Bitcoin conferences are a dime a dozen these days. Why Another?

...I felt that we had an untapped potential here in the Nordic countries.

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).

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.