I'm here right now and I can confirm what you say

However, I don't think that ~20% BTC adoption should be viewed as a failure, quite the opposite.

Maybe not everywhere accepts it, and true, waiters will actually try and say they don't accept it when they do, but it IS possible to live just on Bitcoin in El Salvador. I'm doing it right now.

https://btcmap.org -> this is pretty up to date

Bitcoin is legal tender in El Salvador and that's a big deal, perhaps adoption is slower than we would have liked, but it is definitely happening...

It's the same situation in Boracay, the marketing is definitely not the reality. It's down to people like us though, to change that.

Why aren't there any chip manufacturers in this apocalypse? Somehow, humanity's collective knowledge of how to make computers/adding machines is lost but someone manages to recover the entire 600GB Blockchain even tho there are no books/printed words? I think there are just as many (if not more) offline/faraday backups of Wikipedia than the Blockchain.

Let me present a more likely senario:

Disaster happens and the Blockchain stops adding blocks because every computer on earth has been permanently disabled.

Many people will have cold storage Bitcoin seeds memorized and/or recorded in ways that survive the disaster.

Without new blocks, the coins on these keys cannot be spent. You can't even give someone else your seed in a trade without trust because you also know the seed and could doublespent them once the Blockchain resumes.

Consensus only cares about the Blockchain with the heaviest proof of work. So anyone who decides to try and mine blocks by hand, and distribute the newly found block without internet is wasting their time because all the work they do could easily be undone by primitive adding machines and a network of telegram wires or radio stations.

Even if one community decided this was the best strategy for them, they would struggle to enforce the consensus rules without trust since it's no longer feasible for everyone to validate the transactions themselves without checking all the work themselves by hand. People under this limit, would just trust whoever is disseminating these new "blocks" to people.

It's like trusting the phone companies to make sure there are no typos in the quarterly phone books sent to every household pre-internet. Very centralized. People would have to submit their txns directly to the block factory and hope they get included.

Even if you did find an error in a block, what are you going to do about it? Try to convince everyone in town to discard the last block and force the block production factory to issue a recall and replace it with a valid one? It just wouldn't scale at all without becoming completely trust based.

It soon becomes obvious that Bitcoin was designed for networked computers and humans are really bad at computing/networking. Especially, when most people are just trying to survive and could care less about keeping their ledgers updated and verifying the transactions of their neighbors too!

Instead of doing math by hand or with a slide rule, then shipping tonnes of paper with hashes and hex encoded text to every community on the planet, we would all be better off working towards getting BTC back to running as close as possible to how it was before the disaster.

In the meantime, communities will just use ancient money technologies that run better on the available infrastructure.

At worst case, 2016 new blocks would need to be mined at the pre-disaster difficulty before the next adjustment. The difficulty can only go down 75% at once, so it could take a few adjustments before we're back to 10min block times. The time between those first few adjustments could be decades.

Assuming we have to rebuild global communication infrastructure, there could emerge multiple BTC forks or chain splits as new communities develop the technology to "resume" the Blockchain independently using what they believe is the current chain tip.

These forks could persist forever as national treasuries or lose value to alternative blockchains with greater proof of work as they are discovered and the world reunites.

There would also be a huge opportunity for shenanigans since compute isn't evenly distributed anymore. The earliest miners would be in very powerful positions to reorg the chain that could be very politically impactful since blocks could take years to mine in the beginning.

For those that are interested…

The downsides that exist are probably that there isn’t really much of a Bitcoin economy here yet in Uruguay. They haven’t needed it. The next biggest one is that bureaucracy still exists.

Definitely witnessed an uptick in the amount of libertarian minded people here, moving from abroad, which is a huge plus. People I’ve enjoyed connecting with.

The cashless card culture has expanded and is commonplace. I’m becoming one of the minority in local markets still using cash. It’s still used but much less than other Latin economies, at least in major cities like Montevideo and Punta del Este. They have hooked people in with 15-20% discounts in cafes and restaurants if you have a certain branded card. Now people use cards daily.

Supermarkets are pretty much run by a French monopoly here. There’s lots of brands but all with the same/similar owners, which is why veggies and consumables are 2x-3x more expensive than neighbouring countries. I try to avoid lining their pockets by opting for the local markets or “ferias” and building relationships there.

On the plus side, you can exchange significant amounts of dollars for pesos or vice versa without any sort of identification whatsoever. These are large registered businesses. In the U.K., even exchanging $100 felt like an inquisition and a favour I was being granted.

You need to present ID to get a SIM card like most countries, but it’s so refreshing to walk in & pay a competitive FX rate without being asked your name. To not get asked about what you plan to do with your depreciating dollars, or your travel plans etc. Reason being I expect, many big purchases like houses and cars are denominated in dollars, just like neighbouring Argentina. Those assets by the way are also fairly pricey for the region near the coastline cities given the stability on offer.

Renting and purchasing property comes with quite a lot of additional costs. With very little work or effort on the agency side. I gather it’s often best to find a good agent to trust with this process, or even a friend who does it on the side. Or just be prepared to eat that cost.

Linked to the agency world, and being both a positive and negative, sometimes when paying for a service you’ll find you as the buyer need to chase to get things done. The culture is very different here, to the detriment of speediness. It’s almost like businesses are not motivated by money and believe you are lucky to being served at all, even when paying hefty fees. I guess that’s the “tranqui” way.

It’s just a general observation and not always the case, but also potentially provides good opportunities for those people that are responsive and are willing to setup a business here. You will soon find yourself as the exception if you keep your promises and can deliver on time.

Kudos for this interesting experiment, and the interesting theory behind it.

A thing I think about a lot wrt online communities is how to encourage "good-ness" where "good" is a tricky term to define. Maybe it's easier to say what it's not: what gets produced by the classic advertising model, where the site is hell-bent on increasing time-on-site, driving "engagement" (for a certain type of engagement), click-throughs, etc.

I think we all have a gut feel for how shitty and poisonous this is. What it feels like. So what are other ways a site can feel, what are other objective functions one could aspire to that affirm something valuable, that add something good to the world? How might one design for that, what interactions might encourage it?

There's some aspects of your "pseudo-family" idea in there, I think.