In late 2025, Mark Karpelès, ex CEO of Mt. Gox, lives a quieter life in Japan, building a VPN and an AI automation platform. As Chief Protocol Officer at vp.net—a VPN that uses Intel’s SGX technology to let users verify exactly what code runs on servers—he works alongside Roger Ver and Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. “It’s the only VPN that you can trust basically. You don’t need to trust it, actually, you can verify”. At shells.com, his personal cloud computing platform, he’s quietly developing an unreleased AI agent system that hands artificial intelligence full control over a virtual machine: installing software, managing emails, and even handling purchases with a planned credit card integration. “What I’m doing with shells is giving AI a whole computer and free rein on the computer”, a brilliant idea, really. AI agents on steroids.

The contrast with his past could not be starker. Fifteen years ago, Karpelès was the reluctant king of Bitcoin’s trading world, running Mt. Gox at a time when the exchange processed the vast majority of global bitcoin trades.

His journey began innocently enough in 2010. Operating a web hosting company called Tibanne under the brand Kalyhost, Karpelès received a request from a French customer based in Peru who was frustrated with international payment hurdles. “He’s the one who discovered Bitcoin, and asked me if he could use Bitcoin to pay for my services … I was probably one of the first companies to implement Bitcoin payments back in 2010”.

Roger Ver, an early evangelist, became a frequent visitor to Karpelès’ office. Unknowingly, his servers also hosted a domain linked to Silk Road—silkroadmarket.org—purchased anonymously with bitcoin. That connection would later fuel investigations: U.S. authorities briefly suspected Karpelès of being Dread Pirate Roberts himself. “That was actually one of the main arguments why I was investigated by U.S. law enforcement as maybe the guy behind the Silk Road… They thought that I was Dread Pirate Roberts”. The association complicated public perception and even surfaced in Ross Ulbricht’s trial, where, according to Karpelès, Ulbricht’s defense efforts briefly tried to cast doubt by linking Karpelès to the marketplace.

In 2011, Karpelès acquired Mt. Gox from Jed McCaleb, who went on to found Ripple and Stellar. The handover was marred from the start. “Between the time I signed the contract and the time I got access to the server, 80,000 bitcoins were stolen… Jed was adamant that we couldn’t tell users about it,” Karpelès alleged to Bitcoin Magazine. McCaleb faced no criminal liability for the Mt. Gox case, though he has been sued civilly and has been part of the public discourse around the case. Nevertheless, as far as Karpelès is concerned, he inherited a platform plagued by poor code and technical issues.

Mt. Gox exploded in popularity, becoming the primary on-ramp for millions entering Bitcoin. Karpelès maintained strict policies, banning users linked to illicit activities like drug purchases on Silk Road. “If you’re going to buy drugs with Bitcoin, in a country where drugs are illegal, you shouldn’t”, Karpelès told Bitcoin Magazine.

The Mt. Gox empire crumbled in 2014 when hacks—later tied to Alexander Vinnik and the BTC-e exchange—drained over 650,000 bitcoins. Vinnik pleaded guilty in the U.S. but was exchanged in a prisoner swap and returned to Russia without a trial, leaving evidence sealed. “It doesn’t feel like justice has been served,” said Karpelès, a moment that makes you wonder about the odd political value of Vinnik to the Russians. The 650,000 bitcoins stolen remain at large. 

The fallout was swift. Arrested in August 2015, Karpelès endured eleven and a half months in Japanese custody—a system notorious for its rigidity and psychological pressure. Early detention mixed him with colorful cellmates: Yakuza members, drug dealers, fraudsters. He passed the time teaching English, and inmates quickly dubbed him “Mr. Bitcoin” after spotting blanked-out headlines about him in newspapers given to them by the prison guards. One Yakuza even tried recruiting him, slipping a phone number for post-release contact. “… Of course I’m not going to be calling that,” Karpelès laughed.

The psychological tactics were brutal. Japanese police employed repeated rearrests: after 23 days, detainees were led to believe release was imminent, only to face a new warrant at the door. “They really make you think that you’re free and yeah, no, not you’re not free… That’s actually quite a toll in terms of mental health”.

Transferred to Tokyo Detention Center, conditions worsened: over six months in solitary confinement on a floor shared with death row inmates. “It’s still quite painful to spend more than six months in solitary confinement,” he recalled. Forbidden from letters or visits if claiming innocence, he coped by rereading books and writing stories—”the stuff I wrote is really crappy. I wouldn’t show it to anyone,” he said when asked if he would ever publish his writings. Armed with 20,000 pages of accounting records and a basic calculator purchased for his case, he dismantled embezzlement charges by uncovering $5 million in unreported revenue in the exchange.

Paradoxically, prison improved his health dramatically. Chronic sleep deprivation—often just two hours a night during his workaholic Mt. Gox days—gave way to regular rest. “Sleeping at night helps a lot… when I work I’m used to only sleeping two hours a night, which is a very, very bad habit” (00:22:18). Emerging physically transformed—”shredded,” as observers noted at the time—he surprised the Bitcoin community with fresh photos showing peak condition.

Released on bail after disproving key charges, Karpelès was convicted only on lighter record-falsification counts at the end of the ordeal. The Silk Road links had complicated perceptions, with Ross Ulbricht’s defense briefly attempting to implicate him to create plausible deniability for Ulbricht. Public narratives often painted him as complicit in Bitcoin’s dark side, despite his policies against it.

Emerging in 2016, rumors swirled of vast personal wealth from Mt. Gox’s remaining assets—once estimated at hundreds of millions or even billions due to Bitcoin’s price surge. Yet Karpelès says he receives nothing. The bankruptcy’s pivot to civil rehabilitation allowed creditors to claim in bitcoins, distributing value proportionally. I like to use technology to solve problems, and so I don’t really even do any kind of investment or anything like that because I like to make money by constructing things. To just get a payout for something that’s essentially a failure for me would feel very wrong, and at the same time, I’d want customers to get the money as much as possible.” Creditors, many now receiving far more in dollar terms due to Bitcoin’s rise, continue waiting.

Today, Karpelès collaborates with Roger Ver—the early visitor turned business partner—who recently settled U.S. tax claims for nearly $50 million. “I’m happy for him that he’s finally getting things cleared,” Karpelès said.

Today, Karpelès says he owns no bitcoin personally, though his businesses accept it as a form of payment. Discussing the current state of Bitcoin, he critiqued centralization risks in ETFs and figures like Michael Saylor: “This is a recipe for catastrophe… I like to believe in crypto in mathematics and different things, but I don’t believe in people”. On FTX: “They were running accounting on QuickBooks for a potentially multi-billion dollar company, which is crazy”.

From Bitcoin’s epicenter—hosting Silk Road links, onboarding the world, enduring Japan’s harshest detention—to building verifiable privacy tools, Karpelès’ arc reflects the industry’s maturation. His story marks the first roar of Bitcoin into mainstream culture, a time when his leadership as CEO of Mt. Gox placed him at the center of the storm. Clearest of all, his builder mindset remains a great example of the type of engineer and entrepreneur attracted to Bitcoin in those early days. 

This post Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès Reveals Details of 2014 Collapse and Japanese Detention first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

The second Edition of the Bitcoin Medellin Conference is coming. The small but high signal conference is set in the City of Eternal Spring, Medellin, a tourism hot spot for the Latin American countries, featuring rich food, landscapes, music, and culture, famous for the charisma and beauty of its people. Medelling also hosts a large international community with a strong entrepreneurship and start-up culture. 

The Bitcoin Medellin conference will take place on January 16- 17, 2026, in Plaza Mayor, a large event conference space near the heart of the city. The conference will feature international grade speakers like Jeff Booth, Venture Capitalist and author of The Price Of Tomorrow, Oliver Velez, Wall Street Veteran, author and educator, Mike Peterson, Founder and Director of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach, Frank Corva, Bitcoin Journalist, among many other Colombian and international Bitcoin entrepreneurs. 

The conference will feature two days of talks on various dimensions of Bitcoin, such as mining, finance, self-custody, investment strategy, and so on. It will feature talks in Spanish and English. 

There are two tiers of tickets, General and Premium, that give attendees access to speeches and the event hall or access to VIP spaces and side events. Both tiers have a massive discount for Colombian residents, encouraging evangelism and attendance from locals, a common model in Latin America.

The VIP Speakers mixer access dinner was a highlight of the conference last year, hosted at a 5-star Argentinian restaurant with an all-star attendance. 

Colombia is an under-appreciated Bitcoin and crypto hub, with a double digit percentage of its imports from China paid in stablecoins a long standing Bitcoin and crypto community that has deep peer to peer and OTC market, if you are shopping for conferences next year, this is one you’ll want to have a look at.

This post Jeff Booth, Oliver Velez, and Bitcoin Beach Founder Mike Peterson to Speak at Bitcoin Medellín 2026 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

The Samourai Wallet matter raises a fundamental question about how the United States treats non-custodial software and the developers who create it. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill did not operate a financial service or handle customer assets. They wrote and maintained software that allowed users to construct collaborative Bitcoin transactions in a privacy-preserving way. Throughout the tool’s entire lifecycle, users controlled their own keys, initiated their own transactions, and never relied on Samourai or its developers to transmit or safeguard value. The distinction between a custodial service and a non-custodial tool is not a technicality; it is the core boundary that the Bank Secrecy Act, FinCEN guidance, and decades of regulatory practice use to distinguish software authors from regulated financial intermediaries.

This point was reinforced by FinCEN itself. In an internal analysis, the agency concluded that Samourai’s architecture did not constitute money transmission because no third party took possession or control of user funds. That conclusion was never disclosed to the defense while the prosecution advanced a theory that required the opposite: that building software which users employ for privacy is functionally equivalent to operating a financial institution. When that analysis finally surfaced, it confirmed what has long been understood across the industry and within the regulatory community—that non-custodial tools fall outside the BSA’s money-transmitter framework because there is no transfer of value by a third party. The case ultimately treated the developers as if they were responsible for the independent actions of users, even though they had no role in executing, intermediating, or approving any transaction. Some individuals did misuse the tool, as happens with any privacy or security technology, but the law has never equated misuse with liability for the creators. We do not treat the authors of encryption libraries, VPN protocols, or email clients as participants in unlawful activity simply because bad actors rely on those tools. Collapsing the distinction between developing a tool and operating a service would introduce an untenable level of risk for anyone building privacy-enhancing or security-critical software.

There is also an important speech component. Courts have consistently recognized that code is expressive, and publishing open-source software is an act of communication. When publication is treated as evidence of “operation,” the legal boundary between authorship and conduct becomes blurred in a way that threatens a wide range of legitimate technologies. Any precedent suggesting that developers are responsible for unforeseeable downstream use would have immediate consequences for cryptography, cybersecurity research, and open-source work more broadly.

Rodriguez and Hill ultimately accepted plea agreements in the face of substantial sentencing exposure, even though government records undermined the central regulatory theory of the case. Their convictions now rest on a framework that is at odds with established guidance and with the direction in which federal policy has since moved. A pardon would bring the legal outcome back into alignment with the underlying facts: this was software development, not money transmission, and the individuals involved should not bear criminal liability for writing code that users executed independently.

This case has already had a measurable chilling effect on developers working on privacy and security tools in the United States. Leaving the convictions in place would discourage responsible innovation and push critical work to jurisdictions that do not share our commitment to open research and transparent development. A pardon would correct a clear misapplication of federal law, protect the integrity of long-standing distinctions in financial regulation, and reaffirm that publishing non-custodial software is not—and should not become—a criminal act.

Disclaimer – This is a guest contribution by Zack Shapiro, originally published by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI). The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Pardoning the Samourai Developers Would Restore Legal Clarity and Protect Non-Custodial Code first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Zack Shapiro.

In Bitcoin culture, there is still a noticeable gap between the importance of the subject and the forms in which it is presented. Much of what exists is entirely digital, quick to disappear, or shaped by a purely functional aesthetic. Even projects that engage with Bitcoin’s history or its artistic dimension often end up looking more like documentation or marketing than something with cultural presence.

When I first saw History of Bitcoin in person at the Bitcoin Conference 2025 in Amsterdam, that contrast became quite clear. The physical object had a calm, deliberate quality that stood out in an environment dominated by screens and fast exchanges. It didn’t feel like something designed to be glanced at and set aside. It felt like something that expects to be revisited.

What stayed with me was not the rarity of the materials, but the intention behind the choices. In fields like design, architecture, and art publishing, substantial coffee-table books have long played a role in giving subjects a physical anchor. Major art publishers use this format because it creates a stable place for a topic to live. A well-made book slows the pace. It encourages repeated viewing and allows ideas to settle. That kind of physical presence is still unusual in the Bitcoin world.

Many Bitcoin-related books appear as softcovers. I understand why, but they often feel interchangeable and easy to overlook. They rarely give the impression that something is meant to be kept. My point isn’t that books should be luxurious. It’s that form and material can signal whether a subject is being treated with care.

Smashtoshi, History of Bitcoin (First Edition)

Seen from that angle, the First Edition of History of Bitcoin is a considered object. It comes in a case made from five-thousand-year-old fossilised black oak. The material is unusual, but the effect is straightforward: it gives the book a steady, quiet setting. Inside, the volume is bound in bull leather with a finely made silver emblem by Asprey Studio. None of this feels like decoration. It feels like someone thinking carefully about how an object should look if it is meant to last.

The team behind the project described these choices in a way that adds another layer to this. For them, ancient materials weren’t chosen for rarity, but to reflect a belief that Bitcoin itself is built to endure for a very very long time. Placing a young technology inside something that has already lasted thousands of years creates a deliberate contrast. They also spoke of the First Edition as a kind of time capsule, an object made to outlive us and to offer future readers a way to encounter Bitcoin’s beginnings in a physical form. 

The project continues this restrained approach. The physical book and the digital archive are designed to stand alongside each other. The archive provides access and the book provides presence. Together they make the material both reachable and grounded.

Grant Yun, GPU Power Shift

The 128 artworks in the book were created by different artists specifically for this project. Each one revisits a moment in Bitcoin’s history without trying to define a final interpretation. They open space for reflection. They invite conversation. That is one of the strengths of a good coffee-table book: it creates room for looking again.

The companion volume, the range of guest articles on the website, and even the small fragment of the original Bitcoin code included with each collector’s edition follow the same idea. They offer multiple entry points into the history rather than insisting on a single narrative.

My First Bitcoin, the nonprofit receiving the proceeds from the First Edition auction at Bitcoin MENA, teaches young people around the world. Connecting the book to this project links historical reflection with future education in a simple and meaningful way.

All of this suggests to me that presentation is not a secondary detail. It is part of the cultural work needed to give a subject depth. A carefully made book is not a decorative object. It is a way of turning something that might otherwise feel temporary into something that can endure.

That is, ultimately, why History of Bitcoin feels meaningful to me. It gives this history a form that can be kept close, something you can put down, return to, and live alongside. It doesn’t try to conclude anything. It simply gives Bitcoin a place to settle.

Hackatao, The World’s Most Famous Whitepaper

This post On the value of holding the History of Bitcoin in your hands first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Steven Reiss.

A video has surfaced showing Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rehearsing a pitch in 2012, years before the company became the largest Bitcoin exchange in the U.S.

In the recording, Armstrong lays out a simple argument: Bitcoin is a digital currency that can move money instantly anywhere in the world. But it’s hard to use. Tools were clunky, backups were tricky, and users could easily lose their funds. 

Coinbase, he said, would fix that. The platform would act as a hosted wallet, letting anyone access their money from any device without worrying about security or backups.

Armstrong compares his plan to what iTunes did for music. He emphasizes the early growth: sign-ups and transactions increasing “20 % a day,” and $65,000 in Bitcoin payments were processed in just five weeks.

The pitch is short, under three minutes, and candid. Armstrong discussed fees, competition, and the potential of Bitcoin as a global payment system. It’s a glimpse at the early vision of a company few outside crypto had heard of.

Coinbase: Don’t get ‘left behind’

It’s safe to say that Armstrong’s idea was a success. More than a decade later, Coinbase is the top U.S. exchange, handling billions in Bitcoin transactions and shaping how Americans interact with digital assets. 

That scrappy 2012 rehearsal captures the first hints of a company that would grow into a crypto powerhouse.

Just yesterday, Armstrong sat beside BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and said that all major U.S. banks that ignore stablecoins risk being “left behind.” 

Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Armstrong said that several top banks are running pilot programs with Coinbase for stablecoins, crypto custody, and trading.

Armstrong acknowledged a split within traditional finance: some institutions’ lobbying arms resist crypto, while innovation teams explore it. 

“This is the classic innovator’s dilemma,” he said, noting banks must choose between embracing or fighting new technology. On concerns about capital flowing to stablecoins, Armstrong said banks are mainly focused on protecting profit margins.

Fink, once a bitcoin skeptic, said he now sees a “huge use case” for Bitcoin and worries the U.S. is falling behind in stablecoin innovation. 

Armstrong has championed crypto to the U.S. government. He has lobbied and pushed for clearer regulations for the crypto industry.

Armstrong supported legislation like the CLARITY Act to set legal clarity. He launched grassroots efforts, including Stand With Crypto. He has also spent millions on campaigns through PACs like Fair Shake. 

This post 2012 Video Resurfaces of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Pitching What Became America’s Largest Bitcoin Exchange first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

This is a cross-post from Spiral’s blog, the original post can be found here.

Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is everyday money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin’s existence, there just haven’t been many places to spend it.

But then, something happened. 

Planets aligned, seas parted, nerds hooted and hollered from rooftops, and Block added support for bitcoin payments to millions of Square sellers, making bitcoin both ubiquitous and easy to activate. Suddenly, almost everyone is seconds away from accepting bitcoin payments. Pretty cool, right? Right? Yeah, except how merchants should accept bitcoin payments isn’t the only problem. Why merchants should accept bitcoin payments. That’s the boogeyman we need to vanquish. It always has been.

How we do this is more apparent and pragmatic than bitcoin tropes about digital scarcity and immutability, neither of which will convert someone running an ice cream shop. What will motivate small business owners to accept bitcoin payments is their bottom line. They’re unlikely to be ideological; they’re far more likely to be practical. And what’s the most common problem in need of a practical solution faced by merchants that only bitcoin can solve in a digital-only world? 

Credit card fees and the death of cash. 

—

Back when cash ruled everything around everyone, 3% credit card fees on every purchase were just a distant but frightening hypothetical. It was a better time to run a small business, a time when everyone carried cash, businesses universally accepted it, and margins were chonk. This is, obviously, no longer the case.

And yet, this is where it gets interesting: credit card companies have been so successful at ridding the world of physical cash that they’ve created the perfect stage for the bitcoin-minded to make the case for digital cash, a designation that still captures bitcoin’s benefits better than any other. It seems obvious, yet it bears repeating: if a small business’s profit margins are around 6%, which they frequently are, that means credit card fees might eat more than half their profits. Ooph, right? That’s the reality for millions of merchants: ooph.

This is all window dressing, of course, context written in the past tense so you can understand where we’re coming from as we tell you where we’re going.

—

A universally true statement is that we trust the people we can relate to most. Small business owners, it naturally follows, will trust the experiences of other people running small businesses. This is why we’re spearheading a peer-to-peer community exclusively for them, one that is bitcoin service-agnostic, to promote the idea of bitcoin as everyday money.

It’s called the Bitcoin Merchant Community or BMC for short. They’ve got a website, but more importantly, they also have a Facebook Group. There, they’ll find a like-minded community of business owners, both around the corner and around the globe, who want to take back the 3% they lose to credit card fees. They don’t need to be on Square, either, because that won’t work for everyone.

However, getting the word out presents a problem: most small business owners are too busy and not yet invested enough to do the lifting necessary to jumpstart such a community. That’s understandable, so what this initiative needs is passionate people to spread the word, people who are already invested, people who could really stand to get away from their computers for an hour or two.

What it needs are bitcoiners. Yes, you, person reading this blog post.

—

Bitcoin advocacy has been, up to this point, very online. It makes sense: bitcoin is online, and online is where we all sort of live now. But for every level-headed and persuasive pro-bitcoin post that makes it into a non-bitcoiner’s feed, there are 999 posts above and below attempting to suffocate it. Everything gets diluted online. Occasionally, something will break through and register with someone, only to be forgotten about five minutes later. 

Because of this, we realized that thoughtful, focused in-person advocacy must play a central role in promoting bitcoin and the Bitcoin Merchant Community, advocacy that we think should come in two forms: regular in-person and weird in-person.

Realistically, a customer showing up in person to talk about how bitcoin solves the problem of 3% fees? Memorable, definitely, though maybe a little ehhh. But a customer showing up in person with two impossible-to-ignore, straight-to-the-trash-resistant leave-behinds and a powerful, focused argument? Especially if that leave-behind is bright orange, cuddly, and just as grumpy about 3% credit card fees as merchants are? A leave-behind that can be used at the register by merchants to tell patrons that, “yes, we accept bitcoin”? Say what you will about the messenger, but they won’t be forgetting the message, especially when they learn that thousands of others like them got the same one. 

Free onboarding leave-behind kits are available starting today, directly from bitcoin hubs across the US. These include Presidio Bitcoin in SF, The Space in Denver, ATL BitLab in Atlanta, and Bitcoin Park in Nashville and Austin. We expect to be doing even more free kit giveaways in the near future, with more materials and creative assets for merchants that can be used to promote bitcoin acceptance.

But maybe you’re uncomfortable approaching strangers with a grumped out, eyebrow-laden, bright orange plushie under your arm? Not a problem. There’s an approach for you, too. Just download a merchant onboarding playbook + one-page leave-behind combo pack from the Bitcoin Merchant Community. You don’t even need to engage, you can just drop the latter off. It’s called a leave-behind for a reason. 

Ultimately, trillions of bitcoin transactions don’t rest on the shoulders of the payer, but the payee. So grab a kit or print one out. Talk to a merchant. Help them with all the tech, if you want to. You’ve already made bitcoin what it is, now it’s up to all of us to make it what it could be: everyday money, cash in a digital age. 

This post Merchants Don’t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Spiral.

Two years after clinching 1 BTC in a national competition of Bitcoin meetups at Bitcoin 2023, the Tampa Bay Bitcoin Meetup—now formalized as the nonprofit Bitcoin Bay Foundation—has channeled the prize into a thriving local ecosystem. Valued at roughly $25,000 to $30,000 at the time, that bitcoin has appreciated to over $100,000 amid bitcoin’s bull run, bootstrapping workshops, conferences, and community events that onboard businesses to the Bitcoin standard. The group’s president, Thomas Schlemmer, credits the win with supercharging efforts to create a “Bitcoin circular economy” in the Tampa Bay area.

“The Tampa Bay Bitcoin Meetup is the longest active running meetup, at least in the U.S. Some are saying the world. It’s been going on for 14 years,” Schlemmer told Bitcoin Magazine, tracing the meetup’s roots to 2011. What began as monthly social meetups eventually introduced developer-focused BitDevs sessions supporting the growing international movement of high-tech Bitcoin Developer events.

Bitcoin Bay Foundation hosts a dynamic lineup of events tailored to foster education and community in the Tampa Bay Bitcoin scene, with weekly meetups serving as the backbone—often expanding to five per month depending on programming and demand.

These include core recurring formats like beginner-friendly Bitcoin 101 sessions (averaging 20 attendees), social gatherings (around 25 participants for casual networking), and advanced BitDevs developer discussions, usually small groups diving into technical topics. Hands-on workshops rotate monthly or as requested, covering practical skills such as privacy in the digital age, peer-to-peer Bitcoin purchases, de-Googled phones, Bitcoin mining, node setup, and SeedSigner hardware builds. In these workshops, participants can expect interactive, step-by-step guidance from local experts to build confidence in self-custody and privacy tools.

The recent Sound Money Soirée gala drew around 100 people for a black-tie fundraiser, hosted in a historic bank vault, complete with silent auctions of products from all kinds of Bitcoin companies like Start9 and SeedSigner, raising $50,000 in one night, which goes to fund their various educational events. “It’s just kind of an excuse for people to get dressed up… and have fun… and show the local leaders there’s over 100 people here,” Schlemmer said of the gala, which brought in Bitcoin leaders from across the country.

The gala almost did not take place: “Our bank froze our account like a week and a half before,” as banks seem to do when you need them most. “We were actually able to pay the blackjack dealer, the DJ, and the photographer in bitcoin,” Schlemmer recalled, an omen-like reminder of the power of Bitcoin.

Earlier this summer, they also co-hosted the Bitcoin Day Tampa conference with the Bitcoin Day team, which brought in 150 attendees and had a full day of panels on policy, business adoption, and custody with speakers from across the industry, and even state senator Joe Gruters. “It was a regional conference, we filled out the Tampa River Center, which was good. That was about 150 people, and that was our first conference that we’ve ever thrown. So it went well.”

The group also partners with the University of Tampa, where the Bitcoin Club “The Bitcoin club there is the second largest non-Greek club on campus,” according to Schlemmer. They’ve supplied internships, guest lectures, and materials for the school, which now hosts a Bitcoin course. “We’ve been very close with them over the years, providing internships, getting kids placed in jobs, guest lectures, getting them educational materials,” he added.

The Tampa Bay meetups serve as an example of arguably the foundational institution of the industry, the Bitcoin meetup. For aspiring meetup organizers, Schlemmer stresses consistency: “Just consistency, you know, meeting at the same place at the same time or the same frequency, lets people know what to expect.” Building a core team with complementary skills—like accountants—is key, he added; “If you’re going to go the nonprofit route, then you need to make sure you have an accountant.”

However, successfully hosting Bitcoin meetups is far more than just accounting; the gap in knowledge and interests between new attendants and old ones can be a serious challenge. Staying Bitcoin-only wards off altcoin distractions, Schlemmer noted, “we just tell them upfront, ‘hey, we are a Bitcoin-only here.’” When crypto enthusiasts probe alternatives, the group simply points out that they prefer to focus on Bitcoin and that there are other crypto meetups in the area they can visit for those interests.

This post Tampa Bay’s Bitcoin Community Builds Circular Economy Momentum After 1 BTC Windfall first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

This month, a remarkable Bitcoin-focused artwork will grace one of the art world’s most prestigious stages. Block 1 from Robert Alice’s Portraits of a Mind series is set to be auctioned in Sotheby’s Now & Contemporary Evening Sale on November 18, carrying an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. 

Robert Alice, Portraits of a Mind, 2019. Credit: Theo Cristelis 

This event is where marquee works by renowned artists like Yves Klein or Jean-Michel Basquiat appear, so the inclusion of Block 1 signals an important moment for Bitcoin’s cultural presence. The auction will be held at The Breuer Building — once the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and now Sotheby’s new worldwide headquarter in New York. It marks the first time a physical artifact of Bitcoin’s history stands alongside blue-chip artworks in such a high-profile sale.

In preparing this text, I spoke with Tad Smith, the former CEO of Sotheby’s and a thoughtful Bitcoiner, about the upcoming sale and what it means for Bitcoin’s cultural standing. Speaking as an archivist and art historian, I found our conversation becoming a meditation on value: how art and Bitcoin both rely on scarcity, story, and shared belief rather than financial metrics alone. Some of his remarks are included throughout this piece. His own path –– from auction house executive to Bitcoiner –– reflects the shift he describes: from assigning value within institutions to seeing value take shape through collective consensus.

Why does this matter? For years, Bitcoin has been understood primarily as a monetary revolution or a technical breakthrough. But Bitcoin is also an emerging cultural phenomenon, lacking obvious forums for recognition in mainstream culture. When a work like Block 10 (52.5243° N, -0.4362° E) from Alice’s series enters major collections like the Centre Pompidou –– one of Europe’s foremost museums of modern art –– it externalizes Bitcoin’s cultural value by translating intangible ethos into the language of art. I will return to this later. It is a clear sign that Bitcoin’s story is seeping into broader cultural memory, validated by institutions that historically canonize what matters in art and culture. 

Block 1: The Code That Became Art

Formally and conceptually, Block 1 is steeped in Bitcoin’s origin story. Robert Alice’s Portraits of a Mind series took the original Bitcoin codebase (version 0.1.0) — arguably one of the most consequential texts of the 21st century — and dispersed it into 40 large-format paintings. In doing so, the project formed a decentralized, physical archive of Satoshi Nakamoto’s code with hundreds of thousands of hexadecimal digits distributed across the series.

Robert Alice, Detail of Portraits of a Mind, 2019. Credit: Theo Cristelis 

Each painting in the series carries a set of geographical coordinates that tie fragments of Bitcoin’s code to places of human culture and memory. Block 1 (24.9472° N, 118.5979° E) points to the Statue of Laozi in Quanzhou, a place where philosophy and exchange have quietly coexisted for centuries — near a city that once marked an important point along the Silk Road. The choice of site draws a subtle line between Taoist thought and the libertarian ethos that runs through Bitcoin: Laozi’s idea of wu wei –– governing through non-interference –– echoes the blockchain’s own preference for order without rulers. 

Tad Smith has called the series a memorial to the foundations of digital sovereignty — a body of work that captures the moment Bitcoin began to take form.

A decentered form runs through the series, echoing rai stones and allusions to Japanese currency. The work engages with themes of decentralization, code as text, code as portrait and the nature of memory. Influenced by conceptual and minimalist art (artists like Roman Opalka and Jasper Johns come to mind), Portraits of a Mind treats the Bitcoin codebase as cultural heritage, as something to be preserved and contemplated. The series makes something hidden, visible: it translates the code –– the true first text of Bitcoin, written even before the whitepaper –– into material form. On November 9, 2008, Satoshi wrote to Hal Finney: “I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper”. And Alice asks us to see code not just as functional instruction but as a foundational human document.

Since its debut, Portraits of a Mind has traveled in ways that mirror the network it was born from. Parts of the series have been shown in London, Hong Kong, and New York, as well as at Sealand — the self-declared cypherpunk micronation, once an illegal data haven for irregulated internet traffic. Works from the series have also appeared in museums across the world in Zurich, Seoul, Beijing, Hanover and Linz. In 2023, the series was shown at Monnaie de Paris, the world’s oldest continually running mint, further extending its reach into the contemporary art world. 

Robert Alice’s exhibition of Portraits of a Mind at Sealand, the former cypher punk data haven in the North Sea in 2021. Credit: Robert Alice

Major auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s play a pivotal role in validating new artistic movements. For blockchain-based art, that validation began in 2020 when Portraits of a Mind first made waves: one of its panels, Block 21 (42.36433° N, -71.26189° E), was the first Bitcoin-focused artwork to sell at a premier auction house and laid the foundation for the crypto art explosion, pre-dating the Beeple NFT sensation by six months and back then reached around $130,000. With Block 1 joining Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York, Bitcoin art reaches a new level of visibility. “In the evening sale [this piece] will further increase the reputation” of the series, Tad Smith noted, emphasizing how Sotheby’s platform brings tremendous publicity and cultural cachet. Indeed, a high result at Sotheby’s would broadcast the message that Bitcoin’s codebase is now an important cultural fixture to the narrative of the 21st century, rather than a niche plaything for tech enthusiasts.

Bitcoin’s Cultural Maturation

What does Block 1 at Sotheby’s tell us about Bitcoin’s own cultural maturation? For one, it underscores that Bitcoin’s impact isn’t measured only in market cap or hash rate — it’s also measured in cultural capital. Bitcoin has spawned ideas, values, and aesthetics, yet the protocol itself can’t record those human elements. There’s a lack of on-chain metrics for culture: the blockchain timestamps transactions, but not, say, the moment a Bitcoin artwork hangs in a museum. Therefore we look to external signals. When the Centre Pompidou acquires Block 10 as mentioned earlier, or when artworld’s leading curators like Hans-Ulrich Obrist critically engage with it, those are flashes of recognition that Bitcoin has birthed something worthy of heritage status. These signals indicate that Bitcoin is evolving from a purely financial phenomenon into a broader cultural one. The acquisition of Block 10 marked the first time a fragment of Bitcoin’s code entered a national collection. In France, works that enter the national collection become part of the public domain and are legally inalienable –– they can never be sold or removed. In a country whose modern identity was forged in revolution, the gesture carries its own quiet irony: a technology built to resist authority now preserved by one of the oldest symbols of it. A part of Bitcoin’s genesis code now belongs, permanently, to the people of France –– archived under the same ideals that once demanded the rewriting of history itself. It’s hard to imagine a stronger validation that the Bitcoin narrative has broken out of its early techno-utopian niche and into the broader cultural conversation.

The Centre Pomidou in Paris. Home to the French National Collection of Contemporary Art, which now includes BLOCK 10 from the series, Portraits of a Mind. 

Interestingly, this institutional recognition coincides with a growing awareness within the Bitcoin community itself — an appreciation that culture is not peripheral but central to its mission. As Smith observes, “Bitcoiners have something really powerful when it comes to art. They’re on a mission and they’re highly motivated. This isn’t a hobby or something you do on the side. It’s a deeply committed crowd, full of enthusiasm and driven by a genuine desire to make the world better”.

He adds that Bitcoiners are “very culturally and socially engaged and natural storytellers who understand memetics and communication in every possible way”. That, Smith notes, “is what art is about”. Indeed to be a Bitcoiner is to be a collector, not of art, but of UTXOs. The psychology of collecting and especially ownership, runs deeply through the psyche of Bitcoiners.

In short, Bitcoiners have been creating culture all along and the cultural work began long before its memes. The very first act in its history wasn’t financial but symbolic –– Satoshi’s embedding of The Times headline in the genesis block. It was a gesture of record and resistance, the first instance of Bitcoin declaring itself through culture.

Now, as significant wealth accumulates in this community, their taste in art is maturing as well. “Many of them, of course, tend to be younger”, Smith notes, “and younger people usually aren’t all that interested in the art of older generations. That’s nothing new; it’s been that way for centuries. The younger crowd always wants its own art. That’s why art and taste evolve every few generations”.

Over time, he predicts, “Bitcoiners’ growing financial capital will translate into cultural capital”. With Bitcoin’s market value climbing into the trillions and a massive wealth transfer to millennials and Gen Z on the horizon, the future of Bitcoin art indeed looks bright. “The future is very, very bright”, Smith says, “because the younger crowd has all the tailwinds” — referring both to financial means and cultural appetite.

In effect, a new collector base is rising — one that sees Bitcoin not just as an investment, but as a story and identity worth expressing through art.

Making Culture Visible

Because Bitcoin lacks formal cultural institutions of its own, artworks like Block 1 become crucial mirrors. They reflect and externalize the cultural values of the Bitcoin adoption in a form that the wider world can see and evaluate. The Sotheby’s sale forces questions about how we value such an object: Is it its materials and aesthetics, its backstory and conceptual depth, or its significance to a community? In practice, all of these converge to give Block 1 value. That value is cultural and contextual, not merely speculative. As Tad Smith learned during his years as CEO at Sotheby’s, a painting’s price can swing wildly based on intangibles: “a piece of canvas with a certain color of paint on it and a certain artist’s name and a certain year and a certain look, is worth $20 million, and then one right next to it could be worth $2”, a disparity that revealed to him “something inherently cultural that really drives the notion of value”. Bitcoin, often touted as digital gold, similarly derives its value from a cultural consensus, a shared belief in its significance. But that consensus can be hard to perceive directly. Art provides a tangible embodiment of those beliefs. When a Bitcoin-inspired artwork commands attention and a high price, it quantifies a bit of Bitcoin’s cultural impact in a language the art world understands.

Reflecting on this connection, Smith once compared Bitcoin’s evolution to the building of a pyramid — a new financial infrastructure, a new concept for money. “For the first time in human history”, he noted, “it’s digital capital. And to start building a pyramid, you start with a bunch of blocks. On the lower level, you make a great big square, and then you add a slightly smaller one on top, and another on top of that”. He described Portraits of a Mind as “memorials of the foundation layer of the creation of future and modern digital capital. It’s the foundation document, recording the charter of where it all began”. A century from now, he suggested, people will look back to these works to understand how Bitcoin started, “they paint a picture of a moment in time”.

Robert Alice’s exhibition of Portraits of a Mind at the Monnaie de Paris, 29 June to 22 October 2023. Credit: Monnaie de Paris. 

Art teaches by being seen. It invites interpretation and dialogue; a work like Block 1 makes people ask questions — about Bitcoin’s earliest days, its philosophy, its community — and it does so beyond the usual venues of conferences or developer meetings. Those engaged in this space understand that securing Bitcoin’s place in history means telling and retelling its story in many forms. Visual art, especially works that can hang in galleries or be studied in art history classrooms, gives that story a tangible presence — externalizing Bitcoin’s narrative and weaving it into the broader fabric of contemporary culture.

Finally, the Sotheby’s event highlights a broader truth: Bitcoin’s maturation isn’t just about technological adoption or financial metrics, but about cultural integration. As Tad Smith puts it, “a life of success and wealth without culture is a pretty unexciting life”. He goes on to suggest that “the sooner you begin to experience culture and understand the beautiful qualities that make being human so incredible — literally a divine gift — the better”.

His point is simple but profound: Bitcoin’s promise lies not only in disrupting finance, but in enriching human experience. Engaging with art is part of that fulfillment. The presence of Block 1 in a venue like Sotheby’s signals that the Bitcoin community, consciously or not, is beginning to heed that message. Bitcoin is developing a cultural memory with artifacts like Block 1 acting as its external vessels.

Bitcoin is stepping out as a subject of cultural heritage, not just economic speculation. This single lot at Sotheby’s carries within it the story of Bitcoin’s birth — lines of code painstakingly inscribed in paint and gold — now acknowledged by some of the highest arbiters of cultural value, institutions whose validation both defines and depends on what culture chooses to recognize.

The sale will be closely watched, as the hammer price will say as much about belief as about value, and about how far Bitcoin’s cultural standing has come. You can’t exactly measure culture, but a number can make its value briefly visible. The fact that Block 1 now shares space with contemporary masters signals that Bitcoin’s presence in the world is no longer invisible to traditional gatekeepers. Emerging from a lineage of artistic experiments and cypherpunk culture, it has become a living, multifaceted phenomenon.

At the end, as a closing note and an invitation: the auction takes place on November 18 at Sotheby’s. You don’t have to bid, but you can look. It costs nothing to follow auctions, visit previews, or walk through museums. That’s how culture becomes understandable: by showing up to see it change.

This is a guest post by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post A Defining Moment for Bitcoin Art at Sotheby’s: Tad Smith on Bitcoin Culture and Robert Alice’s Block 1 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Steven Reiss.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is reportedly planning to launch the iShares Bitcoin ETF (ASX: IBIT) on the Australian Securities Exchange, extending its global Bitcoin investment strategy to the Asia-Pacific region.

Expected to debut in mid-November 2025, IBIT will give Australian investors regulated exposure to Bitcoin through a traditional stock exchange structure, removing the need for offshore accounts or direct crypto custody. 

The ETF will carry a management fee of 0.39% and will wrap the U.S.-listed iShares Bitcoin Trust (NASDAQ: IBIT), which has become one of the most successful ETF launches in history since its January 2024 debut.

The Australian listing places the country alongside major jurisdictions such as the United States, Germany, and Switzerland where Bitcoin ETFs are already active. 

The move also reflects growing institutional demand for Bitcoin across the Asia-Pacific region as more investors seek regulated access to the asset. 

Australia’s embrace of crypto

The announcement follows the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s updated guidance reclassifying most digital assets as financial products, requiring service providers to obtain an Australian Financial Services Licence by June 2026. 

While Bitcoin itself is not a financial product, funds and platforms offering Bitcoin exposure will operate under this regulatory framework, providing additional investor protection and market transparency.

In other words, a Bitcoin ETP or ETF lets investors gain exposure to Bitcoin without actually buying or storing the cryptocurrency themselves. 

Instead, the fund holds Bitcoin (or Bitcoin-related contracts) while investors simply buy shares on a stock exchange, with the share price moving alongside Bitcoin’s market value. It’s a convenient and easy way to get invested in Bitcoin. 

The announcement comes as Bitcoin trades down from record highs around $104,000, supported by rising inflows into global ETFs and accelerating institutional adoption. 

Earlier last month, BlackRock officially listed its iShares Bitcoin ETP (IB1T) on the London Stock Exchange following the FCA’s decision to relax rules on crypto investment products. 

The physically backed fund allowed retail investors to gain Bitcoin exposure without directly holding the asset, with custody managed by Coinbase. 

Just like with this launch in Australia, the launch was viewed as timely amid rising UK crypto adoption, offering a regulated and accessible entry point for investors.

Last June, Monochrome Asset Management announced their Bitcoin ETF (IBTC) in Australia. The ETF traded under the ticker IBTC and carried a management fee of 0.98%.

This post BlackRock Expands Global Bitcoin Strategy with Australian ETF Launch first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Today marks seventeen years since Satoshi Nakamoto’s publication of the Bitcoin Whitepaper on the cryptography mailing list in 2008. Back then Bitcoin was nothing more than a proposal for a new niche technology, the latest in a long lineage of niche technologies created by the cypherpunks of the 1990s. 

Bitcoin has gone through many massive transformations since that day 17 years ago. It went from a niche internet collectible, to a decentralized network powering illegal dark net markets, to a mainstream speculative investment for retail, to Wall Street and governments all over the world’s favorite new asset class. We have all had front row seats to the first explosive global technological revolution to the internet, and it’s been a wild ride. 

On this anniversary I think it’s important to touch on a concept that is very relevant, POSIWID, or the Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. The basic idea is that when you have a complex system, it is pointless to try to define it based on what you want it to do, what really matters is what the pieces of that complex system are actually doing. That is all that matters at the end of the day. 

We have once again found ourselves in a time period where people are calling back to the whitepaper as a placeholder for some kind of founding document, or definition, or blueprint. The whitepaper is none of those things. It is simply a high level abstract explanation of a Proof-of-Work blockchain being used to implement a digital currency. It is the idea of a cart with wheels, versus the actual blueprint of the cart (the source code). 

Bitcoiners seem to periodically fixate on the whitepaper in this manner, and inevitably use that as a justification for acting antagonistic towards some use case or idea of improving Bitcoin that they disagree with. Maybe we will eventually get past this, maybe we won’t, but it is an unhealthy attitude to have towards such a potentially impactful technology such as Bitcoin. 

People didn’t recite the writings and speeches of Alexander Graham Bell when digital modems were invented to allow the first tendrils of the early internet to reach out between devices and facilitate digital signals flowing between them. They embraced it as a valuable technological innovation, and in the world today that dynamic has completely inverted itself. Most telephonic signals are now actually conveyed by communication mediums specifically constructed for digital communications. 

Telephone networks were used to bootstrap the digital medium of the modern internet in a way that Alexander Graham Bell might have had only the barest inklings of, reshaping the entire world in ways that would have been impossible to conceive for people of his generation. 

Satoshi did not give us a founding document to be shackled and constrained by when he released the whitepaper, he gave us a high level description of the software that followed. 

That is the actual gift he gave us, the software. And he gave it to us completely freely, open-source, to do with what we decide to do. 

“BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it’s easy for lots of users and small devices.” -Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010

This quote is always brought up in the context of the blocksize limit, or Bitcoin enabling multiple functionalities, but the thing that has always stood out the most to me is “users might get.” In the end before his disappearance, Satoshi is clearly being explicitly deferential to the wishes of users, and in the context of a critical and foundational decision like the blocksize limit. 

Bitcoin isn’t Satoshi’s anymore, it’s ours, and collectively with how we actually use our bitcoin, we decide what the purpose of the system is. It’s important to remember that. 

This post What Has Bitcoin Become 17 Years After Satoshi Nakamoto Published The Whitepaper? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.