Building Bitcoin Communities: Local Roots, Global Impact | BTC Prague 2025 Panel

What happens when Bitcoiners actually meet in real life? Magic. I had the privilege of sharing the BTC Prague stage with builders from Venezuela, Barcelona, Austria, and Nashville — and what united us was simple: community changes everything, and it all starts with showing up.

Your Life Changes the Day You Meet Bitcoiners in Person

We are social animals. As much as Bitcoin is a technological and monetary revolution, it is also a deeply human one. When you sit across from someone who gets it — who truly understands why this matters — something shifts. That shift is irreversible. I’ve seen it happen to thousands of people, and it never gets old.

A Bitcoin Academy Born in Hyperinflation

I come from Venezuela — one of the best-documented hyperinflation cases in the world. When we tried to bring Bitcoin into the system directly, we hit walls. Fighting the system head-on wasn’t the way. So we took a stealth approach and built an academy. They told us we couldn’t call it Bitcoin, so we called it BDC Academy. They loved the acronym. They had no idea.

We became the biggest academy in the university within three months — beating programs that had been running for years. The demand was proven by adoption. We started hoping for maybe 100 students. We ended up with 100 students per cohort, ran seven cohorts, launched a master’s degree, and now have more than 5,000 students through the program.

The key? We never tried to sell Bitcoin. We let people discover it. Students arrive wanting to learn about digital assets — whatever they think that means. They leave as Bitcoin maximalists. That’s the power of meeting people where they are.

Finding Your Tribe When You Travel

I’ve been traveling my whole adult life. I started flying for Austrian Airlines and never really stopped moving. One thing I’ve always believed is that connecting with locals — or with like-minded people passing through — is essential. That’s what led me to help build the Barcelona Bitcoin-only community and to work on Satlantis, a social network for travelers built on Nostr.

We Bitcoiners sometimes don’t want to share our metadata with Telegram or Meetup. Nostr is privacy-oriented, freedom-focused, and built for people like us. The ultimate goal is still real-life connection. Some of us are, let’s say, financially free but socially awkward — we need tools to find each other, especially when we’re not at Bitcoin conferences.

Low Time Preference on a Plate

I run a two-Michelin-star restaurant with my wife, and yes — we accept Bitcoin. When we made that announcement, we got headlines in 15 different newspapers. Just by saying we accept Bitcoin, we became news. Any café, bar, or restaurant owner reading this: that’s all you have to do.

What I love most is that fine dining and Bitcoin share the same values. Low time preference. Quality over quantity. One of our signature dishes takes a full year to prepare — a celeriac baked in a salt crust, kept sealed for twelve months. I always explain to guests: we could open it right after baking, but we wait a year to get a higher value back. That’s hodling. That’s Bitcoin thinking on a plate.

We also host meetups at the restaurant for newcomers — showing them mining hardware, explaining hash rate, serving simple food. We offer our space because we can’t decentralize social bonding. We’re humans. We need to come together.

Bitcoin Park: It Started With One Meetup

Bitcoin Park in Nashville started with 20 people at a free meetup. Then 50. Then a hundred. Then a high school kid was taking two bus rides just to attend. I knew there was something there — a thirst for education, a thirst for connection.

My co-founder Matt Odell and I built a dedicated space in the heart of Nashville. Now we have locations in Nashville and Austin — a community-supported campus