Adopting Bitcoin: three months to bring a community together
By Janusz Nowakowski
Kemal had about three months to help organise a conference in a country he had never visited. He had just joined Galoy in 2021, and El Salvador had announced that it would adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Getting people together to work out what came next became his first assignment.
That is where our conversation about Adopting Bitcoin became interesting. A change in the law could create attention. Someone still had to arrange the meetings, explain the tools and listen to the people expected to use them.
Before the conference, a bar in Munich
Kemal spent much of his life in Germany, studied political science and worked in advertising and marketing. In Munich, he found a Bitcoin community interested in making the currency useful beyond trading it.
In 2019, he helped a bar start accepting Lightning payments. The bar gave the idea a place people could actually visit.
Tell someone Bitcoin is money, Kemal said, and a natural question follows: where can they use it? The bar gave him an answer.
El Zonte offered a larger version of that experience. Kemal credits Mike Peterson and The Hope House with creating the community project from which Adopting Bitcoin took its inspiration.
Three months to get people together
The first conference meant working through COVID restrictions, security concerns and the unfamiliarity of a new country. Kemal had colleagues on the ground, while the wider Bitcoin community helped bring the programme together.
I asked how they decided what belonged in it.
“We never wanted to set an agenda with the Adopting Bitcoin Conference.” He wanted the Bitcoin community to help decide what needed discussing.
The distinction mattered. Developers could meet people trying to use their tools in everyday life. An awkward payment or a confusing QR code gave them something more specific to fix than a broad ambition to increase adoption.
Kemal described lessons that found their way into Blink, the wallet developed from the Bitcoin Beach project: point-of-sale systems, payment links and QR workflows.
A useful payment has a person on both ends
One example he gave was Bitcoin Smiles, a fundraising initiative connected with a dentist in El Zonte. Donations sent over Lightning helped pay for dental care for people on low incomes.
It was a concrete reason to make the payment work. A donor could contribute from another country; someone locally could get treatment. In Kemal’s account, projects like this helped connect visitors with the community around them.
He wanted new groups elsewhere to borrow what was useful from that experience.
The point was to learn from communities already trying to make Bitcoin useful, then adapt that experience to local needs.
What the organisers are willing to refuse
I also asked how the event could grow without losing its standards. Kemal gave a specific example: a wallet claiming to give users sole control of their keys could not sponsor the conference if its code was closed and the organisers could not inspect that claim.
He recognised that this restricted the pool of sponsors. He also acknowledged that custodial services can have uses. His point was that the event needed a basis for judging what companies promised, rather than simply selling space to whoever would pay most.
The social side mattered just as much to him. He called it Bitcoin’s “layer zero”: the people who meet, share experience and learn whom they can work with.
I told him about a Swiss farmer friend I had brought to BTC Prague. He arrived sceptical. Speaking directly with miners and developers gave him something the arguments online had not.
Kemal returned to the people in those conversations: were they knowledgeable, fair and honest about what they were doing? Those were the connections he wanted the conference to make possible.
Edited on 10 October 2026. This interview describes the products, plans and views at the time of the conversation.