Bitcoin Country's Jethro Toro on Why El Salvador Is Winning Every Front of Adoption
Simply Bitcoin welcomed Jethro Toro onto the show, joining from Strategy's headquarters in the middle of a reporting trip covering El Salvador's Bitcoin economy. Toro hosts the Bitcoin Country podcast, exploring life on the ground in El Salvador, the original Bitcoin Country, and digging into how Bitcoin adoption, economic freedom, and safety improvements are reshaping the country.
HOW HE GOT THERE
Toro told the show he came to Bitcoin through a fairly common path for his generation: watching the government's pandemic response up close in Washington, D.C., then watching Silicon Valley Bank fail in 2023, which he said convinced him fractional reserve banking could not be trusted to hold up under stress. That led him to El Salvador, first to research the country's circular Bitcoin economies, then to work with the Bitcoin Office helping run events including the Bitcoin Historico conference.
MULTIPLE FRONTS AT ONCE
Toro's central argument is that El Salvador is not just one Bitcoin policy, it is several running in parallel. He listed the country's public strategic Bitcoin treasury reserve, its capital markets structure, more than a hundred registered Bitcoin startups, several circular economies including Bitcoin Berlin and Bitcoin Beach, and a multi-tier education system that starts teaching money and financial literacy to public school students at age seven. He credited Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert's Bitcoin Office with building out the education pipeline, including a Bitcoin diploma program that grew out of an earlier collaboration between Stacy Herbert and Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song.
THE DICTATOR LABEL
Both Toro and the host pushed back hard on international media coverage calling President Nayib Bukele a dictator. On the show, Nico cited a 96% approval rating for Bukele; independent polling this year has shown Bukele's overall approval in a range generally between roughly 87% and 94% depending on the pollster, with specific policies like the state of exception polling even higher, so the exact figure cited on air should be read as the show's number rather than a single confirmed poll result. Toro's response focused less on the number and more on the comparison: he argued critics ignore Nicaragua's president canceling elections and the ongoing situation in Venezuela and Cuba while fixating on Bukele.
Toro also pushed back on the idea that Bukele's popularity is recent, noting he was already building a Bitcoin-friendly political movement as mayor of San Salvador in 2017, years before the 2021 legal tender law, and that El Salvador's central bank warned him against it at the time.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Toro pointed listeners to the Bitcoin Historico conference in November as the next marker of how far the country's Bitcoin institutions have come since Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert first covered Bitcoin on television when it traded at 23 cents in December 2010. He also confirmed that Simply Bitcoin's own president, Mike Germano, is set to appear at the conference.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
