More than 50 days have passed since El Salvador took a big step into the digital age by adding Bitcoin to its list of official currencies, but according to Salvadorans on Reddit and Twitter not much has changed.

People still almost exclusively pay for stuff with fiat or by swiping their credit and debit cards at the stores in El Salvador.

When asked about adoption of Bitcoin, cashier at a major supermarket responded that of the 600 transactions in his shift, only two were in Bitcoin.

Old fashioned way of paying for goods and services is hard to eradicate.

El Salvador's rushed implementation of BTC was not helpful in solving this problem.

According to Fortune.com, the Bitcoin ATMs that have been installed around the country don’t work well.

Many Salvadorans are having problems withdrawing money from them.

Chivo app, El Salvador's digital wallet, also has its share of glitches.

„This weekend I tried paying with Bitcoin at Starbucks, and their Bitcoin phone wasn't even turned on, so I had to wait for a minute or so, and then the transaction failed anyways“, one Salvadoran wrote on Reddit.

He is one of many complaining about bugs in the Chivo app.

„They should fix the problems in the app. I've been trying to pay with the Chivo wallet for about a week now and nothing. JUST SAYS ERROR!“, tweeted another Salvadoran.

According to a post on Reddit, one manager of a major retailer was upset as they spent a lot of time, money and effort to implement Bitcoin payments in their store just to find out that no one is using BTC.

In the first month since BTC was made legal tender in El Salvador, they had only one transaction in Bitcoin.

As one Salvadoran points out, most of his countrymen just downloaded the Chivo digital wallet to get their $30 Bitcoin bonus from the government for registering in this state-run cryptocurrency app.

„People got their $30.00, spent them immediately and didn’t bother getting more“, he explains.

„We use dollars in all of our transactions. No one understands the concept of Bitcoins. Bukele (President of El Salvador) gave most of the country 30$ in Bitcoins and people went to the supermarket and bought beer, liquor or food. I have some friends that went to Surf City which is a place on the beach to spend their Bitcoins on lunch and beers. Most of El Salvador do not use Bitcoin at all. Most still uses dollars“.

There are many reasons for negligible crypto adoption - government's bumpy rollout of BTC is certainly one of them.  

„The app fails, shows random values, money isn’t transferred to banks, and most think it’s just some money laundering scheme from the government, an experiment the president was bribed to do. There’s zero information of how much it costed to implement this or to whom the money was paid to“, another Salvadoran weighed in.

Many point out that Chivo’s identity verification system is faulty, meaning some users are finding that their accounts have been taken by hackers who spoofed their identity before they could register.

„A lot of accounts were hacked. The wallet app has SO MANY security issues. If any of the app developers is reading this, you suck!“, one comment reads.

Chivo Wallet also has a different philosophy than Bitcoin’s free and open-source software culture – some go as far as to call Chivo wallet spyware, as it is a proprietary program that demands personal data such as the national ID number and does face recognition.

„It breaks users' freedom and spies on people“, some claim.

It's worth noting that BTC that was given to Salvadorans from the government is stuck in Chivo’s ecosystem.

Chivo users can not send Bitcoin to an external wallet, like Coinbase Wallet.

They also can't sent their BTC to crypto exchanges.

They can only send Bitcoin from one Chivo Wallet to another, so that any merchant using Chivo is able to accept it, but merchants who do not use Chivo can't accept it.

Chivo is the exact opposite of being interoperable.

Stories from Salvadorans who went online to vent their frustration with BTC are in opposition with what crypto enthusiasts from other countries think. 

It seems that El Salvador's great crypto experiment is not working well for ordinary Salvadorans.