El Salvador as a state economy tried to pivot to bitcoin.
They employed many tricks to attract investment, to start mining at a scale and bolstered BTC as an alternative currency to the country's population, even recognizing it as legal tender.
The tricks failed to materialize. Poverty remained rampant and El Salvador ended up being forced to suspend its Bitcoin program just to take a puny IMF loan. In the end, no crypto entity stepped in to help them when they needed 1.4 billion in USD. We know from Greece's example that IMF measures lead a state economy to disaster. But imagine how desperate a country had to be to accept an IMF intervention over a loan totalling only around 4% of its GDP.
Bitcoin didn't shield El Salvador from disruptions in the world economy, it didn't enrich its citizens, it didn't protect it from foreign corporations plundering its resources for cheap etc.
So what's the lesson here? Maybe Bitcoin doesn't work at the State level. Yet by Trump's sayings we're going to see the same in the US with a sovereign fund in crypto...
You seem to have a totally wrong perspective about El Salvador's Bitcoin policy. The project was not designed to lift the country out of a financial mess, neither was it paraded as a means to shield El Salvador from IMF loans. The country has been in bad shape and Nayid Bukele is trying to fix it. He managed to reduce the crime rate of the country, which was its major problem. Bitcoin was just a program designed to diversify the economy of El Salvador.
Don't also forget that El Salvador is the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender, so they made some mistakes because they were doing some experiments. Other countries can learn from the mistakes of El Salvador and improve on them.
Now, we should also take note that a President would always make hard decisions when there is an emergency. Bukele taking a loan from the IMF and readjusting the Bitcoin policy is not a bad move if the economy needs the money. Afterall the country didn't sell any of its hodling and it is still buying more coins.
El Salvador is a pride of the Bitcoin ecosystem and should be appreciated for being bold enough to be the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender.