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been there many times.
first time 2003 on a bus from costa rica in san salvador. i went there because costa rica became expensive and san salvador was dollarized which was a huge advantage. i went to el salvador to check it out. i went also to panama several times.
everyone warned me about crime. i walked around during the day without any valuables and i could not perceive anything dangerous. there was definitely something going but mainly at night. no one wanted to talk about it openly. i did not visit the beaches. my friends in costa rica told me about it. all black and not attractive except for hard core surfers which i am not.
i revisited several times over the next 15 years. i have friends in costa rica, nicaragua, panama and el salvador. for my friends in el salvador life was normal behind high walls, barb wire and alarm systems. the rich people all had guards.
it is not different in guatemala ciudad. my friends have to drive the girls to school, pick them up and they also live in guarded a cul de sac behind high walls...
when i visited this year i could see a change. for the first time i saw many other gringos. for almost 20 years i felt that i was the only one going to el salvador. you can also hear that from everyone that the security situation has massively approved. there is still crime going on but nothing compared to before.
with regards to btc i was disappointed that almost no small companies accept it. only large companies and the government does. it is different on bitcoin beach which i visited for one day. estimated 60-70% accept btc or lightning for payments.
being used to the beaches in mexico and even in costa rica i was disappointed about the beach. black stones, some black sand and high waves. nothing i would write home about.
in summary el salvador is a quite safe and stable country now. compared to mexico or even costa rica it is still third world with limited shopping and a humid and hot tropical climate in san salvador and also at the beaches. it is definitely worth visiting. all central american countries are worth visiting. nothing comes close to mexico
ZK-Rollups cannot be implemented in without a hardfork since Miners would have to verify a zero-knowledge proof and miners do not do this in Bitcoin. Bitcoin does have Hash-preimage verification since the very beginning - one could imagine a distributed hash & hash-preimage generation but there is no such algorithm to my knowledge. If there was it would require new and complicated cryptography or a trusted dealer - which both isn't in the spirit of Bitcoin.
Optimistic Rollups are not possible on Bitcoin since they require to undo a transaction in case any party challenges the result. They would also require miners to verify the rollup when someone challenges the result which miners do not do in Bitcoin.
I don't think any of this is a good idea. Rollups always end up with so much chaos that it isn't in the spirit of Bitcoin. And if a construction requires a trusted dealers or a trusted group of participants - why bother with it in the first place - just do it in a SQL database and write the result on the Blockchain.
3 of my friends and I have a weekly morning walk thing going on, where we would go for a approx 1hr walk early Saturday morning and go for breakfast after, rain or shine or snow or storm. So I see these 3 guys once a week.
Other than that, we have a core friend group of 8 people and we go for birthday dinners for each person's birthday. It's a tradition we started and kept doing since high school. So we get to see everyone at least 8 times a year.
I was always quite aware that my own biases leaned towards doomerism, especially hanging out in so many Bitcoin and contrarian spaces. So I would consciously correct for that bias whenever those feelings of impending doom became overwhelming.
You're right that people are resilient. Finance is finance, but what truly matters is the productivity of the people. A financial collapse can gum up the gears for a while, but people will always find a way forward.
Anything Taproot related is super cool, great work! Hopefully some day we'll see people switch to more efficient Taproot outputs for script/multisig addresses.
Speaking of which, and this is maybe a more appropriate question for Bitcoin Stack Exchange, but do I need MuSig2/MuSig/MuSig-DN if I'm all of the parties in a multiparty address? I know simply adding schnorr keys together is insecure (rogue key attacks), but imagine I want to setup a multisig address where my keys are in different locations. Could I avoid using MuSig in this case (thus skipping the extra rounds of communication), since I trust myself?