Bitcoin conferences are a dime a dozen these days. There’s everything from the large-scale Vegas-type events with 30,000 attendees that 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 attendees that BTC Prague gathered in the Czech capital this year. They all serve a purpose and cater to a specific niche, and they’re important to different people at different stages of their Bitcoin journeys, wherever they are.
Remu Karhulahti joins me, from an enviable and impeccably pristine Finnish landscape — pine tree and birch trees, sun-glimmering lake, blue skies… and yes, there was an outdoor sauna in the background — to talk about the newest Bitcoin conference kid on the block: BTCHel, the first large-scale Bitcoin conference in the Nordics. Taking place on August 15-16 in Helsinki, Finland, the team is bringing names like Jeff Booth, Peter Todd, Giacomo Zucco, Knut Svanholm and Adam Back to the Finnish capital. Less than a month before the event kicks off, we talk Bitcoin adoption, the landscape in the Nordic countries and the need for yet another Bitcoin conference.
JB: Remu, you’re the CEO of BTCHel, a new Bitcoin conference and the first of its kind in the Nordics — why another European event?
Remu: Well, I had been to all the major European ones — Baltic Honey Badger, BTC Amsterdam, BTC Prague, Bitcoin Atlantis, Oslo Freedom Forum etc. — and felt that I had lots of experience as an attendee. I had worked the booths at several of them and I have also organized events in the past. I had studied Bitcoin since 2020, and worked with the European book publisher Konsensus, and I felt that we had an untapped potential here in the Nordic countries.
We run this community hub in downtown Helsinki all year round, where everyone from hardcore Bitcoiners to random plebs off the street hang out. Some just come for the bitcoin ATM we have, others are curious about Bitcoin, and some just show up. (The huge orange windows also draw some attention.)
There had been monthly meetup events in Helsinki since 2014 with 30-40 people regularly attending, and we wanted to make something bigger — give back to the community. When our team of five got together in August last year, we realized that we have all these unconnected initiatives in Finland: the miners, various Bitcoin companies, the active local community, the Finnish Bitcoin Association, and plenty of tech-savvy people (eds. note: Finland is at number 5 on Bitnodes’ list of reachable nodes, in a country with fewer people than Minnesota).
JB: What’s the intended audience? Don’t you think yet another Bitcoin event would cannibalize attendees from some of the established ones?
Remu: No, not really. The Nordic landscape is an unexplored niche, and it was just a matter of time before somebody would organize an event like this. Many Bitcoin conferences and companies are focusing on large markets like the U.S. or continental Europe, but you should really go where others aren’t going.
I don’t actually think that BTCHel competes with the larger European conferences. We definitely have a local competitive edge here in that we might draw people who are interested enough to attend a two-day event in Helsinki, but wouldn’t travel to, say, Riga, Prague, or Amsterdam for it. The hardcore Bitcoiners like you and me obviously like to go to all of them, but there’s always a large, local audience that won’t — people who are not part of the clique. So far, we’ve had lots of tickets sold to Germans, so I think we’ll have a large international presence as well. For BTCHel 2025, we think we’ll get about 1,000-1,200 attendees.
JB: Do you also have Finnish-language content, or is it English-only?
Remu: Mostly English and international. We do have a small side stage for Finnish presentations but that’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 members of Parliament. What has the response been, and how’s the Bitcoin talk going among Finnish legislators?
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, but bitcoin is nothing to them. The only thing that comes up is the mining industry, where a proposal to tax miners more was introduced last year but didn’t pass.
JB: Why do you think Bitcoin hasn’t taken off in the Nordics? It’s an otherwise pretty tech-savvy region, with high-speed internet access everywhere and mobile payments etc., so what’s preventing bitcoin adoption over here?
Remu: I have a theory about this. Like you say, Nordics were early to 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 high-trust society — peaceful, with lots of protection for private property and trust in institutions. And that’s what bitcoin solves, so there is no acute need for the solution that is bitcoin. For average people, it just doesn’t make sense.
JB: What’s the idea with BTCHel? Are you going to run this conference annually like most of the others, or, say, every four years like Bitcoin Atlantis?
Remu: We’re planning to do this long term, and we’ll put up BTCHel next year again. The ethos for the team and the core value of BTCHel is that it’s community-driven and grassroots. My vision for what we’re doing here is that we’re building a very welcoming place, open for everyone who wants to participate and learn. I have already made plans 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 large sponsor behind them, so if they don’t make a profit they can still keep going… with the downside that they’re beholden to that company. We don’t have that. We’re plebs, community-driven, and we bootstrapped from the ground up — and it’s quite likely that we won’t manage to make a profit either. We’re doing this for the love of the game.
JB: So, how are you going to run the conference next year, then, if you’re not making a profit?
Remu: Ah, we’ll figure it out. Maybe bitcoin’s price keeps going up, and our company treasury increases in value.
Disclaimer: BTC Inc., the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine, also puts on Bitcoin conferences around the world: Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong, Aug 28-29; Bitcoin Amsterdam, Nov 13-14; Bitcoin MENA in Abu Dhabi, Dec 8-9; and the flagship event Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas, April 27-29, 2026.
