The Salvadoran Family

Carlos had been working construction in Houston for six years. Every month, without fail, he sent $400 to his mother and sister in San Salvador.

For six years, he walked into a Western Union and handed over $428. His family received $400. The $28 difference — 7% of everything he sent — went to fees. Over six years, that was more than $2,000 lost to the transaction itself.

He didn’t think much about it. That was just the cost of sending money home.

In 2022, a colleague showed him Strike — a Lightning-based payment app that allowed him to send dollars that arrived as Bitcoin in El Salvador, where his family could spend them or convert to dollars through the Chivo wallet. The fee: less than a dollar. Sometimes cents.

His mother was initially skeptical. She wasn’t familiar with Bitcoin. But the Chivo wallet was on her phone, the government had distributed it to every citizen, and within a few weeks she was comfortable receiving and converting the transfers.

Carlos now sends $400. His family receives $399.60.

The difference in his pocket: more than $300 per year. Over a decade of working abroad, that’s the difference between arriving home with savings or arriving home with nothing.

Carlos’s story is not unusual. It’s one version of what’s playing out across millions of remittance corridors — Latin America, West Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia — wherever workers abroad send money home to families who need every cent of it.

The technology isn’t changing the amount he earns. It’s just stopping someone else from taking a cut of every single transfer.

Tomorrow: Bitcoin Beach — the world’s first Lightning circular economy.

— The Daily Bit