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The “Badass Bitcoin Users” panel from the Expo stage at BTC Prague 2026, moderated by Rodolfo Andragnes.
On stage with me:
- George Bodine — ex-cop, ex-Navy fighter pilot, now a publicly known Bitcoiner who spent the year geo-dispersing his wallets, upgrading his home security and finding someone to watch the mean dog. The rest of the changes he declined to name.
- Lyudmyla Kozlovska — Open Dialogue Foundation, excluded from banking over her human rights work, for whom Bitcoin is not a preference but the only option left.
- Bruno Krauss — co-founder and CTO of ReWallet, on the self-custody failures he sees in practice: undocumented seeds, passphrases kept only in someone’s head and family members left with a hardware wallet and no idea where to start.
What came up:
- Concern isn’t binary. Asked how worried we are, the answers ran from a self-rated “medium” up to actively concerned — and the danger arrives with visibility, not with holding.
- You can’t all be anonymous. Bitcoin doesn’t become a utility while everyone building it stays hidden, and it would be hypocritical for BTC Map to be anonymous when our merchants put a physical location on the map.
- Sovereignty is a mindset before it is key management: not asking permission, and knowing who you outsource your opinions to.
- Self-censoring isn’t sovereignty — go and spend Bitcoin, just don’t buy a coffee from your cold storage.
- Digital ID lands in the EU this autumn: how do you keep keys private when internet access is tied to an identity? Nostr identities, BitChat over Bluetooth mesh, Meshtastic and FIPS as a permissionless replacement for DNS all came up.
- Inheritance is the hardest part of the whole problem. My kids run GrapheneOS phones and VPNs and get their allowance in Bitcoin — equipping them with the sovereign mindset rather than surveilling them.