El Salvador’s $300 Million Bitcoin ‘Revolution’ Is Failing Badly

On an estuary along the coast of El Salvador, a few miles west of the Conchagua volcano, about 70 families live in a settlement called Flor de Mangle. It’s named for a mangrove forest where residents pluck oysters and crabs by hand from the brackish water. The first group of inhabitants came about 20 years ago, some of them former soldiers and guerrillas displaced by a brutal civil war. Harvesting shellfish, herding cattle and growing mangoes and corn, they earned enough to raise families and build houses, first of tin and wood, then of concrete.

Earlier this year, government workers ...