Bitcoin conferences are a crown a dozen these days. There’s everything from the big scale Vegas-type events with 30,000 participants At BTC Inc. (the owner of Bitcoin Magazine) puts on, to the small, intimate gatherings of dozens or hundreds of devoted Bitcoiners – or the 10,000 participants who BTC Prague Collected in the Czech capital this year. They all serve a purpose and accommodate a particular niche, and they are important to different people at different stages of their Bitcoin trips wherever they are.
Remu Karhulahti joins me from an enviable and impeccably pristine Finnish landscape pine and birch trees, sun-shimming lake, blue sky … and yes, there was an outdoor sauna in the background-to talk about it Newest Bitcoin -Conference Kid on the block: BtchelThe first major Bitcoin conference in Nordics. Taking place on 15-16. August in Helsinki, Finland, brings the team names like Jeff Booth, Peter Todd, Giacomo Zucco, Knut Svanholm and Adam back to the Finnish capital. Less than a month before the event starts, we speak Bitcoin adoption, the landscape of the Nordic countries and the need for yet another Bitcoin conference.
JB: Remu, you are CEO of BTCHEL, a new Bitcoin conference and the first of its kind in Nordics – why another European event?
Remu: Well, I had been in all the major European – Baltic Honey Badger, BTC Amsterdam, BTC Prague, Bitcoin Atlantis, Oslo Freedom Forum, etc. – and felt I had lots of experience as a participant. I had worked on the booths on several of them and I have also arranged events in the past. I had been studying Bitcoin since 2020 and working with the European book publisher consensus, and I felt we had an untapped potential here in the Nordic countries.
We run this community hub in the center of Helsinki all year round, where everyone from hardcore bitcoiners to random plebs off the street hangs out. Some just come to the Bitcoin atm we have, others are curious after Bitcoin, and others just show up. (The huge orange windows also draw some attention.)
There had been monthly meeting events in Helsinki since 2014, when 30-40 people regularly attended, and we would do something bigger-giving back to society. When our team at five met last August, we realized that we have all these unexplored initiatives in Finland: Miners, various Bitcoin companies, the active community, the Finnish Bitcoin Association and lots of tech-savvy people (ed.
JB: What is the intended audience? Don’t you think another Bitcoin event would cannibalize participants from some of the established?
Remu: No, not really. The Nordic landscape is an unexplored niche and it was just a matter of time before anyone would arrange an event like this. Many Bitcoin conferences and businesses focus on major markets like the US or continental Europe but you really have to go where others Isn’t it goes.
In fact, I don’t think Btchel is competing with the larger European conferences. We definitely have a local competitive advantage here, as we may be drawing people who are interested enough to attend a two-day event in Helsinki, but would not travel to, says Riga, Prague or Amsterdam for it. The hardcore bitcoiners like you and me can of course want to go to all of them, but there is always a large, local audience that is not – people who are not part of the click. So far we have had lots of tickets sold to Germans, so I think we also have a great international presence. For BTCHEL 2025, we think we get about 1,000-1,200 participants.
JB: Do you also have Finnish -language content, or is it only English?
Remu: Most English and international. We have a small side phase for Finnish presentations, but it’s about it.
JB: You mentioned that some Finnish Bitcoiners had crowdfunded 200 copies of Nik Bhatia’s book “Layered Money” to send to Finnish MPs. What has been the answer and how is Bitcoin speech going among Finnish lawmakers?
Remu: Yes, it was a fun initiative in 2023 and we followed up with some feedback, but didn’t really hear too much back. I don’t think most Finnish politicians are hostile To Bitcoin, Men Bitcoin is nothing for them. The only thing that comes up is the mining sector, where a proposal for tax persons was introduced more last year but did not go.
JB: Why do you think Bitcoin has not taken off in Nordics? It is an otherwise beautiful technically-capable region with high-speed internet access everywhere and mobile payments, etc., so what does the Bitcoin adoption prevent this?
Remu: I have a theory of this. As you say, Nordics was early for tech and the internet, and especially in Finland with Linux and the Open Source movement, we have lots of people who are interested in these topics. But Finland is a society with high confidence-rich, with plenty of protection of private property and trust in institutions. And that’s what Bitcoin solves, so there’s no urgent need for the solution that is bitcoin. For average people, it just doesn’t make sense.
JB: What is the idea of Btchel? Should you run this conference annually like most of the others, or say, every four years like Bitcoin Atlantis?
Remu: We plan to do this in the long term and we will put Btchel again next year. Ethos for the team and core value of Btchel is that it is community -driven and grass roots. My vision for what we do here is that we build a very inviting place, open to anyone who wants to participate and learn. I have already planned to scale next year even bigger so we can make it more accessible to plebs and bootstrapped start-ups.
All the other major conferences usually have a mother company or a great sponsor behind them, so if they do not make a profit, they can still continue … with the disadvantage that they look at that company. We haven’t. We are plebs, community-driven, and we bootstrapped from scratch and it is very likely that we are also unable to make money. We do this for the love of the game.
JB: So how are you going to run the conference next year if you don’t earn?
Remu: Ah, we’ll find out. Maybe Bitcoin’s price continues to continue and our company Treasury rises the value.
Disclaimer: BTC Inc., the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine, also takes on Bitcoin conferences around the world: Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong, 28-29. August; Bitcoin AmsterdamNovember 13-14; Bitcoin Mena in Abu Dhabi, December 8-9; and the flagship event Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas, 27-29. April 2026.
