BTC Prague 2025: A "Bitcoin-Only" Conference That Lost Its Way

By BTC Your Mind June 25, 2025

A damning case study of profit-driven decay in Bitcoin’s conference culture

For the third consecutive year, I attended BTC Prague. While it remains a valuable networking hub for sovereign minds, the event increasingly resembles a fiat casino rather than a gathering aligned with Bitcoin’s original ethos.

Don’t get me wrong - the conference has never been some pure gathering of freedom-minded idealists, but what began as a flawed yet somewhat balanced event has devolved into a VIP circus with Bitcoin branding. Past editions at least made performative efforts to engage the grassroots, offering a broader platform for Bitcoin’s core values on the community stage and small gestures to make ordinary attendees feel welcome. Now? It’s just another corporate trade show where plebs pay premium prices for scraps while VIPs get the red carpet treatment.

The Decline of Bitcoin Culture: A Gathering of “Number Go Up” Speculators

One friend summarized the shift perfectly:

“Every year, there are fewer of us—people who care about freedom, privacy, and sovereignty—and more of them—those who only care about price pumps, nation-state adoption, and mainstream acceptance at any cost.”

This observation is painfully accurate. While many of us still attend the conference for the side events and networking opportunities, a growing number of long-time Bitcoiners are opting out, disillusioned by the conference’s increasing focus on corporate interests, institutional adoption, and profit maximization—often at the expense of the very community that is Bitcoin’s decentralized immune system—keeping its core principles alive.

BTC Prague’s Failures: A Symptom of Fiat Mindset

1. No Space for Families—But Full Price for Kids

Despite many Bitcoiners being parents, BTC Prague provided no dedicated space for children. Worse, parents reported being forced to pay full-price tickets for kids—effectively treating them as revenue streams rather than future adopters.

As you can see in this Nostr post, this isn’t just an oversight—it’s a blatant cash grab. A true Bitcoin event would encourage family participation, recognizing that the next generation is essential to adoption. Instead, BTC Prague’s approach mirrors the extractive fiat mentality—prioritizing short-term profit over long-term value.

2. The “Closing Party” Disaster

The official closing party was a ghost town—poorly organized (announced to happen but actually not even organized), and lacking even the most basic entertainment. At least last year they cared to provide a DJ, but this time, the organizers couldn’t be bothered. Why? Because cost-cutting took precedence over value creation. The organizers cut costs wherever possible, reserving their budget for high-profile speakers (who bring in ticket sales) while neglecting the regular attendees who paid the full ticket price anyway but lack the marketable clout of Saylor or Mallers and their cult-like following.

Bitcoin has an incredible community of musicians and artists who would have gladly performed for a stack of SATs - or through value-for-value, without even requiring any payment from organizers. Instead, BTC Prague prioritized extraction over culture—embracing the exact high-time-preference behavior that Bitcoin exists to penalize.

3. Art Rejected in Favor of Profit

Despite hosting a gallery for Madex, multiple voices confirm that lesser-known Bitcoin artists faced rejection with the blunt justification:

“We are a business and we have to be extremely selective when it comes to art”

This epitomizes peak fiat mentality. While superficially appearing to support art through Madex’s featured exhibition, BTC Prague’s true motivation becomes transparent - they sought to profit from his established reputation rather than genuinely foster artistic expression. The contradiction is glaring: Bitcoin was never meant to be solely about commerce, but about cultivating culture, nurturing creativity, and resisting hollow corporatism.

While acknowledging BTC Prague’s need for financial sustainability, their deliberate choice to marginalize grassroots artists in favor of sponsor interests reveals a ‘profit-above-all’ philosophy. This approach doesn’t merely overlook community values - it actively betrays the very principles that made Bitcoin’s culture worth preserving in the first place.

4. Prioritize profit extraction over value creation

Attendees faced absurd restrictions—not even permitted to bring their own water into the venue. No welcome packs, no thoughtful gestures—just premium pricing for an increasingly sterile, transactional environment that reduced participants to balance sheet entries.

Meanwhile, red-carpet treatment was exclusively reserved for big names like Michael Saylor, Jack Mallers, Samson Mow, Mark Moss, and other “idols”—figures who draw crowds but whose vision of Bitcoin often aligns with Wall Street and the legacy Western colonial financial system than financial freedom and sovereignty.

Saylor’s agenda, for instance, aligns with US government’s plan to replace physical dollars with digital ones like USDT as the global reserve currency and primary medium of exchange in order to sustain its debt-ridden economy and prolong the life of its dying empire. Bitcoin was meant to dismantle this system, not serve as its life support.

Don’t take my word for it. Saylor’s own manifesto, A Digital Assets Strategy to Dominate the 21st Century Global Economy, spells it out:

“Expand U.S. Treasuries by $10 trillion, reinforcing dominance in global banking, credit, and currency markets. We export our currency to the world.”

I’ve detailed how this aligns with U.S. policy in From Decentralization to Control: The U.S. Plan to Turn Bitcoin into Collateral

Similarly, Samson Mow—a vocal proponent of nation-state adoption and Tether advocate—enjoys VIP status while the human nodes maintaining Bitcoin’s decentralized nervous system are ignored. Given BTC Prague’s three-year trajectory, Tether as a title sponsor by 2026 seems inevitable.

For more on Mow’s Tether ties, see my piece Is Tether a Bitcoin Company?

This is the fiat mindset in action: Prioritize profit extraction over value creation. Bitcoin was designed to invert this—rewarding long-term builders over short-term extractors—yet BTC Prague exposes a painful truth: without a steadfast commitment to Bitcoin’s core values—sound money principles, long-term thinking, and individual sovereignty—even our ecosystem falls prey to the same high-time-preference greed that fiat systems institutionalize.

The Shitcoinification of BTC Prague

The selection of Xapo Bank - a regulated institution promoting bitcoin yield products and stablecoin banking - alongside Rootstock’s “Bitcoin DeFi” platform as lead sponsors effectively legitimized shitcoin culture to such a degree that attendees began overlooking Bitcoin-only companies such as Satori Coin ( https://x.com/satoricoin))—a project producing physical coins with embedded QR codes to gift SATs as tangible presents to loved ones. Despite its legitimate purpose, many repeatedly dismissed it as just another scam due to its name - a direct consequence of BTC Prague’s sponsorship choices.

This widespread confusion reveals the event’s fundamental failure: by platforming the exact financial intermediaries Bitcoin was designed to disrupt, BTC Prague actively conditioned its audience to accept Wall Street’s repackaged crypto grift as normal. When a genuine Bitcoin company becomes invisible while banking hybrids and DeFi charlatans dominate the spotlight, the conference has betrayed its core purpose. Such normalization of anti-Bitcoin actors should be unthinkable at any event claiming to be a bitcoin only conference.

Conclusion: A Conference at a Crossroads

To its credit, BTC Prague hasn’t yet sunk to the level of overhyped spectacles like Bitcoin Vegas 2025—those grotesque American ‘conferences’ where sponsorships go to the highest bidder, principles be damned. But make no mistake: it’s racing down the same corrosive path. The symptoms are identical:

Profit placed above principles
Institutional validation prioritized over individual sovereignty
Mass adoption pursued at the cost of Bitcoin’s revolutionary ethos

Left unchecked, this trajectory will reduce BTC Prague to just another “Bitcoin in name only” farce—a corporate trade show where suits and bankers lecture about “digital assets,” while the actual plebs, cypherpunks, builders, and node operators who are the antifragile base layer preserving Bitcoin’s revolutionary DNA are treated as relics.

“BTC PRAGUE. The biggest, most influential bitcoin event in Europe ever.”

It’s not about the size, nor about the influence but the signal and real impact one make. If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry…

All in all, the hunger for a real Bitcoin conference—one that rejects financial intermediaries rather than platforming them—has never been greater. Now BTC Prague faces its existential choice: Will it purge the fiat mindset and return to Bitcoin’s fundamentals, or will it complete its transformation into yet another vehicle for institutional capture? The clock is ticking.