Fifteen years of rooms

Bitcoin meetups split into two species in 2013. A short history of what those rooms built - and what it tells you about the one we were sitting in on Saturday.

On Saturday the whole Stacked team spent the day at Bitkiwi XVI in Auckland, after a bitcoin breakfast at Node in Devonport - a community space on Wynyard Street that runs workshops, youth programmes on AI and financial literacy, and a room given over to bitcoin education. The price came up, of course. It always does, and anyone claiming otherwise has never been to one of these. But nobody was there for it.

Bitcoin has spent the past month in the low-to-mid sixties, where the tourists have gone home. Which makes it a reasonable moment to ask what fifteen years of people gathering in rooms has actually amounted to - and where a four-year-old New Zealand meetup sits against the ones that have been going since the beginning.

2011: the first rooms

For its first two years bitcoin was a purely online phenomenon - a mailing list, a forum, an IRC channel. The first attempt to put faces to the handles was a conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on 19 August 2011, organised by Bruce Wagner, who at the time hosted a daily bitcoin webcast. About fifty people came. Miners, two exchanges including Mt. Gox, a few programmers, some students of monetary theory, and a handful of investors. Informal New York meetups had already been happening before it - Yifu Guo had organised at least one - but the Roosevelt is the first gathering anybody wrote down.

The same year, in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a bar owner called Jörg Platzer started accepting bitcoin at Room 77 - the first private business anywhere to do so. Room 77 became a weekly fixture and then something stranger: the surrounding blocks picked up the nickname Bitcoinkiez, a district named after a payment method because one publican decided to take it. Platzer's own claim for the place was that it shifted how journalists wrote about bitcoin, by giving them somewhere to go and actual people to photograph. That is a self-assessment rather than a measured effect, but the press cuttings from the period do bear it out.

Note what both of these were for. Not education, not development, not commerce. They existed so that people who had only ever met as usernames could confirm each other's existence. Everything else came later.

2013: the meetup splits in two

Two things happened in New York in 2013 that between them set the shape of every bitcoin meetup since.

The first was Satoshi Square. Bloomberg turned up in July 2013 to write about it: people meeting in Union Square, and later at the Bitcoin Center on Broad Street, to buy and sell bitcoin face to face because the exchanges were slow, expensive and prone to collapse. An open-air trading floor, run on trust and cash in envelopes. It was commerce, and it was social, and it was completely dependent on a room.

The second, on 7 August 2013, was BitDevs - the first bitcoin meetup organised around the protocol rather than the price. No pitches, no merchandise, no networking. Instead a monthly Socratic Seminar: someone gathers the month's topics from code repositories, research papers and technical blogs, and the room argues about them. Participants question each other and challenge the answers. There are sometimes presentations from projects and researchers, but the discussion portion is never recorded, which is the point - people say what they actually think when nothing is going on the internet afterwards.

Those are the two species. One is about getting bitcoin into the world; the other is about getting the world's best thinking into bitcoin. Almost every meetup since has been a version of one or the other, and the useful question about any given group is which job it is doing.

The branch that changed the software

BitDevs stayed a single New York room for five years. Then the format started travelling: San Francisco in July 2018, London in May 2019, Boston that June, Los Angeles in August, Austin and Chicago in September. Today there are 43 chapters, from Buenos Aires and São Paulo to Athens, Taipei and Mauritius. New York itself passed its 154th consecutive monthly seminar in January 2026 - twelve and a half years without missing a month.

This is the part of meetup history that gets least attention and did the most. BitDevs has never onboarded a merchant, never run a promotion, never sold anything to anybody. What it produced is people - a meaningful share of those now working on Bitcoin Core, on Lightning, on the covenant proposals we covered a few weeks ago. Its agendas draw on the same technical sources those developers publish through, and the reading list at a Socratic Seminar in a given month is a decent proxy for what the protocol will be arguing about a year later.

The honest caveat is that this is hard to prove and easy to overstate. Nobody keeps a register of which developers were radicalised in which room, and BitDevs is not the only route in - the funded residencies and the developer gatherings that run alongside conferences matter at least as much. But if you accept that bitcoin's software is made by a few hundred people who mostly know each other, then a monthly room where those people argue in front of newcomers is not a social club. It is a recruitment pipeline that has been running, unbroken, for over a decade.

The branch that tried to build economies

The other branch aimed at getting bitcoin spent, and its record is genuinely mixed - which is the more interesting thing about it.

Arnhem is the cleanest experiment. On 28 May 2014, three locals who simply wanted to spend bitcoin in their own town started Arnhem Bitcoinstad. Fifteen merchants signed up at launch. By February 2016 there were a hundred, and Arnhem was being written about as a bitcoin city. Its meetups ran only a few times a year throughout. Ten years on it held its own conference, in May 2024, and it is still going - but the merchant list is back to around sixty, and its payment tracking stopped altogether in November 2024 when European MiCAR rules put pressure on the processor it depended on. A decade of consistent community work, and the merchant count is a hill rather than a staircase.

Prague built something more ambitious and less commercial. Paralelní Polis opened in Holešovice in October 2014, founded by the Ztohoven art collective as an institute of cryptoanarchy where paying in bitcoin was simply the house norm. It seeded Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis and Dark Prague. It shifted to a managed wind-down in late 2024 and closed for good on 2 March 2026, twelve years in, when the building's owner decided crypto activity had to go. Room 77 had closed already, in October 2020. The Bitcoinkiez faded with it.

And the largest test of the adoption thesis was not a meetup at all. El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender in September 2021 and spent state money on the rollout - no room, no base, no volunteers. A nationally representative survey of 1,800 households, published by the NBER, found that 20% of businesses accepted it despite a legal requirement to, about 5% of sales ran through the government wallet, 88% of firms that took it converted straight back to dollars, and more than 60% of people who downloaded the app for the signup bonus never transacted again. Top-down bought reach and did not buy use. Bottom-up buys use and struggles for reach. Neither route is a shortcut.

What separates the survivors

Run those histories next to each other and the pattern is not tenure, and it is not how often the group met. Room 77 ran weekly for nine years and left nothing behind, because the bar was the institution - when it shut, the Bitcoinkiez was just a neighbourhood again. Paralelní Polis ran for twelve years and its closure barely dented anything, because it had already spun off Hackers Congress as a separate thing that could relocate. Arnhem met only a few times a year and is still going after a decade, because what it built was a named network rather than a standing appointment, and a name can shrink without dying.

BitDevs is the extreme case: it handed off so thoroughly that the format itself became the institution. Anyone can start a chapter, because the organisers deliberately licensed it like open-source code for other communities to adapt. Forty-three cities did. New York could close tomorrow and the tradition would not notice.

So the test is not how long a meetup has run. It is whether it has produced something that would survive its own founders losing interest.

What that says about Bitkiwi

Bitkiwi is about sixteen editions over four years, dating from late 2022 when it first appeared on the community map. Set that beside 154 monthly seminars in New York, or Bitcoin Wednesday in Amsterdam running since 2013, and the arithmetic is what it is. But the whole point of the history above is that tenure turned out to be the weakest predictor of anything. Room 77 had nine years and left a neighbourhood with a nickname. On the measures that actually separated the survivors, Bitkiwi is doing unusually well for its age.

Start with the cadence, which people sometimes apologise for. Quarterly is exactly the rhythm Arnhem has sustained for twelve years, and it is a deliberate choice rather than a shortfall - volunteer burnout is the most common way these groups die, and a schedule you can keep for a decade beats one you abandon in eighteen months. The structure is more unusual still. Instead of one city, Paul and Dan move the entire thing around the country - Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland, Queenstown - so what accumulates is a national network rather than four separate local ones. I am not aware of anyone else running a meetup that way at country scale, and it is the reason people fly to these.

And it has done the thing that mattered most in every case above: handed off. The Bitkiwi Brief has come out monthly since May 2024 and is past its 24th edition. Kiwi Bitcoin Guide is a standing knowledge base rather than a Telegram group's collective memory. Most consequentially, on 4 June 2025 people out of these rooms briefed more than twenty coalition MPs inside Parliament, with a bitcoin miner running in the building. Bitcoin Policy New Zealand was incorporated the following month and launched in Wellington that November, with Dan as its vice-chair, and its first paper proposes a de minimis tax exemption for bitcoin payments under NZD $1,000. Four years in, a meetup has produced a registered society drafting tax policy. Most of the groups in this history never got there at all, and several with a decade's head start still have not.

The one thing New Zealand is missing is not Bitkiwi's to supply. Of the 43 BitDevs chapters worldwide, four are in Australia and none are here - so we have the adoption branch of this tradition well covered and the technical branch not at all. That is not a criticism of a meetup that was never trying to be a Socratic Seminar; the two do different jobs, and Bitkiwi does its own properly. It is an opening for somebody else. The format was deliberately licensed for anyone to adapt, the reading lists are published, and every chapter in those 43 cities started with one person deciding to host it. If that ends up being someone who first walked into a room because of Bitkiwi, the point rather makes itself.

Why we keep turning up

We put Saturdays into this because self-custody is a practice, not a purchase. Nobody learns to verify a receiving address, or to take a payment with no bank behind it to reverse a mistake, from a wallet download. They learn it standing next to somebody who has already got it wrong once and can say what to check. An onboarding flow cannot teach that. A room can, and after fifteen years of them it is still the only thing that reliably does.

The rooms in this history that lasted were not the ones with the best venue or the tightest schedule. The Roosevelt Hotel conference happened once. Room 77 ran for nine years and vanished. A monthly seminar in Manhattan that has never sold anything to anyone turned into 43 cities and a good share of the people who maintain the software. What separated them was whether anything walked out of the room and kept going on its own.

By that measure Saturday was a good day. Sixteen editions in, something has already walked out of those rooms and kept going without them - a newsletter, a knowledge base, a society with a seat in front of MPs. Whatever the next fifteen years of New Zealand bitcoin turns out to look like, a fair amount of it will trace back to people who kept booking venues and turning up.

Stack accordingly,

Simon

Stacked - Bitcoin-only, non-custodial. New Zealand.

stackedbitcoin.com