This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi traveled to "Bitcoin Beach," a small coastal town in El Salvador called El Zonte that has created a bitcoin economy. El Zonte is one of the first places in the world where the cryptocurrency bitcoin can be used to pay for just about anything.

American Mike Peterson, a former financial planner who moved to El Salvador, is the man behind the initiative. He told 60 Minutes his vision was for vendors to accept the currency, then pay their employees in it, which the employee could use to pay for things like utilities electronically.

"That was the goal, [a] circular economy with bitcoin, and everybody said we couldn't do it," Peterson told Alfonsi. "But, you know, you guys are here, and you see the results."

To make it happen, Peterson needed to get locals on board with his plan. He got help when, out of the blue, someone offered to launch a purpose-built bitcoin wallet app for El Zonte. That someone was Chris Hunter, a tech entrepreneur who saw an opportunity to deliver a faster and cheaper way to transact with bitcoin using the new Lightning Network.

Before connecting with Peterson and El Zonte, Hunter says he had shopped his idea to venture capitalists, who told him that he was five years ahead of his time.

"They acknowledged that the technology existed, but they thought it was simply academic or not usable for people in the real world in the year 2020," Hunter said.

After being rejected by every venture capitalist his company approached, Hunter said he read an article about Peterson in Forbes. He cold-called Peterson and told him his company, Galoy, would custom-build a wallet app for El Zonte and do it pro bono.

Peterson accepted Hunter's offer. Hunter and his Galoy team knew the wallet had to be an easy-to-use experience that, at its most basic level, helped locals save and spend their money through bitcoin. About 70% of El Salvadorans are unbanked, and most businesses do not have a credit card terminal.

"In a cash economy, introducing something novel like bitcoin in a wallet there, you have to have a good user experience in order for them to actually adopt it," Hunter said. "Otherwise, they'll just push it to the side."

The result was Bitcoin Beach Wallet. Prior to the Hunter's app, bitcoin transactions in El Zonte were both slow and expensive. They relied completely on the bitcoin blockchain, which Hunter estimates took approximately 30 minutes for final settlement. That means a person who bought a coffee with bitcoin had to wait half an hour for their funds to move into the merchant's account.

Instead, Hunter's new wallet app took advantage of the Lightning Network layered on top of bitcoin's blockchain, a technology that expedites the transaction process. Bitcoin alone can process about seven transactions per second. When the Lightning Network is included, that figure approaches 1 million transactions per second.

"Lightning is a layer on top of bitcoin that allows for these effectively free, instant settlements something that's actually faster than a credit card transaction," Hunter said.

Hunter's Bitcoin Beach Wallet is different from El Salvador's state-backed wallet Chivo, which launched in September 2021. That is when President Nayib Bukele put a law into effect requiring Salvadoran businesses to accept bitcoin, making El Salvador the first country in the world to make cryptocurrency legal tender. Unlike Bitcoin Beach, Chivo is not open source.

Bitcoin Beach Wallet is now the most popular way to use bitcoin in El Zonte. The experience of using it feels similar to Venmo or Apple Pay. Even though users pay with bitcoin, the wallet shows the equivalent value of the transaction in any currency, so they know exactly how much they are spending. It also includes a map that shows users which vendors accept bitcoin.

It may all feel very high-tech for a beach town with no paved roads. But Hunter and Peterson are betting that, if the bitcoin economy works in El Zonte, it may be a sign of things to come everywhere else.

"It is a proof of concept," Hunter said. "It is a postcard from the future."

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and Will Croxton. It was edited by Will Croxton.

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The tech behind the Bitcoin Beach Wallet - CBS News

A visual representation of Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

Edward Smith | Getty Images

There's a new and low-cost way to quickly send U.S. digital dollars around the world without a bank. And it's built on bitcoin.

Blockchain start-up Lightning Labs announced Tuesday that it's launching the Taro protocol, a technology that will route fiat-pegged stablecoins and other digital assets through the bitcoin monetary network. The project is still in development mode.

Taro uses Lightning, a payments platform built on top of bitcoin's base layer that enables global, high volume, virtually instantaneous, and low-fee transactions using the security of the bitcoin blockchain.

"It's one of those things where people don't really know how the credit card system works and it just works," Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark told CNBC.

Typically, this 'layer two' payments platform is all about making bitcoin easier to spend and receive but Lightning Labs has decided to extend the use case of this tech to other types of virtual cash.

"With this technology, you could route all the world's currencies through bitcoin," said Stark.

"People will be able to seamlessly go between bitcoin and say, a USD stablecoin, or peso, euro, yen, etc. And they can send those globally, instantly and with extremely low fees," she said.

There is bitcoin, the asset class, and then there's the global interoperable bitcoin monetary network. Lightning Labs is piggybacking off the latter.

You can think of Taro's payment workflow as enabling bitcoin to serve as a hybrid of the SWIFT financial messaging system (the communication layer) and correspondent banking (routing component).

Typically, all nodes must agree to confirm a transaction on the bitcoin network, verifying every transaction on the blockchain. The process highlights one of bitcoin's greatest strengths: its high degree of network decentralization, which is a big part of what ensures its security. But it is also relatively slow, averaging five transactions per second on bitcoin's base layer, and can be expensive.

On the Lightning Network, not all participants in the network need to agree. Instead, nodes only verify transactions with which they are directly interacting.

That difference is key. Stark tells CNBC that it's possible to execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second on Lightning.

And then there's the cost.

"Lightning transactions can be fractions of a penny...while a bitcoin transaction at the core protocol layer can be much more expensive than that," said Alyse Killeen, founder and managing partner of bitcoin-focused venture firm Stillmark.

Twitter integrated Lightning tipping in 2021 and the technology is already deployed around the world in places like El Salvador, which made bitcoin legal tender in Sept. 2021.

But Lightning Labs says that the Taro protocol marks a major step in Lightning's capacity to serve as the underlying value transfer protocol of the internet.

"From our standpoint, we're particularly interested in the fiat and stablecoin aspects, because we're really big into emerging markets," explained Stark. "That's something near and dear to our hearts. We've seen a lot of adoption there, and there's a big demand for that."

The ultimate goal is to create a frictionless on-ramp to the global economy requiring only a mobile phone, in order to include as many people as possible in the process.

Lightning Labs which also announced it raised $70 million in Series B funding led by early Tesla and SpaceX backer Valor Equity Partners says it is releasing the technical spec for the Taro protocol, so that it can incorporate feedback from developers as it continues to build the protocol.

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There's a new way to quickly send U.S. dollars around the world with bitcoin - CNBC

HIVE Blockchain executive chairman Frank Holmes discusses the potential growth of digital currencies on 'The Claman Countdown.'

MIAMI Top-10 UFC flyweight fighter Matheus Nicolau says he has signed a contract to be paid entirely in Bitcoin to secure his future financially.

Nicolau, who lives in Brazil but accepts a paycheck from the U.S., signed the contract on March 21 and is the first Latin American UFC athlete to take a paycheck in bitcoin.

"Some friends support me and even help me. I have some friends who already know about the Bitcoin world," Nicolau told FOX Business. "[O]ther ones are surprised, and they want to know more. My family has an open mind. They trust my choices because they know Im doing it for my future."

Top-10 UFC flyweight fighter Matheus Nicolau (Bitwage / Fox News)

The deal was made possible through a payroll service called Bitwage, which has paid more than $150 million in Bitcoin to 150,000 users and 2,000 companies, Bitwage CEO Jonathan Chester, who previously worked for Oracle, told FOX Business at the Bitcoin 2022 conference.

AARON RODGERS, SERENA WILLIAMS, ODELL BECKHAM JR. TALK BITCOIN AT CONFERENCE: IM BETTING BIG ON CRYPTO'

"We're the most compliant solution on the market. You can make sure that its automated, it's compliant, and your workers are being education and pushed in the right direction because we're an extremely conservative organization," Chester said. "You can't trade on our platform. We don't have a wallet, so we can't lose your money. And we only offer top-teir coins that we know are going to last five years or longer, and that is Bitcoin, Ethereum and Stablecoin."

Nicolau says he is "putting everything in Bitcoin" after learning about the world's most popular cryptocurrency a couple of years ago. The moments when Bitcoin "goes down a little bit is an opportunity to put more money into Bitcoin," the UFC fighter said when asked whether he was concerned about the volatility of the cryptocurrency, which was valued at around $42,800 as of Friday afternoon.

Bitcoin 2022 conference entrance (Audrey Conklin / Fox News)

"I really believe in Bitcoin," he said. "You see that this is something that is really growing."

PETER THIEL: BITCOIN WILL NEVER BE CONTROLLED BY GOVERNMENT, UNLIKE WOKE COMPANIES

In Brazil, he explained, depositing a U.S. paycheck into a Brazilian bank takes too much time, and the fees associated with the process take a chunk out of his paycheck.

"The bank wasstalling me, and it took more than a month to get my money," he said. "Right now, I decided how much Im going to put into cryptocurrency, how much Im going to put into United States banks, and how much Im going to put into Brazilian banks."

Top-10 UFC flyweight fighter Matheus Nicolau (Bitwage / Fox News)

He cited a 2021 study from DeVere that found more than a third of Millennials and half of Gen Z would be willing to receive more than half their salary in Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.

And it's not just athletes. Bitwage works with retail workers, rideshare drivers, city workers, services companies and more.

"It's not just tech and crypto companies but professional services that are onboarding for this, and one of the reasons is becauseit has one of the highest opt-in rates for non-critical benefits, critical benefits being health care and 401k," Chester explained.

Top-10 UFC flyweight fighter Matheus Nicolau (Bitwage / Fox News)

Here's how it works, according to Chester: First, Bitwage offers a B2B (business to business) service to integrate Bitcoin "as a post-tax deduction" for employees, similar to the mechanism a business would use for a Roth 401k account, he said. Second, Bitwage offers a B2C (business to consumer) service when you "connect the direct deposit into the payroll system, and you choosewhatever percentage you want to be in Bitcoin or dollars."

Chester said Bitwage has clients in the United States and around the world in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria.

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"2020 was a big inflection point for us. With COVID, there was remote work. You heard of a lot of people like Brazilians and Argentinians and Nigerians are allcoming to our system to get paid for international work. But also, all the inflation helped us grow our U.S. business, as well, and with cryptocurrency growth, in general," he explained.

People who live in the countries he mentioned see Bitcoin payments "as a lifeline," whereas people in the U.S. see it more as an investment or protection against inflation, Chester said.

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Top 10 UFC fighter signs Bitcoin payment contract: 'I'm doing it for my future' - Fox Business

Detractors of Bitcoin often point to its costs namely in the form of electricity used in proof-of-work mining and its perceived impact on the environment as reasons for why it will never be a sustainable alternative to traditional fiat currency. These detractors often believe that Bitcoin is fundamentally unscalable, or more likely, come from the power structures that fiat currency has enabled, such as government or centralized financial institutions.

In his presentation on the main stage of Bitcoin 2022, Dr. Saifedean Ammous delivered a presentation meant to underscore the invisible costs of fiat money, and how it has been used for centuries to economically oppress the average citizen of a fiat-based economy. Dr. Ammous has long been a supporter of Bitcoin, and has written The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard, both of which have helped educate numerous individuals about the advantages of Bitcoin and the corruption that is ingrained in most fiat states.

Dr. Ammous started his speech by focusing on inflation and how using fiat money helps back a system that is inherently unequal. Dr. Ammous specifically cited how fiat inflation is used primarily for the needs of the government, saying that The cost of fiat is currently 3.5% of all global wealth, and is used to finance government parasites, wars, and monopoly banksters.

He followed up by citing how fiat money often helps those who are already rich, and who have the ability to store their wealth in hard assets such as real estate, and often preys on the poor. He added that fiat parasites who are always talking about inequality, like Elizabeth Warren, Thomas Piketty, and WEF global leaders never mention this. It certainly seems as if the very politicians and leaders who preach for a more equal system are rather enabling and backing an economic model that is predatory on the very people they pledge to help.

Dr. Ammous then brought up a little-talked-about consequence of using fiat money: its impact on the health and nutrition of its users. He argued that governments often encourage their citizens to eat their sponsors industrial waste as a cheap alternative to organic and high-grade essentials. He also cited fiats impact in scientific reporting, especially in energy, saying that fiat scientists are telling us that windmills, a sixth-century technology, is what is going to be needed for the future. This is just an inflation cover-up. Of course, it is often these very same fiat scientists who attack Bitcoin over its sustainability, especially on ESG grounds.

For most Bitcoiners, myself included, it was the allure of using a currency that was independent from centralized authority and oversight that drew me down the so-called rabbit hole. However, I had neglected to think deeply about the extent of the detrimental impact fiat currency was having on my life, and the lives of billions of people all over the world. Fiat is not just government-controlled; it is government-enabled. Using fiat money powers a system that funds unhealthy eating, economic oppression and more. Dr. Ammous, as always, has managed to open the eyes of hundreds of orange-pilled Bitcoiners at Bitcoin 2022 through his creative and original thinking.

Dr. Ammous concluded his speech by rebutting the critics of Bitcoin who focus solely on its computing and electricity consumption: If you think a machine and electricity are not worth it for Bitcoin, kindly get rid of all your machines and use primitive alternatives.

Bitcoin 2022 is part of the Bitcoin Event Series hosted by BTC Inc, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine.

This is a guest post by Archie Chaudhury. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Dr. Saifedean Ammous Explains The Hidden Costs Of Fiat At Bitcoin 2022 - Bitcoin Magazine