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XJuly 9, 2026

El Salvador is the Bitcoin country that prints no dollar of its own. It runs on the US dollar, and in 2025 it rolled back its Bitcoin law on the IMF's terms. Its money is stable for one reason. None of it is El Salvador's to steer. The country dropped its own currency, the colon, in 2001. The US dollar became legal tender, and the colon left everyday circulation within a few years. Since then El Salvador has had no monetary policy of its own. It cannot set a policy rate, cannot devalue, cannot print, has no money-printing lender of last resort. Those levers sit at the US Federal Reserve, where it has no vote. Then the Bitcoin chapter. September 2021, it became the first country on earth to make Bitcoin legal tender, mandatory for merchants. It never took, a national survey put Bitcoin use near 8 percent of the population in 2024. In December 2024 it reached a staff-level deal with the IMF for a 1.4 billion dollar program, on conditions, and in January 2025 Congress voted 55 to 2 to reform the Bitcoin law, ending mandatory acceptance and blocking tax payments in Bitcoin, with the IMF program separately requiring the state Chivo wallet to be wound down. Now its use is voluntary and confined. So the state sold as monetary rebel is one of the least monetarily sovereign there is. It reads as highly currency-stable only because it borrowed the dollar's stability wholesale. That is the trade almost nobody prices when picking a base. Dollarization kills the risk of a local devaluation, because there is no local currency left to devalue. Panama has run this way since 1904 with no central bank at all, Ecuador since 2000. But borrowed stability is stability you do not control. No rate cut in a downturn, no shock absorber, full exposure to a Fed that answers to Washington, not to you. The currency you earn in and hold your balances in never shows up on a tax-and-passport comparison. A stable borrowed one shields you. A sovereign but fragile one taxes you every year through depreciation you never voted for. Stable because it is not yours, or sovereign but able to bleed. For the place you actually base, which risk would you rather carry? Tell me where I am wrong. Data from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer I build at Lucky Nomads.

EcuadorEl SalvadorPanamaUnited States