If you are into Bitcoin, you might have heard “Nostr,” a strange, nearly unpronounceable word that stands for “Notes and other stuff transmitted by relay”. This acronym that’s captured the imagination of Bitcoin technologists for years has a big idea. That you don’t need to be locked into a social media giant to talk to your friends. 

Invented at the start of COVID19 by Fiatjaff in March of 2020, today the Nostr protocol has a seemingly infinite amount of websites custom-built around this niche, with world-class influencers like Edward Snowden and Jack Dorsey prominently on the platform. 

Unlike the internet and social media ecosystem of today, Nostr lets users take their followers and content with them from website to website, from app to app, as they see fit. The algorithms are fundamentally in the hands of users, supporting maximum control, variety and censorship resistance, qualities largely lost from the modern big tech clear web. 

A Tool of Bitcoin Evangelism

Built on Bitcoin native technology, Nostr has supported bitcoin micro payments called zaps from almost day one. Its login system resembles a Bitcoin wallet more than it does any other login credential, resulting in a fresh and novel experience of the web. 

Artists have started to find their way to this strange corner of the internet, as they do, growing their brands into international communities that tip in Bitcoin, not just in appreciation for great art, but to make a point. To demonstrate that, regardless of where you are in the world, Bitcoin can be delivered to your door. 

Take Pubpay, for example, a Nostr-powered music site built to elevate the musicians not just online, but in live performances. I got to see this app in action at a Bitcoin party in Las Vegas just a few weeks ago. The site seen on that massive screen showed off the artist on stage, with a massive QR code and a leaderboard of Zaps, tiny bitcoin donations made to the artist over the lightning network. Those who donated most rose to the top, claiming the bragging rights, while the artist claimed the sats. 

Have a listen to the trending tab of Wavlake, for example, another music dedicated Nostr site with a smooth design and instant access to surprisingly good music. 

Stories of onboarding new people to Bitcoin via Nostr social media apps like Primal are common at Bitcoin meetups and conferences. Primal is a Twitter clone of sorts built from the ground up around Nostr, it is without a doubt the fastest way to get into this social media niche, start growing your followers and start stacking sats by posting great content. 

Unlike the boring payments-only Bitcoin wallet whose design principles are now more than 15 years old, the Nostr app is fresh and has a direct pipeline of content that can be delivered to newcomers if done right, keeping them tumbling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Easy to Understand Nostr Fundamentals

Built on Bitcoin native cryptography, Nostr uses public addresses and privacy keys to authenticate its users, the same as Bitcoin wallets. Nostr public addresses start with “npub” while private keys start with “nsec”. Users sign posts or messages they want to publish to the Nostr network with their private key. Those signed posts can be found by looking at the same user’s public address. Like normal social media apps, users can follow and mute each other across the Nostr ecosystem. 

Data about who follows whom, and what they have published, is stored on relays, special servers that users can run themselves, and which sync with other relays to varying degrees, similar to Bitcoin nodes. 

Interfaces and apps can be built on top of Nostr to let users experience their social network in different ways, and many different approaches exist, from Twitter-like clones like Primal and Amathyst, to blogging platforms, music and even micro video sites like Divine. Basically, any website can be Nostr integrated as long as it makes its users’ identities Nostr compliant, and user-generated content becomes available via relays.

If you get tired of one app or don’t like how they are treating you, you can just grab your nsec and move to another. The new app will look up your npub, find all your friends, notes and preferences and let you continue connecting with them without issue. In other words, the network effects built on Nostr apps are owned by you, controlled by you and not by the platform. This is the big idea of Nostr, and it is why so many Bitcoiners are obsessed with it. 

A lot more than Social Media

It’s important to note that Nostr isn’t just a social network protocol; it is actually an open-source and actively growing information protocol that can transfer any kind of data. Devices can talk to each other via the nostr without you having to see them. In fact, a wide range of apps have already been built to transmit data over Nostr; many of those apps can be found in one of the most important places of this ecosystem, the Zapstore.

That’s right, Nostr has its own dedicated app store, and it’s quite impressive. Led by a gentleman known as Franzaps, this open source Nostr-powered app store gives you direct and often early access to over 150 apps in the Nostr ecosystem, published directly to it by its developers, signed cryptographically and publicly with their Nostr keys.

But Zapstore goes beyond just its Nostr niche; it lets you download a wide range of popular apps that publish to GitHub. We are talking over 3000 of the most popular apps, according to Fran, who talked to Bitcoin Magazine in an exclusive interview. Examples like Mullvad VPN and Brave browser can be found on the Zapstore, along with many others; it could very easily replace the Play Store and App Store for a privacy-conscious user, by passing the choke point that Google and Apple have been building inside mobile phones. 

The Zapstore software goes through significant lengths to verify the authenticity of apps via cryptography. Fran explained that “Android uses the APK format. All APKs have a developer signature, and this is what Android checks during updates.” Google now effectively KYCs its app developers, but Nostr is decentralized, so to know whether an app was actually published by its developer, Nostr social proof is used. “Nostr is a *social* protocol where keys carry social weight, so now that Zeus signed their wallet, you can be certain it’s the real one.” 

This concept of Nostr social proof is historically known as a Web of Trust. If you log into Zapstore with your Nostr keys, you get to see if anyone you follow has engaged with the publishers of the app, an early web of trust solution to the question of security and authenticity in a decentralized world. 

Fran estimates the Zapstore has around 4,000 daily users, with half installing or updating at least one app. These are estimates — he clarified, “because we value privacy, we have zero tracking in the client and must derive them from relay and Blossom server data.”  

Digital Identity on Hard Mode

Since authentication into Nostr is done via Bitcoin-style private-public key pairs, the security practices to protect your identity are similar. Rather than emails, passwords and password resets, in Nostr, you have to take precautions to make sure your nsec (private key) does not get hacked. If it ends up on the dark web somehow, there’s not much you can do to recover it, and your identity and data can not be transferred to a new key pair either; the hacker can take control. For years, I’ve criticized this design, but while a protocol-level solution to password resets in Nostr has not been widely adopted, other solutions have emerged, such as remote signers.

Amber, an app created by Greenart7c3, a popular Nostr developer, can generate and sign Nostr events remotely, giving you full control over the nsec, without exposing it to every website you connect to. This technology works quite well, with wide adoption. It takes advantage of NIP-46 — an open-source Nostr improvement proposal designed for this purpose.

If you have never had a Nostr account, Amber is a great place to start, have it generate your Nostr keys, and use it exclusively to login to Nostr apps. 

Zap Zap Zap!

The most viral and innovative element of Nostr, a feature called by some “the moat” of Nostr apps, is, of course, the Zap. Those small bitcoin tips, which can be as little as 1 satoshi, though can be much higher as well, with a new Nostr site designed specifically around onchain Zaps, making the minimal viable over 1500 sats. Zaps, as a result, can deliver an excess amount of dopamine to its recipients relative to the cost, a reinvention of the Facebook “like”, with the weight of the hardest money in the world behind it. The Zap anchors approval and value to something that can not be faked by sock-puppet accounts on social media. If you want to try to game the popularity of a post, you have to pay up. 

The potential of Zaps is likely still in its infancy, but may one day serve as a novel kind of advertisement medium, ultimately paying consumers to experience content, or simply as an undeniable sign of gratitude from Nostr users towards a piece of content and its creator. 

Setting up Zaps on your Nostr account however could be easier, there are two sides to getting your Zaps up and running, sending and recieving, and for both you need the right kind of Bitcoin wallet. Not all Bitcoin wallets are made the same, as you might know. Most focus on handling onchain transactions, which, for the most part, are not compatible with Zaps. You need a lightning wallet that supports NIP-57, which gives you an email like nym, such as bitcoinmagazine@b.tc, a human-readable address that can receive lightning payments. And you also need to be able to send Zaps from a lightning wallet, which does not have to be the same one you receive them to.

The easiest way to start by far is by using Primal.net, likely the most popular Nostr social media client to date. Primal has a deep range of tools for Nostr users and often serves as the gateway to the ecosystem. It has a wallet built in that manages to stay on the self-custodial side of the regulatory line, while also being a low effort, low cost lightning wallet. It does this by using Spark, a layer 2 protocol similar to lightning. 

Most important of all, Primal’s wallet support Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) a very powerful and standard in the ecosystem under NIP-47, which lets you connect Nostr enabled websites to a wallet, to enable Zaps, without giving every website custody of your satoshis.

Other options range from running an Alby lightning node, which costs $12 dollars a month on server fees, far too much if you ask me, though a viable option for power users. Or running an Electrum Lightning wallet from a home machine and making sure it is always open and online. From there, there’s a wide range of lightning node software that enthusiasts can set up and make compatible with NWC and Nostr Zaps.

A Glimpse of the Nostr Ecosystem

Including all the tools mentioned above, here are some of the most notable Nostr sites and tools I discovered in my deep dive into the Nostr ecosystem, in no particular order. 

Social media apps:

• Primal
• Dark Wisp
• Amathyst
• Zap.cooking
• Ditto
• divine.video 
• Wavlake (music!)
• Pubpay (music events!)

Web of trust tools:

• plebsvszombies.cc
• brainstorm.nosfabrica.com  

Bitcoin Wallets + Nostr:

• Bitcoin-safe (Multisig Nostr Coordination)
• Electrum (NWC lightning node)
• Albyhub
• Cashu.me

Remote Signing and Key Management:

• frostr.org 

• Amber 
• LNbits Remote Signer (hardware!)

Other:

• nostrhub.io
• Npub.world   
• Citrine (Run a Nostr relay on a phone)
• Morganite (Serve your own data, like images and video) 
• Zapstore.dev

This post Nostr is the Orange Web: Bitcoin’s Niche and Futuristic Alternative Internet first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

In February 2026, a single piece of cardboard sold for $16,492,000. The 1998 Pikachu Illustrator — the only known PSA 10 example of one of the rarest Pokémon cards in existence — was sold by Logan Paul through Goldin Auctions to A.J. Scaramucci, who called the purchase the first move in a “planetary treasure hunt” for the world’s rarest objects. It became the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction. Card collecting, long treated as a culture at the margins, is now impossible to ignore.

What’s new is what’s driving today’s prices: live-stream ripping has turned pack openings into spectator sport, auctions and secondary markets with advanced data-responsive metrics, new printing methods, and communities built around scarcity and authenticity are reshaping the category from first principles. It is, not by coincidence, the same vocabulary the bitcoin world has spoken for years — and the two cultures have begun to find each other.

As a lifelong creator and entrepreneur, Alladan Flinn grew up tearing open packs of Marvel cards and inventing characters of his own.  When NFTs got marketed as collectibles while lacking the scarcity of physical cards, he built what he saw as missing: launched in late 2022 and known both as Based Trading Cards and Bitcoin Trading Cards, his company makes limited, serialized cards designed to teach the principles of sound money and decentralization.

I sat down with Alladan to talk about where this is headed; community-driven commerce, the blurring line between physical and digital ownership, and why bitcoiners keep reaching for trading cards to carry the history of the movement. 

BMAG: The trading card industry has changed dramatically over the past five years. What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in 2026 that collectors may not have noticed yet? Do you think the market is putting a new premium on verifiable scarcity and authentication—and why so much change now?

Over the past five years, we’ve seen the industry explode, cool off, and now surge right back to the all-time highs we are in today. A huge driver of this is people simply looking for genuine community—they want those personal interactions with others who share their hobby. But at the same time, people are extremely worried about the broader economy. Because the trading card economy continues to rise, many are looking at the hobby as an alternative investment or even a potential lottery ticket. As for a new premium on verifiable scarcity and authentication, I don’t think there is a massive, market-wide callout for it just yet. However, we are seeing key influencers start to take a stance and ask companies to do better. This is definitely a growing trend right now, but we are just getting started. I believe there will be a lot more to come on this front, especially as the market eventually starts to dip.

BMAG: As a company founder, you’ve built a strong community around Based Trading Cards and its releases. How important is community engagement compared to traditional marketing in today’s collector landscape?

Right now, the indie card space is wild. On one hand, off-the-shelf printing tech like eufyMake is empowering creators to bypass traditional gatekeepers, which is a beautifully decentralized concept. On the other hand, it’s creating a lot of high-time-preference noise. While printing cards at home is a great way to produce art for collectors, it puts a massive risk on transparency and quick pop-up money grabs that can easily reprint cards and inflate their supply. This introduces real opportunities for counterfeits and rug pulls, meaning we are definitely in the danger zone of a hype cycle. There are so many new brands popping up using AI-generated artwork and relying on influencer hype rather than putting in the hard work to craft a meaningful story. Print-on-demand sets knocked out overnight are a warning sign that we might be hitting a top. Ultimately, these physical art collectibles only become truly valuable when they archive a story that outlasts the current trend. Brands that are doing the work, ensuring top-notch quality and honoring a deep, globally recognized narrative, the way One Piece does, are the ones that will thrive. The rest will wash out when the hype fades.

BMAG: What types of collectors are entering the space today, and how are they different from collectors who entered during previous generations?

The collector base right now is split between raw hype and seasoned experience. We have a huge influx of new people who run straight toward the loudest trend, easily falling for gimmicks because they haven’t developed a filter yet. In this hobby, just like in crypto, you usually have to live through a painful bear market before you stop buying the hype and start looking at the actual underlying value. The saving grace right now is that old collectors are returning to the space completely reinvigorated. They already know these lessons, and they are stepping up to mentor the newcomers. Every all-time high brings noise, but the return of legacy collectors is what gives the space its real foundation.

BMAG: Looking ahead, what innovations or changes do you think will have the biggest impact on the trading card industry over the next three to five years? Do you see physical cards and digital ownership converging, and what would that mean for collectors?

The real innovation over the next few years is going to come down to what can actually be achieved on cardboard. It is about how far you can stretch the medium and turn a physical card into a true work of art through complex layers of embellishments and advanced printing techniques. I also expect a major push toward the digital side, but I do not think NFTs will be the bridge that connects the physical and digital worlds. Instead, I see augmented reality taking over. The digital layer shouldn’t be about artificially inflating the financial value of the card. It should be about utility, giving collectors new ways to play, interact, and gamify their collections. At the end of the day, the fundamental value will always be anchored to the physical product itself. AR will simply be the tool that lets us experience that physical art in a completely new dimension. 

BMAG: Based Trading Cards has successfully merged bitcoin-culture with physical collectibles. Why do you think bitcoin enthusiasts have embraced trading cards as a way to celebrate and preserve the history of the movement—and where do you see that intersection heading?

Our success stems from the fact that we took the time to build a solid foundation. We did not jump out with any gimmicks or try to manufacture artificial hype around the cards. Instead, we took our time and let trust, transparency, and true scarcity be the driving force, applying the exact same low time preference ethos that defines Bitcoin itself. There is real proof of work in every card we produce. When we feature pioneers like Michael Saylor or Adam Back, we are not just using their likeness for a quick trend; we actually get their explicit permission and blessing to create these trading cards. This hobby is the perfect medium because it acts as a physical timestamp. A card proves you were there during the bull market and the bear market, weathering the highs and lows. It proves you were at the conferences and that you stayed when the tourists left. It is a tactile way to preserve the history of Bitcoin that can be collected and shared among friends and family, capturing the people, the books, the companies, and the artists together as a collective community.

Find the full Based Trading Cards collection and upcoming releases on their website, and follow @based_cards for drop announcements, community events, and artist features.

The BMAG Card Expo at Bitcoin Asia brings a full trading card floor to Hong Kong this August 27–28 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Expect card vendors, TCG tournaments, on-site grading, and a museum-grade centerpiece on public display. Vendors and sponsors can find table and partnership details here.

Card enthusiasts headed to Bitcoin Aisa can use code BMAGHK for a discount on tickets.

This post The Future of Collecting: Alladan Flinn of Based Trading Cards on Cards, Community, and Culture  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.

Bitcoin’s digital nature is the source of most of its advantages. Since it is programmable, it unlocks self-custody practices that can make theft and confiscation very difficult. Since it is digital, it can move at the speed of light, allowing movement of value and settlement across the globe in minutes. 

Nevertheless, Bitcoin has at times been criticized for being hard to grasp, literally. Bitcoin, in its natural state, can not be touched, can not be physically held; it can only be imagined and understood. To many people, that’s a significant barrier and one that has inspired quite a few attempts to bring the coin into meat space, but it is not easy. 

Entrepreneurs and artists alike, for well over a decade, have taken on the challenge of making Bitcoin physical in a way that retains its most valuable cash-like properties, and while nobody has entirely solved the problem, significant progress has been made, leaving a wonderful trail of artifacts along the way.

Casascius Coins

(Image by Stacks Bowers Galleries) 

Minted as early as September 6th, 2011, at a bitcoin price of barely $8 dollars, Casascius coins are without a doubt the most iconic physical Bitcoin artifacts in history, with many copycats since. Named after Mike Caldwell’s Bitcointalk forum nym, which appears to be an idiom for “call a spade a spade”, the Casascius coins developed many of the practices that other attempts at physical Bitcoin would innovate on over the years.

One problem with making Bitcoin physical is the handling of private key material. Since Bitcoin is digitally native, it can only live in a cryptographic private-public key pair, a secret that is used to generate a public key, with Bitcoin-compatible cryptography. In the case of the Casascius coin, Caldwell generated the private keys in an airgapped machine and printed them, gluing them to the iconic precious metal coins and then presumably destroyed the copy that could have been kept on his computer. He described the security precautions taken on his website for potential buyers to review.

The printed private key was then covered by specialized tamper-proof stickers, which, if removed, leave an obvious mark in a “honeycomb pattern”. Buyers of the coins could thus tell if the private keys in a Casascius coin had been exposed before purchase from a third-party vendor.

This key management issue is the biggest hazard in the creation of physical bitcoin, and one which, in the case of Caldwell, was dealt with by trusting him not to cheat. He was also very transparent and careful by the standards of the time. To this day, his reputation is strong if not legendary, so that trust was well placed by buyers who profited greatly from the collector’s value of the items, which to this day mark a premium on top of the bitcoin and precious metal values of the piece.

Casascius coins were discontinued in November 2013 after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a branch of the Treasury Department, informed developer Mike Caldwell that minting physical bitcoins qualified him as a money transmitter business with heavy compliance requirements. The trust involved in generating the private keys may have been a centralizing element that put a target on his back. 

RavenBit Coins

A year after Casascius coins shut down, RavenBit launched, with an attempt at decentralizing the trusted minting problem of physical bitcoins. The RavenBit coins, very similar in form factor to Casascius, did not come with pre-generated keys; instead, they came with the tamper-proof sticker unpealed, such that the user could generate their own keypair, paste it to the coin and slap the tamper-proof sticker on top.

This, in a sense, decentralized the mint and, in theory, that is a breakthrough, but in practice, it just created a thousand trusted mints, without brands, without reputations, using office printers that probably had malware on them. If you got a RavenBit coin from someone, how could you know that the person who bought it and generated the private key in there didn’t keep a copy or take proper precautions?

To date, the RavenBit project has been abandoned, but it probably taught the industry an interesting lesson. To make Bitcoin physical, we need to go higher tech.  

Opendimes

To route around the trusted mint problem — both at the center and at the edges – of physical bitcoins, Coinkite, the hardware wallet maker, designed the Opendime, a tiny computer purpose-built to be a Bitcoin bearer asset. Looking back on what motivated him, NVK, co-founder of CoinKite, told Bitcoin Magazine that, “Bitcoin is digital money. All we can do is an analog backup. Maybe someone cracks doing secp256k1 by hand in the future.” Meaning that currently, you always need some kind of computer to generate valid Bitcoin keys; that computer is the mint.  

Opendimes were designed around this fundamental fact. They have a computer chip that can generate a private-public key pair and store the private key securely, behind a silicon tamper-proof mechanism. 

Users have to feed it a file or some kind of input for entropy during setup, which the chip uses in part to generate the Bitcoin wallet, this grants further assurance that the random generation logic, which is open source, has an even better entropy input in the generation of those bitcoin keys. 

The public key of the generated Opendime wallet can always be seen by connecting the device to a computer, as you would a normal USB stick; its balance is visible on a block explorer.

Users can then send bitcoin to the opendime, but if they want to withdraw BTC from it? They have to physically puncture the device, which unlocks a circuit to access the private key, but renders the device visibly unsealed. 

Opendimes represent a major breakthrough in bearer asset technology and go for about $20 dollars each today, rising in price slightly with inflation from a low of about $13 each in 2016. As a result, they have also achieved iconic status, with artists embedding them in premium Bitcoin art and making them into Bitcoin meme culture. 

While $13 to $20 dollars is very cheap for hardware wallets, and the trusted mint issue is effectively solved by letting users fill the device with their own coins, the price and form factor are still far away from cash. On a price basis alone, $20 dollars is a big ask. If Casascius charged about 20% markup for his coins, then Opendimes should hold at least $100 worth of Bitcoin inside to be worth the hardware, and for use as a currency, which prices out most every day purchases.

Finally, the badass cypherpunk USB stick form factor, while epic, does not visibly tell the user much about its contents, making each device effectively non-fungible with other Opendimes and thus not cash-like. A cheaper and probably more fungible alternative is needed. 

The Satodime

Taking the Opendime concept to a more friendly form factor, the Belgian hardware wallet manufacturer Satochip created an open source credit card-like Bitcoin wallet, which has very similar qualities to the Opendime. It can generate Bitcoin private-public key pairs, and depending on the version, can even sign transactions. Users can interact with it via phone apps that talk to the card via NFC. Other form factors are available as well, like rings and coins that contain the same chip and capabilities. 

The cost for Satochip hardware can be as low as 13 Euros, depending on the bulk purchases, which is cheaper than an Opendime, which gets us closer to everyday cash purchases, but not by that much. The Satochip cards are intended to be high-security hardware wallet devices anyway, not daily-use cash containers. And these powerful and small computer chips are not cheap, hence the price floor above $10 that seems so hard to break through, for now. 

Too Expensive? The Fundamental Limits

So, how cheap does physical Bitcoin hardware need to be to make business sense, if it can make sense at all? 

According to the Federal Reserve, it costs anywhere from 4.1 cents to 11.3 cents to produce U.S. dollars. The smaller the value, the more expensive it is, with $1 bills incurring a 4.1% loss in production costs. 

That means that to justify a 20,000 Satoshis bill — roughly $16 dollars at today’s prices — the hardware needs to cost well under a dollar. Most computer chips powerful enough to do Bitcoin cryptography are above that price target, but there is one chip that demonstrates what is possible, the NXP’s NTAG X DNA chip.

Available in sticker antenna form factor, a couple of millimeters thin, this NXP chip can handle a variety of cryptographic primitives, such as ECDSA and ECC. It can create secrets, sign them and even encrypt a message. However, while powerful, it does not include the Bitcoin cryptography curve, secp256k1, which means it can’t do Bitcoin things natively. 

Nevertheless, this 2025 generation NTAG can be purchased for roughly $3, if you can find any supply, demonstrating how low the price can go on a chip capable of performing cryptographic functions.

Sadly, the cash-like form factor most of the world is used to, with flexible bills that people can fold into their pocket, can be very damaging to computer chips, a fact that NVK says he learned from experience, as they experimented with Bitcoin bearer assets hardware. 

The closest anyone may have come to the cash-like format is the OfflineCash company, with a beautiful, collection-worthy set of Bitcoin-denominated bills that have an NTAG-style NFC chip, which stores a user-generated key, while the company generates a second key on their servers, to create a 2 of 2 multisignature wallet. The Server key is on a time lock, degrading the multisig address to a 1 of 1 wallet, from which the user can eventually withdraw the bitcoin. This tries to get around the trusted mint issue, but ends up just replicating the many mints problem. Though their cash-like form factor is undeniably gorgeous.

The costs of producing a Bitcoin native NTAG can easily hit a few million dollars, and implementing Bitcoin’s cryptography in this way can be fraught with errors if manufacturers are not experts on the topic. It would also need to be fully open source to guarantee that there are no backdoors. 

There’s one more fundamental problem with physical Bitcoin bearer assets. Even if you could get a cheap enough chip in a cash-like format, you would always need online access to verify its authenticity —that the cash is loaded with real bitcoin— since the asset is unavoidably digital. The problem could be solved by simply trusting an issuing mint of Bitcoin-denominated cash instruments, and believing in the face value of a redeemable bill, but that would miss the ideal of self-custodied, trusted cash. Though it probably would work in a friendly jurisdiction. 

So, while it would be cool to have physical Bitcoin bills like those created by OfflineCash Company with a bearer asset secure chip and not trusted mint risk, we are still a ways away. And it might actually be overkill today, since no one would have bitcoin-denominated change anyway, so you’d end up getting fiat cash back, but maybe one day, post-hyperbitcoinization. NVK does believe there’s a superior solution to the cash format, at least for the foreseeable future, which is why Coinkite created the Tapsigner. 

The Tapsigner

Built on the Coinkite Bitcoin NFC chip, a technology similar to the X DNA NTAG by NXP, though perhaps more powerful and thus more expensive, the Tapsigner comes in the familiar debit card form factor, with a secure element chip, NFC tap to pay and cool designs to choose from. Inside the chip, though, is a fully capable Bitcoin wallet, with scep256k1 cryptographic capabilities, letting it create Bitcoin keys, store the secret securely enough and sign transactions internally, to be broadcast by an accompanying phone, which serves as a critical visual aid for the user to verify transactions.

The Tapsigner can function as a bearer asset, but perhaps even better as a refillable hardware wallet that can spend specific amounts of bitcoin, like any credit card, resolving the issue of change, and enabling tap to pay to wallets that support the already popular feature.

With cards like the Tapsigner, which cost about $20 bucks, the problem of bitcoin-denominated payments returns to good old-fashioned retail adoption, and integration with major business accounting and payments software, which Cashapp and Square are blowing wide open. 

This post The History and Future of Physical Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

The Bitcoin Open, a combined golf and poker tournament organized by Bitcoin Sports Network and Satstreet, is scheduled for June 8, 2026, at Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario. The event will take place at the club during its 50th anniversary year.

Glen Abbey Golf Club, designed by Jack Nicklaus and opened in 1976, is one of Canada’s most recognized golf venues. It has hosted the Canadian Open multiple times and is known for its championship-level layout and history in professional golf. The course is located approximately 30 minutes west of Toronto and serves as a public golf facility with a significant legacy in Canadian sports.

The Bitcoin Open consists of a scramble-format golf tournament on the main championship course during the day, followed by a Texas Hold’em poker tournament in the evening. The golf portion uses a team scramble format, typically with groups of four players. The field size is limited, with organizers noting strong demand and a reduced number of remaining team spots as of mid-May 2026.

Prizes for the event include two separate hole-in-one awards, each consisting of one Bitcoin. Additional golf prizes cover the longest drive and closest to the pin. Golf winners will also receive tickets to the 2027 Bitcoin Golf Championship, scheduled to take place in Nashville, Tennessee, ahead of the 2027 Bitcoin Conference. The winner of the poker tournament receives $5,000 CAD in stablecoins.

A list of hole sponsors for the event has been announced. These include APX Lending, Tetra Digital Group, The Canadian Bitcoin Conference, Satstreet, True North Airways, Ledn, Gator Mining Inc., Wealthsimple, CAD DIGITAL, PRIVATEDEBT Partners, McCarthy Tetrault, and Samara Asset Group.

Bitcoin Sports Network operates as an organizer of Bitcoin-themed sports and lifestyle events, including golf tournaments held in conjunction with major Bitcoin conferences. Satstreet, a Canadian Bitcoin-focused company, is co-hosting the event and serving as one of the hole sponsors. The two organizations are collaborating on this Canadian edition of The Bitcoin Open.

The event is open to participants from the Bitcoin community, including builders, investors, and others active in the industry. Registration is handled through the official event website, with tickets covering both the golf and poker components. The schedule includes on-course activities, meals, and networking periods at the venue.

This marks the first time The Bitcoin Open is held at Glen Abbey. Previous Bitcoin Sports Network golf events have taken place in locations such as Las Vegas, often timed near larger Bitcoin conferences. The Canadian event is positioned as a standalone gathering in the Toronto area.

Glen Abbey’s 50th anniversary provides additional context for the timing. Since its opening, the club has been a central part of Canadian golf, training professionals and hosting amateur and professional competitions.

This post Bitcoin Open Heads to Iconic Glen Abbey Golf Club for June 8, 2026 Event first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Located in the heart of the country’s capital, El Salvador’s BINAES library stands tall as a monument to the love of knowledge, literature, and technology—accessible to the public 24 hours a day, for free. Positioned directly in front of and carefully aligned with the Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador, BINAES is also surrounded by the Palacio Nacional de El Salvador (to its left/side) and the Jardín Centroamérica, all symbols and reminders of a dream. The dream of a society that elevates beauty, the love of knowledge and faith, and shares them with the world.

Having traveled to many countries and cities in my lifetime, I have to say that the safety, tranquility and cleanliness of this area of San Salvador was remarkable. An unignorable contrast to the city squares of many western capitals, often unsafe, filled with garbage, and host to the homeless and drug addicted. Instead, both outside the library, in the gardens and walkable roads of the city square, as well as inside the library, palace and gardens, children and their families can be seen at peace, running around, enjoying this national treasure. 

Donated to El Salvador by the Chinese government, BINAES is 7 stories tall with a wide range of amenities, including a cafeteria on the first floor and an Italian restaurant on the 7th. Plenty of room to host events of various sizes, public and private. BINAES stands out with an elegant futurist design, congruent with its facilities and a vision for the future of El Salvador, which also prominently features Bitcoin technology and educational materials. 

With a strong focus on supporting families and the next generation, the second floor is a young children’s playground filled with educational tools, books and physical entertainment options for children to unleash their energy. The third floor has a large section dedicated to LEGOs, a powerful educational tool known to stimulate a love of building in children, with multiple tables where parents sit with their kids and play. It also hosts children’s video games, such as collaborative and family-friendly games like Mario Party and the legendary Minecraft. 

The fourth floor is aimed at children 8-12 as well as fans of fantasy and fiction, with dedicated Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter areas, as well as hundreds of manga books featuring some of the greatest stories of the Japanese genre. Many of these areas include collection grade legos and merchandise from the films, as well as, of course, full libraries of books for each fictional universe. 

The fifth floor is home to literature, history and books for adults, considered the core of the library, with thousands of books on all major genres of knowledge. Among them, a vast section on social sciences, which includes economics, hosting some samples of libertarian Austrian economists like Mises, Milton Friedman, Rothbard, and Ayn Rand, though not too deep a variety. 

This specific topic, which is very important to the history, economic theory of Bitcoin and its cultural roots, is one that the library got some criticism for years ago when it was first completed. Back then, a popular tweet claimed the library had no works on libertarian economic theory, something which today has changed, but could improve further. Their collection, for example, had no fictional work by Rand, only a couple of her philosophy books; this is something that can actually be changed easily enough, though, as the library does accept book donations. Donors can contribute by first emailing BINAES staff at consultalealbibliotecario@cultura.gob.sv. 

The sixth floor is the high-tech area. Coming out of the elevators, the first thing you see is a Bitcoin-shaped bookshelf with a solid collection of Bitcoin literature, covering its economics, software architecture and history of money, among many other topics. This specific installation is a project by Alejandra Guajardo, also known as Miss Bitcoin, the Salvadorian model who represented the nation in the Miss Universe pageant of 2022. Her Bitcoin Book Shelf initiative looks to deploy installations of this sort in libraries all over the world, with an expansion to Mexico in the works. Bitcoiners who want to lead the installation of Bitcoin bookshelves in their local libraries can contact her to make it happen. 

In the center of the same floor is a beautiful Bitcoin lounge area, with another similarly shaped bookshelf and various Bitcoin plushies called Little Hodlers led by artist and Bitcoin evangelist Lina Seiche. A massive screen shows Mempool.space, a slick and very popular Bitcoin block explorer, showing live network data and statistics. 

This floor is also home to 3D printers, tools for robotics work, interactive digital screen-style whiteboards, a full gaming area with top-of-the-line gaming consoles, a virtual reality area, computers available to the public for research, and a digital collection of over 9 million books accessible to the public. As well as various dedicated office-like environments for students and teams to take advantage of and get some work done. 

Last but not least is the seventh floor, home to the art gallery, which at the time of my visit was hosting a variety of art pieces, showing the history of El Salvador through the architecture of iconic locations in the area. In the center of this art hall, between the gallery and the Basílico Italian Bistro, are photographs of Bukele and first lady Gabriela Bukele, perfectly aligned with the Metropolitan Cathedral across the square, a beautiful architectural detail that reinforces a harmonic union between the classic arts and faith.

Overall, despite the high-tech Chinese design of the library, which somewhat contrasts against the classical Roman architecture of the area, the BINAES library is likely to stand as a visionary legacy of the self-described Philosopher King and his administration.  

This post Bukele’s Futuristic BINAES Library Blends Books, Bitcoin, and Family Play in Revitalized Capital first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Dear Reader,

I write this letter to you before the sun has made her first appearance. The moon still reigns on this day, April 24th 2026. At this same exact time, 5:00 AM, only two years prior, my wife Lauren and I were both awaken dramatically to sirens, flashing lights, and brisk commands shouted over a megaphone.

“Keonne Rodriguez, this is the FBI, come out with your hands up IMMEDIATELY!” was repeatedly shouted. Over 50 armed FBI tactical agents pointed their assault rifles at our chests. Drones, armored vehicles, assault rifles, men dressed like GI-JOE, all swarmed the quiet humble small town where we lived. Once arrested, handcuffed, placed in the back of a police cruiser, Biden’s lackeys descended on my home like a swarm of ants hopped up on adrenaline.

The drone was flown through the house first to clear the way, the GI-JOEs followed, finally the army of blue haired DEI hires and the puny men who looked like they would be defeated by the thought of a single push-up shuffled their way in. I knew the tech team the moment I saw them.

They would be going through my hard drives and USB sticks. I was most worried about my wife who at this point was still detained in handcuffs. I was relieved when they let her leave and my worry immediately was directed toward my cat who I knew would quite happily take advantage of the hubbub and the wide open doors to go on one of her unmonitored adventures around the village.

That is how my day started on April 24, 2024. Two years later, I start my day markedly differently. I wake up at FPC Morgantown. Federal prison. I am told when I can sleep, when I can wake, when I can eat, when I can shower, what I can wear, and even to some degree what I can think.

My days are structured around shouted commands over a loud speaker and a book of regulations I am expected to follow. In prison your identity is stripped from you. In here it is ‘us and them’, convicts and guards, inmates and CO’s. Don’t get me wrong, most of the CO’s are decent enough, they are here to do a job, and they do it well. Treat them with respect and don’t mess around with contraband (mostly cellphones and vapes) and they will generally treat you well enough. But at the end of the day, they go home and you don’t. So here I am, inmate # 11404-511, a federal prisoner.

Two years ago today an overzealous and politicized FBI under corrupt leadership, under a corrupt presidential administration, acting under a corrupt Department of Justice that empowered a corrupt US Attorney that delegated authority to corrupt AUSA’s; indicted, raided, and arrested me and Bill, two American software developers. Just another two casualties in the Biden ‘War on Crypto’.

Two small fishes with no political friends or influence. Two guys who wrote software and gave away code that worked so well they had no choice but to change the rules of the game and go after us with the full force and might of the United States government.

And by God, their calculations were correct. Barely anyone cared. Bill and I couldn’t even raise enough money for our legal defense. We were left high and dry to fend for ourselves against an adversary with unlimited resources. The government took out the only effective non custodial, open source, privacy tool in the entire space and there was barely a whimper of protest. From some corners of the industry there was even celebration. This wasn’t a war on crypto, in a war both sides have a fighting chance. This was a massacre.

There is no doubt that the ‘War On Crypto’ was started and waged fiercely under Joe Biden. But Biden himself has proven to be a ship without a rudder. He was clearly a man who did not know his ass from his elbow. He was nothing more than a marionette puppet whose strings were being pulled by aides and henchmen receiving orders in secret from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and her self described ‘anti crypto army’. The War On Crypto truly belongs to her.

The Trump administration inherited this war, and won the election partly because the democrats couldn’t steal it in the same way they did in 2020 – that was a trick that would only work once – but also because Trump appealed to young men of every race.

A major reason for this appeal was 1) His promise to free Ross and 2) his promise to end the war on crypto. In many ways he has made good progress. Ross was freed as promised and the administration began to dismantle the levers of power that were the big guns in the ‘war on crypto’. The SEC was reigned in, the tide had begun to turn against the luddite candlestick makers in favor of the electric lightbulbs.

The deputy attorney general – now the acting attorney general – Todd Blanche issued a memo early in the administration intended to reign in rogue prosecutors, explaining in exquisite detail that America does not regulate by prosecution and does not hold responsible software developers for the acts of their end users. Blanche and the new administration drew a line in the sand. The war appeared to be ending.

What most people miss about this ‘War on Crypto’ is that it is not an ordinary war. It is not an us versus them war. It is very much a civil war. An us versus us war. As such, when Blanche published his memo, when Trump ordered the end of the war, the infantry on the ground tasked with obeying those orders – the line prosecutors, the AUSA’s, the army of unelected bureaucratic lifers – ignored them. Willfully and explicitly.

They continued just as they have always done, perhaps change a charge from (b) to (c), or change the language they use to make sure that they get away with blatant insubordination. The administration has been dealing with this treachery from day one, in all areas, not just crypto.

Trump identified the problem during his first term. He called it the swamp or the deep state. I call it the administrative state. The administrative state was a problem for him during his first term. It orchestrated the biggest election heist ever witnessed in 2020.

It then came after Trump attempting to put him in prison for life. And it continues today unabated during the second administration. Dismantling of the administrative state followed by the full scale liquidation of the army of apparatchiks that lord over us, will be, if he is able to achieve it, Trump’s lasting legacy.

So where do we stand now? The ‘War On Crypto’ is half won. The SEC has largely been reigned in. The DOJ under Bondi and now Blanche has not brought forward new charges under these novel theories conjured up during the last administration, so to some degree Blanche’s memo did work.

Elizabeth Warren and her ‘anti crypto army’ have decidedly lost, just as the luddites did, just as the horse carriage men protesting the automobile did. She was always going to lose, it was just about how much damage she could do on the way down. With the war half won, a problem remains, combatants have been left behind.

One of the US Military’s guiding principles is that no man gets left behind. Heaven and earth will be moved at extraordinary expense to retrieve a single American behind enemy lines (as has just been witnessed in Iran).

Well, in the ‘War on Crypto’, men have been left on the battlefield. Forgotten and left to bleed out. The war will not be won until Bill and myself are extricated from behind enemy lines.

The war will not be won until Roman Storm stops being shot at with ammunition provided by the last corrupt administration and carried forward by the wolves in the hen house of this administration. When we are all home with the threat of retribution by the most powerful and mighty state bearing down on us no longer credible, then we can celebrate the victory of this war.

Until the crypto prisoners are free, none of us are free.

Write to Keonne:

Keonne Rodriguez
11404-511
FPC Morgantown
FEDERAL PRISON CAMP
P.O. BOX 1000
MORGANTOWN, WV 26507

Mailing Guidelines:

Please note: You can only send letters (no more than 3 pages long). No packages or other items are allowed. Books, magazines, and newspapers must be sent directly from the publisher or an online retailer like Amazon. All letters must include a full return address and sender name to be delivered.

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

This post Samourai Letter #6: Two Years In first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Keonne Rodriguez.

Revolutions leave behind artifacts. In the summer of 2011, a painter named Alex Schaefer set up an easel on a sidewalk in Van Nuys, California, and began painting the Chase Bank branch across the street. In his mind, the building was on fire — flames pouring from the windows, black smoke rising over the palm trees, the Chase logo still legible through the heat. He worked en plein air, the way the Impressionists had worked the Seine and the hay fields, except the subject was a branch of the largest bank in America three years after it had been bailed out with public money. A passerby called the police. When the artwork sold on eBay for $25,200 to a German collector, Schaefer did the only logical thing and painted more.

The artworks gathered in Relics of a Revolution at Bitcoin 2026 trace a lineage of dissent that connects street-level protest to the birth of Bitcoin itself — a Tokyo sidewalk in the snow with Kolin Burges, a Los Angeles overpass under wheat paste with Mear One, a botched police raid in Ohio answered with songs and a flag suit with Afroman. Schaefer’s Banks on Fire paintings belong to that same lineage, and they arrive with an art-historical pedigree that sharpens the point. Art critics have drawn the obvious line to Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68), the painting that put a cultural institution up in flames and hung it back on the museum’s own wall. Schaefer swapped the museum for the bank, the oil-crisis era for the bailout era, and took the painting out of the studio and onto the sidewalk in front of the building itself — a fact that earned him questioning by LAPD officers who wanted to know if he was a terrorist planning to follow through on his canvases. “Some might say the banks are the terrorists,” he told them. In July 2012 he was arrested outside a downtown Chase branch for chalking the word “Crooks” next to the logo, and spent twelve hours in jail on a misdemeanor vandalism charge.

Born in Los Angeles in 1969 and trained at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Schaefer spent eight years as a digital artist — including on the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy — before leaving the screen for the easel and returning to ArtCenter to teach the fundamentals of painting, drawing, and composition. Like Mear One, he spent years working out of downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood that functioned as ground zero for a decade of American unrest — Occupy LA camped on the lawn of City Hall a few blocks from his studio, the 2012 chalk protests that swept across the country had one of their flashpoints outside a downtown Chase branch, and the area around 5th and San Julian stayed a visible stress test of every system the bailouts were supposed to have fixed. 

The Banks on Fire series began in 2009, in the immediate wake of the financial collapse itself. “All the problems in America,” he has said, “to me seem to point to the same root problem. Which is: the money is bullshit.” The Bitcoin community found him quickly, and for obvious reasons. The Genesis Block’s embedded Times headline — “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” — is the same diagnosis in text that Schaefer was making in oil, on the sidewalk, while the building still stood.

I sat down with Alex Schaefer ahead of his panel at Bitcoin 2026 to talk about plein air protest, the 2008 crash, the architecture of bailouts, and what it means to paint a building on fire while the building is still there.

BMAG: Alex, you started the Banks on Fire series in 2009 — not in a studio, but on the sidewalk, en plein air, in front of the actual buildings. For people encountering this work for the first time, can you set the scene? What was happening in the country when you first set up an easel across the street from a Chase branch, and what made the sidewalk the right place to paint it?

Alex: In 2009 I had been (and continue to enjoy) “plein air” painting which means working on location outdoors directly from life; it’s very much associated with the French Impressionists and it’s a very enjoyable thing to do. Since I was living in LA at the time, my favorite motif to paint was urban landscape and I was often set up with an easel and art supplies on the sidewalk so I was used to making art in public. Also in 2009 I was starting to really pay attention to financial news and began a learning process about it that continues to this day. At the time I slowly began to think that the 2008 FiNaNciAL cRiSiS!!1! and subsequent trillion dollar bailouts were not what we were made to believe. Add to this a friend telling me about a show called the Keiser Report. Now Max and Stacy, along with all sorts of news and information on YouTube, are educating me with wit and insight about what was exactly happening. I could only draw one conclusion: This was a crime spree and not only were the perpetrators getting away with it, they were getting paid. Outrageous. AntiAmerican, AntiCapitalist, Anti-Law and Order. A couple years later and duly radicalized, I was seeking a way to express my outrage. I was plein air painting a lot, especially with a friend who lived in Van Nuys. In his neighborhood I saw this Chase Bank that used to be a Washington Mutual that used to be a Home Savings and Loan and it was this beautiful Millard Sheets designed mid-century modern building. That was the eye chocolate falling into the peanut butter of my mind: I am going to paint en plein air this Chase bank like the roof is on fire. One day later I took the following photo:

BMAG: There’s an art-historical line that keeps getting drawn between your work and Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire — a painting that set a cultural institution alight and then hung back on the walls of the institution itself. You swapped the museum for the bank, the oil-crisis era for the bailout era, and took the work out of the studio and onto the sidewalk. When you look at that lineage, do you see yourself as extending a conversation Ruscha started, or diagnosing something he couldn’t have seen yet in the 1960s — the specific rot of a financial system that now runs the culture that used to run it? Is it Deja Vu all over again with the current Middle East situation? 

Alex: I think something that the two paintings share is they were born out of a sense of outrage. But different in that one is about financial terrorism and the other about lack of institutional representation for artists. Ruscha painted his piece from 1965 to 1968, which interestingly was when the French were putting tremendous pressure on the US dollar by swapping their paper dollars for actual gold, which at the time was an incredible bargain in a rigged market. Everyone was feeling the inflation, I’m sure even Ed Ruscha, from stupid foreign and domestic policy government spending, the French knew why (Vietnam), and a couple years later Nixon closed the gold window, letting loose wanton money creation on a scale never imagined. Ironically this turned out to be a benefit for the “Capital A” Art Market via the CIA flooding contemporary American Art auction houses with cash promoting this idea of American Exceptionalism; i.e., not only did America beat you commies to the Moon, our art is better too (read: more expensive). 1973 was the famous Bob Scull auction of his contemporary art collection that broke all price records at the time. The game was on.

BMAG: The LAPD questioned you as a possible terror suspect while you were painting, and in 2012 you were arrested for chalking the word “Crooks” next to a Chase logo — twelve hours in jail on a misdemeanor vandalism charge. Mear was censored and nearly cancelled. Kolin was told by Mt. Gox that if he kept protesting everyone would lose their bitcoin. Afroman had seven deputies with assault rifles kick in his door. What did being treated as a threat by the state teach you about the artwork itself — and about what the institutions you were painting were actually afraid of?

Alex: The powers that be, the institutions, want the public to be mad at each other. Picture those hierarchy pyramid illustrations and on one level is “The Public” and above them on the pyramid are layers like Police, the Justice System, Politicians, C-Suite Executives, Banks, Central Banks, Satan etc. Every layer above The Public over centuries has created ways to exert power over Us, for all sorts of reasons but mainly because they are afraid of Us directing the sum of all our anger at the aforementioned upper layers. They use their favorite trick and divide The Public into different factions with each side getting their own custom grievances and scapegoats. Then the mainstream media does its job of winding people up on both sides and voila: anger and outrage side to side and Us toward each other, but none of that directed above. As soon as someone in The Public layer starts calling out an injustice in an upper layer, troubles will come to them. Everyone you mentioned, Mear, Kolin, Afroman, 1st Amendment auditors, tax protestors etc., all know this. My experience with this ongoing Burning Banks series has taught me many things over the years about art, the art world, the financial world, Truth, Justice, the American Way etc. Great things, scary things, profound things… But the first thing it taught me is the power of spectacle and that when the spirit moves you powerfully to do something, even though it might seem a little weird or scary you gotta go with it.

BMAG: You’ve said, plainly, that “the money is bullshit” — that all the disconnected problems in America point back to the same root. How did you arrive at that diagnosis, and when you first encountered bitcoin, did it feel like confirmation of something you’d already been painting, or like a different kind of answer to the same question?

Alex: I think I would more accurately say that “fiat” money aka currency aka the federal reserve note, is bullshit. Fiat currency was invented centuries ago to wage war and the US PetroDollar is no different. Endless war, wars of aggression, the War on drugs, the War on cancer… you name it there’s a war going on either for or against it and at the end of the day it’s all funded by the Federal Reserve. Every terrible idea put forth by our so-called leaders gets funded. It’s true: “The love of money is the root of all evil’ but in the case of the US Dollar, it’s actually the money itself not just the love of it. The way that it’s created out of thin air and the implications of that fundamentally shows nothing but utter disregard and disrespect for the value of human life and human labor. Despite that, civilization needs “money”. Good money that is. The social construct that is money is older than capitalism, it’s frankly as old as society itself and is the means for complex and specialized societies to form, grow and flourish. For millennia that function was fulfilled by gold and silver, they possess the classical qualities of Sound Money in that they are scarce, fungible, transportable, divisible, durable, a unit of measurement and medium for exchange. Once you accept this as a fact, then you learn about bitcoin, it slowly then suddenly dawns on a person that it is the greatest form that the concept of Money has ever taken. And then you start to really think that if we can fix the money, we truly can fix the world! Defund Evil!

BMAG: This exhibition is called Relics of a Revolution, and it puts your work in conversation with Kolin’s Mt. Gox protest sign, Mear’s Occupy-era murals and wheatpaste protest posters, and Afroman’s flag suit — alongside an original copy of The Times from January 3, 2009, the newspaper Satoshi encoded into the Genesis Block. The dollar bill works you’re showing here take a different route to the same thesis. What do you want someone walking through this exhibition to take away — especially someone who knows bitcoin as a price ticker but has never thought of it as the continuation of a fight that artists, cypherpunks, and protestors have been in for decades?

Alex: Honestly, as with all my paintings, I want people to be visually struck by something first and foremost… Whether it’s the paint surface, the color, the contrast, the effect of light, the imagery, just be interesting to the eyes first, then the mind. I find the low resolution pixelated quality of the Devaluation series pieces to be fascinating to look at. There is an interesting interplay happening between the eye and mind of the viewer; the painting is complete but it is also “completed” in the viewer’s mind. The viewer gives more to the image by way of their imagination than is actually visually imparted by the painting itself. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” Then one might question the subject matter and how it’s depicted with the concept of Devaluation. At what point can the painting become so pixelated that you can’t even make it out for what it is anymore? Just like at what point can the Dollar become so watered down and extended and pretended that it entirely loses its “Tinkerbell Effect” and ceases to perform it’s crucial function around the World. We may find out.

This is Part IV of the Relics of a Revolution interview series accompanying the Relics of a Revolution exhibition. Part I features Kolin Burges, Part II Mear One, Part III Afroman. 

Fix the money. Fix the world.

Clean and minimal: Schaefer will exhibit artwork on view at Bitcoin 2026, April 27–29, at The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, and will appear on a speaking panel moderated by Dennis Koch titled “Looking at Bitcoin Art Through a Protest Lens” alongside Kolin Burges and Mear One. Bid on Schaefer’s work HERE. 

The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference. Since 2019, the BMAG conference art gallery has facilitated more than 120 BTC in art and collectible sales. Learn more about BMAG at museum.b.tc. Follow BMAG on twitter @BMAG_HQ.

Bundle your Bitcoin 2026 pass with a stay at The Venetian and get your fourth night free. Use code AFTERS for a free After Hours Pass, or get your pass alone here. 

This post Relics of a Revolution, Part IV: The Bank Was Already Burning first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.

In the wild west of money, where a forgotten password to your Bitcoin wallet can mean the difference between fortune and ruin, comes the taut 31-minute Bitcoin action-thriller Self Custody (2026). Co-directed by Garrett Patten (who also stars as the desperate lead) and Fernando Ferro, the micro-feature is produced by Patten’s own TBK Productions in association with Tucci & Company. 

The film features Entourage alum Adrian Grenier in a key supporting role, alongside UFC champion and Olympic gold medalist Henry Cejudo in his acting debut, and House star Odette Annable. After a private Sundance screening and pickup by Inaugural Entertainment for distribution, Self Custody (2026) arrived on Tubi and Plex before landing on Amazon Prime Video—delivering a compact, terrifying yet entertaining tale drawn from real-world stories of lost Bitcoin wallets.

Scott, a family man, finds himself in financial trouble after failing to organize his finances when his family friend and accountant gives him a call. Turns out Scott had gotten a signing bonus from some tech company he worked for in 2014, paid in Bitcoin. Today, presumably well into the 2020’s, that bonus is worth over 14 million dollars. The film follows Scott as he tries to claim this Bitcoin, quickly realizing his self-custody setup was done improperly, and he does not remember the PIN code to the wallet. 

The film is overall negative on self-custody as a practice, presenting the absolute worst-case scenario for a Bitcoin or crypto owner. A series of mistakes, presented as innocent but really born out of a lack of study or knowledge of the technology and industry, led Scott to catastrophic loss, in admittedly a very entertaining and action-packed fashion. It is a testament to the maturity of the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry that a film called “Self Custody” can end up on Amazon Prime, even if painting a broadly negative picture of this technology, which reimagines the financial system.

Overall, the film is worth a watch, and hopefully the directors and producers will fall further down the rabbit hole and tell the stories of Ukrainians and Iranians escaping war with their life savings thanks to Bitcoin, to show the other side and upside of radical financial sovereignty. 

SPOILER ALERT – Detailed Review

The film opens up with an intimidating statement: “It is estimated that more than 20% of all bitcoin, valued at over 200 billion, has been lost or stolen beyond recovery.” Shown in white text over a black background, the claim sets the stage for a story that is unlikely to end in a happy ending. 

The statement is also incorrect. The widely reported claim that 20% of Bitcoin is inaccessible, roughly 4 million bitcoins, refers specifically to ‘lost’ funds. This kind of research is possible in part because we can see the coins not moving for over a decade, in many cases, mined to addresses or ancient wallet types that are effectively obsolete or rarely used today. The primary source of the study is probably Chainalysis, in their 2017 era work on the topic, though the film does not provide a source for this claim.

According to Investopedia, the 3.7 million coins in question have been lost, not stolen. Lost to bad wallet setups, many in the early days of Bitcoin mining, and much of this claim remains an assumption, since it’s not easy to prove that such coins are really inaccessible. The claim that so many coins have been stolen — particularly from self-custody — is not backed up by the facts at all, and is clearly there to set the mood in the film, in what we can generously call artistic liberty over the reality at hand. If anything, a much larger amount of Bitcoin has been stolen from custodial, centralized exchanges that try to bring bank-like legacy finance institutions to the Bitcoin world. 

The first scene introduces the audience to Scott and his family’s financial advisor and friend Cooper, who delivers the good news. Scott, thanks to a signing bonus paid in Bitcoin from work with a 2014 tech company, is now rich! But there’s a catch: he has to get access to the Bitcoins, whatever that means. 

Soon, Scott is sitting in front of his computer, opening a folder that contains the 14 million dollars in bitcoin. We see a Trezor hardware wallet and what appear to be some seed plates. It’s unclear if the plates are metal or just paper to write the 12-24 words that back up the Bitcoin wallet, but what soon becomes clear is that there are no words. Whenever Scott presumably created this wallet, he failed to write down the magic words. Mistake number one. 

It’s useful to note that in a normal self-custody setup, you would not usually store the magic words with the hardware wallet, which kind of defeats the purpose of the hardware wallet’s pin protection and advanced security features. If someone opened up Scott’s office drawer and found the Trezor, they could just put it aside and take the backup words — he had backed them up. Instead, a savvy Bitcoiner would engrave the words on metal plates, for which there are many products on the market, and bury them or stash them in a place more secure than his office drawer.

The Trezor would then serve as his secure computing environment, which is connected to computers that have internet access. The Trezor signs the transactions inside its own chip, and transmits the signed transaction to the user’s computer via USB cable, air gapping the user’s private keys, from the user’s most likely compromised computer. But that can all happen if the user has the pin, which Scott does not. 

The user starts trying to guess pins and quickly realizes that he has a limited number of attempts. This isn’t just to make life difficult for people; it is a security feature that prevents a thief from trying pins forever until they find the right one. Once 10 failed attempts are made, the device deletes its contents, a factory reset of sorts, deleting the bitcoin keys. By the time Scott realizes he has no idea what the pin code is, he has two attempts left, not a good situation to be in. Usually, a user would have the backup words somewhere to regain access even if the hardware wallet got erased due to incorrect PIN attempts. But not Scott! No, he didn’t get one thing right.

Turns out, the 12 words are gone, not clear where they went. Most, if not all, Bitcoin wallets are very annoying to the user about writing those words down, with pop-ups and reminders. Even back in 2014, wallets were very explicit that not backing up those words could lead to loss. Scott, we have to assume did not take the care needed during the setup, nor did he listen to his boss at the time, Kevin, whom we get introduced to next.

Amy, Scott’s wife, finds him lying on the office floor in a mess, papers and devices everywhere. He finally opens up to her about the situation after a nasty fight the night before about the family finances. She convinces him to call Kevin, the crypto expert, rich guy who employed Scott back in 2014.

Soon, we see Kevin in an airport hangar walking towards a private yet cool-looking assistant who passes the phone to her boss, Scott is on the line. Kevin finds it in his heart and busy schedule to deliver a mouthful to his old employee and ex-friend, chastising him for not writing the magic words, giving a speech about financial crypto revolutions and coming off as a condescending and detached Silicon Valley billionaire. At some point, Scott asks if Kevin ever had kids, which he scoffs at. The conversation ends with Kevin putting Scott in contact with ‘a guy’ who can break into that Trezor. 

Here’s the thing: There’s a lot wrong with this picture, at least when it comes to Bitcoin. Most actual rich Bitcoiners I’ve met are family men and women. They don’t spend their wealth on private jets; instead, they are building out their homestead, homeschooling their kids and — as far as the American variety — stacking guns. Far from the stereotype of the billionaire high-tech narcissist loosely portrayed here or in shows like Silicon Valley. 

Also, someone that rich would have better contacts than the scammer Kevin recommends via a single text message with a phone number. In reality, there are companies out there that specialize in recovery services, mostly focusing on locked wallets like Scott’s. Some are scams for sure, and as the film points out in its credits, large-scale recovery scam operations have been shut down by the feds. So it is important to do deep research on who you work with to recover a locked wallet. When it comes to stolen crypto via hacks or fraud, there’s little anyone can do about it; cases can be reported to the FBI, but there are few successful examples when it comes to anonymous cybercrime.

One company that’s been growing a good reputation in the space for offering wallet recovery and self custody consulting services is The Bitcoin Way, another renowned company in this niche is Casa. 

Anyway, the recovery contact passed on by Kevin convinces Scott to drop the Trezor in an anonymous drop box, and well… let’s just say things don’t go well from there. But I’ll let you experience the ending for yourself, since it’s fairly entertaining.  

The film ends with this on screen that does beg some context: “In 2025, U.S. consumers lost more than 9.3 $billion to crypto scams.” What stat misses is that financial and identity-related fraud is north of $50 Billion for legacy financial crime. 

In 2012, for example, 24 billion dollars’ worth of identity theft was reported. Twice as much as all other forms of theft combined that same year. According to Business Insider, the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that “identity theft cost Americans $24.7 billion in 2012, losses for household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft totaled just $14 billion.” Eight years later, that number doubled, costing Americans $56 billion in losses in 2020. If that trend continued, which there’s little reason to assume has slowed down, we could expect 2026-related identity financial fraud to be north of $70 Billion a year in the United States. So Fraud is rampant in general in this day and age, and trusting legacy finance with all your information is hardly a solution. 

Overall, the film represents an interesting exploration of the nightmare scenarios of self-custody and might serve as a great metaphor with which to improve education on the topic. 

Editorial Disclaimer: We leverage AI as part of our editorial workflow, including to support research, image generation, and quality assurance processes. All content is directed, reviewed, and approved by our editorial team, who are accountable for accuracy and integrity. AI-generated images use only tools trained on properly licensed material. In Bitcoin, as in media: Don’t trust. Verify.

This post Film Review: “Self Custody” Indie Film about Bitcoin on Amazon Prime first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Revolutions leave behind artifacts. In August 2022, seven Adams County sheriff’s deputies in Ohio executed a search warrant on the home of Joseph Foreman — better known to the world as Afroman. They found nothing (save the lemon pound cake), and no charges were filed. What followed was a First Amendment masterclass in an American flag suit.

Using footage from his own home surveillance system, Foreman turned a botched raid into songs, videos, and a public record the Ohio deputies could no longer control. The officers later sued him for defamation, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy, claiming the videos ridiculed them and damaged their reputations. In March 2026, a jury ruled in Afroman’s favor. But by then, the videos and songs had grown exponentially beyond anything a courtroom could contain.

Born Joseph Edgar Foreman in Los Angeles, most people still know him from “Because I Got High” — the 2001 breakout hit that made him a household name. But what happened in Ohio revealed something more enduring beneath the comedy: an instinct for turning humiliation into visibility, and visibility into power. In his own telling, the deputies “brought me material.” What they intended as force became fodder. What could have remained a private violation became songs, satire, and evidence.

What unfolded was not just a legal victory. It was protest art in the modern age — raw, low-budget, absurdist, and deeply American. Wearing the flag while defending free speech. Turning ridicule back on the people who expected silence. Alongside Mear One’s Occupy Wall Street murals and Kolin Burges’ Mt. Gox vigil sign, Afroman’s American flag suit belongs to a lineage of cultural objects created when people refuse to let institutions bury the story. That suit will be on display at Bitcoin Conference 2026 in Las Vegas as part of Relics of a Revolution, an exhibition exploring protest art and asymmetric responses to institutional power.

I sat down with Joseph Foreman to talk about the raid, the songs, the verdict, and what it means to turn injustice into art.

BMAG: You testified that “the whole raid was a mistake” and that “all of this is their fault.” Seven deputies with assault rifles found nothing in your home and filed no charges. What was the first thing you did after they left?

Afroman:  I put on my green and white outfit that matches my house and I quickly took a picture of the most damaged part of my house so I could infinitely reflect on the positivity of my mentality. I wanted to show humanity how I was gonna turn a bad situation into a financial good one. So as soon as I got home, I dressed up and I took the picture for the album LEMON POUND CAKE. 

BMAG: You’ve said that if they hadn’t raided your house, there would be no songs, no lawsuit, and you wouldn’t even know their names. They sued you for defamation over the music you made from their own raid. What do you think they expected you to do instead?

Afroman: They expected me to get bullied like the rest of the small American civilians they bully every day. They weren’t expecting me to stand up to them using my FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

BMAG: “They stormed my home with assault rifles and they want to sue me for cracking jokes?” Why does humor disarm or scare power so much? The songs went viral — you can’t un-laugh or unsee it.

Afroman: They know that if a joke shows how wrong and pathetic they are, it can spread like wildfire through the population. It’s hard for five cowboys to control hundreds of cows that KNOW THEIR RIGHTS. The thought of the hundreds of cows — the American people — unifying and trampling a few cowboys is the worst-case scenario for a crooked government official. So if a joke points out how crooked or wrong a government or law official is, they want to silence you before they lose control over the population, and their jobs.

BMAG: To step back for a moment — what’s going on in Ohio? “Four Dead in Ohio” was fifty years ago and the state is still making headlines for the wrong reasons. Or is that just America?

Afroman:I’m from Los Angeles and Mississippi. You have two types of people in this world — good and bad — and they’re gonna be all over America. They’re gonna be all over the world. Just to put everything in a nutshell: I am a new Ohio immigrant. I don’t know too much of Ohio’s dirty past. All I know is this — BAD PEOPLE ARE NEVER GOING AWAY. Therefore, good people must put things in place that check the bad people. There’s always gonna be a common cold, but humanity is no longer scared of the common cold because when we get the common cold, we have the remedies to treat it. So good people need to have remedies for bad people, no matter what, where, why, or when.

BMAG: After the verdict, you walked out of the courthouse shouting “We did it, America” and “Power to the people.” You said “we” — not “I.” In a country that keeps dividing people into sides, who were you talking to?

Afroman: I WAS TALKING TO THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I was talking to all sides. We all almost lost our freedom of speech — and I’m gonna say “we” because people’s hearts and spirits were fighting with me on the internet. People were riding by the courthouse blowing their horns. I didn’t do it by myself. I fought with America. America fought with me. Thanks to that unification, America still has freedom of speech.

BMAG: The suit will be on display at Bitcoin Conference 2026 inside Relics of a Revolution. Claire Salvo painted your portrait on a dollar bill. Songs get pulled. Platforms disappear. Footage gets buried by algorithms. Even the dollar loses its value over time. The suit is the one thing from this story that can’t be deleted or devalued. Now you’ve got a Constitution suit and a Statue of Liberty suit in the works.  When did the suits become part of the art?

Afroman: One time I went to a party — and all of my friends are cool, all my friends dress really cool — and me and my friend almost wore the same suit to the same party. It was that night I decided to go custom. All cool guys shop at the same store, so me and another cool guy, we’re gonna like the same outfit. TO STOP THESE CLOTHING CATASTROPHES, I began ordering, designing, and making custom-made suits.

This is Part III of a three-part interview series accompanying the Relics of a Revolution exhibition. Part I features Kolin Burges, and Part II Mear One.

Fix the money. Fix the world.

Afroman will appear as a main stage speaker and performer at Bitcoin Conference 2026 at The Venetian in Las Vegas, April 27–29. The auction for his American flag suit can be previewed on Scarce.city at scarce.city/auctions/americanflagsuit. 

The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference. Since 2019, the BMAG conference art gallery has facilitated more than 120 BTC in art and collectible sales. Learn more about BMAG at museum.b.tc.

Bundle your Bitcoin 2026 pass with a stay at The Venetian and get your fourth night free. Use code AFTERS for a free After Hours Pass, or get your pass alone here. 

This post Relics of a Revolution, Part III: The Suit, The Songs, The System first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.

Revolutions leave behind artifacts — not always weapons or flags, but the quieter objects that carried a message before anyone knew how far it would travel. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard sign held up in the snow outside a Tokyo office building. A newspaper headline, pulled from the front page of The Times of London and encoded permanently into a piece of software that would go on to challenge the architecture of global finance.

The works gathered in Relics of a Revolution at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas trace a specific lineage of dissent — one that connects street-level protest to the birth of Bitcoin itself. Mear One (b. 1971, Santa Cruz, CA) has spent nearly four decades using the walls of Los Angeles as a medium for political and economic confrontation. He pioneered the Melrose graffiti art movement in the late 1980s, was the first graffiti artist to exhibit at the 01 Gallery on Melrose and at 33 1/3 Gallery in Silverlake — where Banksy would later debut his first North American show — and in 2004 joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour, a nationwide series of anti-war street art interventions during the Bush administration. His work was part of the landmark Art in the Streets exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011 and resides in the permanent collections of the Laguna Art Museum among others. From anti-Gulf War broadsides in the early 1990s through the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011, Mear One has been making work that insists the root problem is the system itself — not the politicians or the policies, but the underlying architecture of money and power.

I sat down with Mear One ahead of his panel at Bitcoin 2026 to talk about protest, art, broken systems, and why the revolution is not over, or how to exit a loop.

BMAG: Mear One, you started writing on walls in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, at a moment when graffiti was still broadly criminalized and the idea of it entering museum collections would have seemed far-off. By the early 1990s, you were making large-scale political work — anti-Gulf War broadsides, pieces confronting economic power structures head-on. What was driving you to use the street as a political medium at that point, and who were you trying to reach?

Mear One: Graffiti is the voice of the dissatisfied soul, and back then it was a vehicle to reach the masses before the internet took off & social media ever existed. When you illegally spray paint your ideas in the public realm it resonates with the urbanite caught in traffic, angers the city officials whose dilapidated walls we scribe like a big middle finger to their failed policies. Conscious art speaks to conscious people, and the act of vandalism carries with it an energy that helped instigate a movement which was lacking. The streets were our meeting ground, and getting away with it kept us all anonymous, permissionless.

BMAG: There’s a phrase that circulates in bitcoin culture — “all wars are banker’s wars.” The Genesis Block itself contains a newspaper headline about a bank bailout. When you look back at the work you were making during the Gulf War era and later during Occupy Wall Street, how much of it feels like it was pointing toward the same structural critique that bitcoin would eventually encode into its protocol?

Mear One: Quite honestly, when I discovered bitcoin it immediately reminded me of the graffiti, hip hop, and punk rock culture I grew up in, it mirrored the revolutionary necessities I was communicating through my art. I think we all desire an ideology or movement that speaks to and offers a solution to the endless new world order slave trap that so many have become accustomed to. And it turns out the architects who created this current economic matrix are the same builders of our prison schools, creators of our bankers’ wars. Satoshi knew this. Humans don’t really have world war issues with one another, these issues stem from economic and political power struggles outside of our fundamental human desires like freedom, love, a spiritual connection to a higher purpose. My goal as an artist is to always experience freedom, to set myself free from the system, this is the basis of my art, philosophy and resistance.

BMAG: In 2004, you joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour — taking anti-war, anti-corporate street art across the country during the Bush administration. That was four years before the financial collapse, and three years after 9/11 had already been used to justify unprecedented expansions of surveillance, military spending, and executive power. What did that experience teach you about using art as a tool for economic and political resistance, and how did it shape your thinking when the crash actually arrived?

Mear One: Be the Revolution with Robbie and Shepard was more so an outlet to express my angst and dismay of American politics at the time. Fighting wars for foreign resources to sell for profit exacerbating this hierarchy of haves and have nots still weighs heavy on my philosophical heart. 

But when the financial crash hit in 2008 my revolutionary lens shifted drastically, and for the first time in my life I became interested in learning how the system of money actually operates, what money is, and seeking to articulate through my art a more accurate definition of the new world order culminating in my most controversial work to date False Profits.

“You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” Subversive art, subliminal art, illegal art, art that punches you in the gut with facts and satire using a spray can, paint brush, wheat pastes, music, comedy, film, whatever tools are in your creative kit, art is the most effective way to create change. I think great art stands the test of time for its quality of being somewhat psychic, narrating the cause before the effect is widely understood by the masses, before it’s too late.

BMAG: Street art is ephemeral by nature — it gets buffed, painted over, torn down, rained on. Some of your protest works from the Occupy era and earlier have survived. What does it mean to you that objects made in that spirit of urgency — work created to be temporary — are now being shown in a gallery context as historical artifacts?

Mear One: They’re still relevant, ironically, because nothing’s changed! Same circumstance, different puppets. These works point out a condition that is ongoing within our human story, and it’s important as Bitcoiners to pay memory to our past struggles and the remedies which we choose to solve them. In this spirit of urgency these Relics of Revolution are calling out for exactly that – the time for change is always now!

BMAG: You were making anti-war street art during the first Gulf War. Now, more than thirty years later, we’re watching another military escalation in the Middle East — this time with Iran. The machinery looks different, the justifications sound different, but the economic architecture underneath it is remarkably similar. For a generation that came of age watching 9/11 become the justification for two decades of war and then watched the 2008 crash reveal that the financial system underwriting it all was itself a fraud — when you see this cycle repeating, does it feel like confirmation of something you’ve been saying on walls for decades, or does it feel like failure — that the message didn’t land?

Mear One: Like you said, all wars are bankers wars. And for hundreds of years we’ve been fed a false narrative about who our enemy is. There’s a lot of truths I’ve tried to point out through my art and it has made my life much harder for it. I’ve been criticized, censored, nearly cancelled, had my life threatened, labelled all sorts of heinous things. But I resisted, I was unapologetic, and I continue to do my work unfazed. Sometimes it feels like I’m standing on the street corner pointing up in the sky, screaming at the top of my lungs about the chemtrails, and everyone just thinks I’m crazy – it’s always like that in the beginning – but people are waking up. It’s not easy to do art that points out what’s wrong with the system. But it’s also not easy to be honest with yourself and accept the mediocre mundane pointless reality that is the social norm. The reward in doing this is to see a movement like bitcoin spawning and like-minded people sharing the joy and vigor for revolution.

BMAG: There’s an argument — and it runs deep in Bitcoin thinking — that wars are not really fought over ideology or territory but over monetary control. That every major conflict is ultimately about protecting or resetting an economic order that benefits the people waging it. Your work has been making that case visually since the 1990s. How do you articulate that connection between war and money to someone who hasn’t thought about it that way?

Mear One: I create an allegory that consists of the main factors, I am challenged to present it in its most digestible form; yet this is complicated subject matter so this challenge causes me to include subliminal psychedelic mythological archetypes and symbolism all coming together to assist in this complicated narrative, not only to create something visually compelling, but to give the subject matter a focus and a place to become a discussion amongst people. Through narrative art you can introduce ideas that people struggle with in the abstract.

BMAG: The 2008 crash, the bailouts, Occupy, and now what looks like another cycle of inflation, debt, and military spending — do you see Bitcoin as the first real exit from that loop, or just the latest attempt to build something outside a system that keeps absorbing its opposition?

Mear One: I’m a non-dogmatic being by nature. Bitcoin to me is the first wave in new technology that might steer us away from the fiat slave system. But I’m not convinced that it is the be-all and end-all for our current predicament. As we observe Wall Street attempting to hijack bitcoin all the while in-fighting amongst internal ideologues rages on, all that noise obscures bitcoin’s original ethos. These are its problems that are being worked out. I’m much more a believer in innovation and I welcome many more new inventions to enter our realm. I think that the monetary reality needs to run its course though, and what eventually follows I hope is a spiritual revolution. I see bitcoin as a crowbar in an emergency break the glass situation where it is necessary for the next iteration of where we’re heading into the 2030s. I do believe that is towards a state of ultimate freedom where the concept of money itself will become obsolete as we migrate closer to rebuilding a new world.

BMAG: How did you first encounter Bitcoin, and was there a specific moment where it clicked for you as connected to the same values and frustrations that had driven your street practice for decades?

Mear One: Back in 2009 I ran into a mathematician at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, we struck up conversation over my art and he hipped me to bitcoin for the first time. I never saw myself as one who would invest money into money, so it was just an interesting idea in the back of my mind. As I deepened my education into what money is through Occupy and to the creation/fallout of my London mural in 2012, my path eventually led my lady and I to our first bitcoin conference down in Mexico at Anarchapulco. We were introduced to a tribe of anarchists who shared similar sentiments on politics and lifestyle. I had millions of questions, everyone had answers, and like a sponge I absorbed this knowledge. I rocked two live art pieces for the community, which I auctioned off. Those collectors helped me set up my first wallet (shout out EDGE) as well as the transactions in exchange for my proof-of-work. That’s when it clicked for me, when I earned my first coins.

BMAG: Your work is in a show called Relics of a Revolution. Do you think the revolution it’s referencing is over, still happening, or something that hasn’t fully begun yet?

Mear One: Revolution is a daily occurrence, it is one of the inevitable aspects of life that you either take part in or it’s gonna take a part of you. Revolution literally means a cycle that we experience in different seasons across different cultures, time and space. There’s a variety of revolutions currently taking place. What’s great about bitcoin is it somehow is able to connect and bridge to them all at once because ultimately it seeks what we all desire – freedom from the system.

BMAG: This exhibition is called Relics of a Revolution, and it includes your protest works alongside an original copy of The Times from January 3, 2009 — the newspaper whose headline Satoshi embedded in the Genesis Block. That newspaper is the moment a diagnosis became a protocol — the moment the frustration that Mear One had been painting on walls and that Kolin would later carry on a sign in Tokyo was encoded into something that could not be buffed, censored, or bailed out. When you see your work displayed alongside that artifact, what do you want someone walking through this exhibition to take away — someone who may know Bitcoin as a price ticker but doesn’t know the history of why it exists?

Mear One: Collect these works of art! And I don’t mean that facetiously. Every great art movement had their Medicis, those whose power and influence defined the style & ideas of a generation. All the works you see here in the gallery is art denominated in bitcoin, created by artists whose works are inspired by the philosophical principles underlying the greatest bitcoin artwork of them all, the Genesis Block. Like bitcoin, art is the greatest store of value. But cultural preservation of these fine art assets of freedom by accomplished artists requires the patronage of those with passion for these aesthetic visions. Currently we face WW3, economic destruction, trade & agriculture collapse. Bitcoin cuts that circuit of suffering & punishment. Our ultimate fight is with the controllers of money and their bullshit fiat institutions, rendering their scheme obsolete and irrelevant.

This is Part II of a three-part interview series accompanying the Relics of a Revolution exhibition. Part I features Kolin Burges. Part III, featuring Afroman, is forthcoming.

Fix the money. Fix the world.

Mear One will be painting live in the BMAG art gallery throughout Bitcoin 2026, April 27–29, at The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, and will appear on a speaking panel moderated by Dennis Koch titled “Looking at Bitcoin Art Through a Protest Lens.” A unique print by Mear One entitled The Magician is available exclusively through BMAG. Preview Mear One’s historic protest works included in the Relics of a Revolution exhibition in the BMAG B26 auction HERE. 

The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference. Since 2019, the BMAG conference art gallery has facilitated more than 120 BTC in art and collectible sales. Learn more about BMAG at museum.b.tc. Follow BMAG on twitter @BMAG_HQ. Bundle your Bitcoin 2026 pass with a stay at The Venetian and get your fourth night free. Use code AFTERS for a free After Hours Pass, or get your pass alone here.

This post Relics of a Revolution, Part II: False Profits and Freedom first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.