay in power by claiming over mountains of dead Syrians and Lybians. The west didn't interfere much in Syria so Assad was able to stay in power a while longer and kill many more of his own citizens. The west messed up the post revolution period but letting Gaddafi do what he wanted would have lead to a worse situation