Our speakers are engaging, inspiring thinkers who are passionate about sharing what they’ve learned and helping you to sharpen your skills and start thinking about what’s coming next.
Amir Taaki is a developer, anarchist, and one of the big names behind the development of Bitcoin technology, especially in the areas of technical improvements, privacy, and anonymity.
"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools".
Aaron Koenig is a writer, film producer, entrepreneur and consultant. He is involved in the bitcoin space since the early days.
Most of his activities are related to Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology.
Aaron is the author of the books A Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin and Austrian Economics, Cryptocoins - Investing in Digital Currencies and The Decentral Revolution.
"I am sure that they can change the world for the better." Aaron Koenig
Giacomo Zucco is a Bitcoin educator, consultant, and researcher. Zucco first heard of Bitcoin in 2012 across various circles, and shortly started to mine for the cryptocurrency.
In 2013, Giacomo was convinced by his wife to leave his job and work on Bitcoin. From there, he both co-founded and supported Bitcoin start-ups. He continues as a co-founder of BCademy, a website dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology education and consultation for managers, developers, companies, and institutions.
Organizer of the Mallorca Blockchain days, founder of Mallorca Blockchain, co-founder Cryptonaut.
Peter Todd is a Bitcoin core developer and an Applied Cryptography Consultant - (what the cool kids call 'blockchain tech')
Todd began contributing to Bitcoin in 2012. Additionally, he started a website in 2013 to publish technical writings related to Bitcoin, wallets, cryptography, and other cryptocurrencies. As of 2019, Todd has contributed over 100 commits to the open-source Bitcoin codebase, doing the bulk of his work between 2013 and 2016. He has also been involved with the development of crypto projects Mastercoin, Counterparty, Coloured Coins, and Viacoin and its associated ClearingHouse project.
Dominic Frisby is a financial writer from London, author of Bitcoin: the Future of Money? (2014) the first book on bitcoin from a recognised publisher.
Co-Founder of the Blockchainhotel and Bitcoin-Treff.de - a german bitcoin p2p Exchange Platform. As an early adopter of bitcoin, he has a lot of experience in crypto-ecosystems, communites and education.
The Blockchain Hotel is situated in one of the largest metropolitan regions of Europe. – “das Ruhrgebiet” – and was founded by Gideon Gallasch and Gökhan Köse. The whole team strives to become one of the main hubs for blockchain technology in Europe.
Andrei Martchouk is managing director of KI decentralized GmbH a software house with a strong focus on blockchain technology and solutions. Before co-founding KI decentralized GmbH, Andrei was CEO and Co-founder of Yacuna Exchange, a London and Zurich based Blockchain solutions provider and international trading platform for cryptocurrencies.
The former graduate of Cologne University of Applied Sciences and Minsk State Linguistic University became a Bitcoin enthusiast in 2010.
Christoph Heuermann is a perpetual Traveler and CEO of staatenlos.ch.
Christoph studied Administrative Sciences at the University of Konstanz in Germany, before working at Parliament in Berlin and Brussels. From an early age, he has been passionate about finding ways to leave the system, which drove him to create a successful consulting business.
Joshua Scigala is a distinguished designer, animator & entrepreneur. Co-Founder and CEO of Vaultoro.com, the leading Bitcoin to gold exchange. He is a regular keynote speaker and has been an avid member and proponent of the Bitcoin community since 2010.
Vaultoro.com is the first realtime bitcoin / physical gold trading platform, orderbook and API.
"Bitcoin is the first rare digital asset that can’t be copied only sent." Joshua Scigala
Rahim Taghizadegan is the last Austrian economist of the Austrian School in the direct tradition and has been teaching at universities in Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Germany.
As one of the last Viennese polymaths, he is also a physicist (specialization in nuclear physics and complex systems), philosopher, investor and entrepreneur.
He has written more than a dozen books, some of them best-sellers, and is the founder of the private university scholarium in Vienna, where the Austrian School is kept alive in its original interdisciplinary form of the Hayek- and Mises-Circles.
Rahim Taghizadegan was one of the first academic economists to understand and analyze the monetary nature of Bitcoin. He is originally from Iran, but has grown up in Austria and studied in Switzerland and the US.
Thorsten Polleit, 47, is Chief Economist of Degussa Goldhandel GmbH (www.degussa-goldhandel.de). From 1998 to 2012, he worked as an economist for ABN AMRO and Barclays Capital in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt.
Thorsten holds a diploma in economics and was awarded a doctorate in economics from the University of Münster in 1996. In September 2014 he was appointed Honorary Professor for economics at the University of Bayreuth (www.uni-bayreuth.de).
Thorsten Polleit is an Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, US Alabama (www.mises.org), President of the Ludwig von Mises Institut Deutschland (www.misesde.org) and a founding member of the research network on The Role of Money in the Economy (ROME).
In 2012 he co-founded an alternative investment fund (AIM), and he left the firm in April 2018. Thorsten Polleit writes frequently for various newspapers magazines and journals.His research interests are monetary economics, capital market theory and, in particular, the Austrian School of Economics.
His latest books are “Mit Geld zur Weltherrschaft” (2020, Finanzbuch Verlag), „Vom Intelligenten Investieren“ (2018, Finanzbuch Verlag) und „Ludwig von Mises – der kompromisslose Liberale (2018, F.A.Z-Verlag).
Victoria Collette Jones is a qualified dentist who has worked in the dental industry for over twenty years.
She has had a range of involvement in different public- and private-sector markets, from small family-owned practices to large corporate chains, from local co-operatives to international institutions. She also spent ten years starting up and building her own dental establishment into a profitable enterprise in the private sector, and successfully sold it in 2017. As a result she has extensive experience in varied business environments.
Victoria has also earned an MBA from the University of Nottingham, and is interested in the world of commerce and economics, including new payment methods and the ways in which these will influence and profoundly affect our future.
Her familiarization with Bitcoin came in 2016 when she introduced Bitcoin as a payment method into her own business. Victoria now works as a Bitcoin advocate, supporting individuals and businesses that are similarly interested in adopting Bitcoin as a payment method. She published her first book ‘Truth Decay - How Bitcoin Fixes This, Unveiling The Path To Financial Freedom’ in March 2020. Which is currently rated in the top 100 Best Bitcoin Books and Best Bitcoin Audiobooks of all time by bookauthority.org.
You can learn more about her and her work at www.satoshispage.com.
Vít Jedlicka is a Czech politician, publicist and activist, currently serving as the President of Liberland.
Vít Jedlička has been actively involved with the liberty movement since his early high school days.
On Monday, 13th of April 2015, he founded the Free Republic of Liberland and was elected its first President. Liberland has over half a million people who have registered and applied for citizenship. He has been a speaker on many high-level conferences.
Liberland is a sovereign state located between Croatia and Serbia on the west bank of the Danube river. Its total area of approximately 7 km² is now the third smallest sovereign state, after the Vatican and Monaco. The motto of Liberland is “To live and let live” because Liberland prides itself on personal and economic freedom of its people, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, which significantly limits the power of politicians so they could not interfere too much in the freedoms of the Liberland nation.
Harry Halpin is CEO and Co-founder of Nym Technologies, a privacy-enhanced network that interoperates with any blockchain.
Nym is a network-level privacy mixnet that defends cryptocurrency transactions in a better fashion than Tor. Nym is the world's largest mixnet, with over 8000 nodes and investors like Polychain and Binance.
Previously he led cryptography standards at MIT, led cryptography research at Inria de Paris, and has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of Edinburgh. He has over 100 academic publications and is a Visiting professor at KU Leuven and American University of Beirut.
Thomas Voegtlin is a computer scientist, neuroscientist, and creator of the Electrum Bitcoin wallet.
He served for 10 years as a research scientist at INRIA, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics. Thomas created the Electrum Bitcoin wallet in 2011, and became the founder and CEO of Electrum Technologies.
Independent bitcoin writer, podcaster, and video creator at Bitcoin Takeover
Rachel-Rose O'Leary is a software developer working in anonymity, systems development and cryptography. She was lead tech writer for CoinDesk 2017-2018, covering privacy tech and ethereum. She has a background in digital art and philosophy, and has been writing about crypto since 2015.
Professor Richard A. Werner, D.Phil. (Oxon), is an LSE and Oxford-educated economist, Professor of Banking and Finance at De Montfort University, UK. Professor Werner is an expert in money, banking, central banking and high growth economic systems. He is also a proponent of decentralised finance via community banking. As founding director of Local First Community Interest Company he is engaged in promoting the establishment of local not-for-profit (but profitable) community banks that lend to SMEs and boost productivity.
In 1991, Professor Werner warned of the coming banking crisis and depression in Japan. In 1995 he proposed a new policy to end banking crises which he called ‘Quantitative Easing’. His book ‘Princes of the Yen’, on central banking, was a top bestseller in Japan in 2001. The 2003 English edition warned of the coming credit bubbles, banking crises and recessions. His 2005 book ‘New Paradigm in Macroeconomics’ (Palgrave Macmillan) presents reality-based economics. His academic research is among the most downloaded scientific work in the world (see www.professorwerner.org).
Previously, he was professor of banking at the University of Southampton, Professor of Economics at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Assistant Professor of Economics at Tokyo’s Sophia University, chief economist of Jardine Fleming Securities (Asia) Ltd. in Tokyo, for over a decade member of the ECB Shadow Council, Senior Managing Director at Bear Stearns Asset Management in London, and a member of the asset allocation committee of TelWel, a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporate pension fund. Earlier, he was a visiting researcher at the Bank of Japan, European Commission Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, Visiting Scholar at the Ministry of Finance, Japan, and the first Shimomura Fellow at the Development Bank of Japan.
Organizer of the Mallorca Blockchain Days, co-founder Mallorca Blockchain.
Bastian is putting a lot of energy to educate the local bitcoin community, and is hosting a monthly meetup in Palma de Mallorca.
Michael Dupree Jr. is the founder of the Denver Bitcoin Center and the owner of EasyBit.
Dupree started the Denver Bitcoin Center in 2014 as a startup incubator and community center for local bitcoin entrepreneurs. With a background in trading and Internet hosting, Dupree now specializes in international banking, startups, multi-market arbitrage, and global business development, with a particular focus on bitcoin.
Founder of the World’s first Decentralized Autonomous University, Bittopia University. An advocate of decentralization, P2P economies, privacy, and bottom-up strategies. Netexplo UNESCO Grand Prix award winner, international speaker and educator.
Amin has been helping share the truth, freedom, and choice that Bitcoin and other decentralized systems have to offer since 2013, collaborating with and advising projects such as Storj, Wirex, Aave, Qtum, and many more. A bio-hacker, consultant, journalist, designer, and advisor, always looking to push the boundaries of what is possible.
Amin is now focused on teaching people about privacy and decentralization while building Bittopia University, to disrupt the education industry and create a fully decentralized university where students are incentivized for the successful acquisition of knowledge.
Dan Eve / CryptoRaptor. He mines crypto cover music to lighten up the dips.
Co-host on the World Crypto Net Youtube show "The Bitcoin Group" and founder of RewardPortal.com
nopara73 is co-founder of zkSNACKs, the company behind Wasabi Wallet, and a .NET/C# developer. His main focus is privacy in Bitcoin. He started and is still working on Wasabi, and co-authored the Bitcoin C# Book.
Ben Arc, educator, foss enthusiast, applied bitcoin researcher, creator of LNbits, Where39, Nostr Twitter, Bowser DIY hardware wallet, LNPoS, LNRelay, and many more bitcoin gizmos and devices.
He is also currently a Co-Founder of Stokr, an Advisor of Soramitsu, and a Mentor of the accelerator program of the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) Innovation Hub. Additionally, he speaks at a wide-range of events ranging from small meetups to large multi-day conferences, covering topics around cryptocurrency and open source as well as social issues such as immigration and government.
Fascinated by the idea of economic and financial freedom that Bitcoin represents, in 2018 Manuel Ferrari co-founded Money On Chain, a protocol that includes the first Bitcoin-backed stablecoin, with the purpose of helping Bitcoin become an everyday monetary technology for millions of people around the world.
In 2021, he co-founded Bitcoin Escala, a space to talk about the Lightning network, RSK, Liquid and other technologies that allow the use of Bitcoin to scale beyond the main layer or layer one.
Pavol Rusnak is co-founder of SatoshiLabs, where he is overseeing the development of open-source software and hardware projects that strengthen the power and independence of an individual. Along with his everyday work, he is also very interested in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and biotechnologies.
Pavol graduated from Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, majoring in Database Systems, with particular emphasis on distributed systems. He is a highly regarded security expert and privacy activist and has been invited to speak at significant technology-oriented events such as Chaos Communication Congress, FOSDEM or LinuxTag. In the past, he also served as a board member of the openSUSE Project and as a three-time mentor/administrator for the Google Summer of Code.
Mission: Strengthening the power and independence of individuals via open-source software and hardware projects
Cryptoanarchist & voluntaryist focused on technology and society hacking.
IT security guy, founder of IT security hacking companies (Nethemba, Hacktrophy) & contemporary art (Satori) Co-founder of Bratislava's and Prague's hackerspaces (Progressbar & Paralelni Polis)
Member of Czech contemporary anti-government artistic group Ztohoven
Responsible for many anti-government & digital privacy projects www.nepracujemeprestat.sk, www.internetbezcenzury.sk
Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) Angel investor, reliability engineer, shill for truth. I work on freedom technology.
Esteban van Goor, completed his master's degree in Tax Law in 2010 at the University of Maastricht and has worked as a tax lawyer for (1) Taxand, (2) PwC and (3) Baker. Mr. Van Goor is currently managing partner of Megalodon Services, a firm focusing on management consultancy services for fintech companies and digital securities offerings.
He has officially been appointed as an Executive Advisor for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Eastern Africa, for his specific expertise in relation to digital securities and digital assets. He has been working with several legislators on legislation regarding, digital services, including (co-)writing a position paper for the G20 in relation to the VAT treatment of digitalization of currency in 2014.
Gabriela Chang (Mexico / Spain): Graduated in Industrial Design and Product Development. CSO and co-founder of EthicHub (DeFi protocol for the productive economy of financially underserved small farmers). Member of AEFI and associate of Fintech Women Network.
She was an organic coffee producer and worked in the Secretariat of Economic Development in Chiapas, Mexico. Frequent speaker and panelist about the use of Blockchain technology for impactful financial inclusion, sustainability and SDGs. Advocate of shared value generation, decentralization and aligned incentives for multistakeholder governance.
Advisor with many years of experience in various areas of software and website development. Operational involvement in FinTech startups in Switzerland, Poland and Liechtenstein with a special focus on sustainable growth and system security.
Despite complex technologies, fierce advocate of the concept that the product should be as simple and clear as possible and as professional as necessary for the customer. Background in computer science from the TU Munich and founded his first company in web development in his early twenties."
Jed Grant, global head of financial crimes at Stripe Inc, is a serial entrepreneur. A regtech expert and decentralized architect, in 2018 he was named in the Top 200 FinTech Leaders in Europe by LATTICE80 and as a Top EU blockchain expert by Blockpool.
Prior to joining Stripe, Jed founded KYC3 in 2014 leveraging big data & machine learning for compliance automation for alternative assets, PE, WM and VASPs. In 2008, Jed was co-founder of a boutique private intel agency. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Luxembourg, lecturing on KYC/AML for the Masters in Wealth Management.
An expert on blockchain, Jed has patented PeerChain, a blockchain layer 2 protocol ecosystem for trust, the core of Peer Mountain. He is active in many non-profits including the Luxembourg Blockchain and DLT Association, Institute for Financial Integrity and Sustainability and Infrachain. He is on several INATBA committees and is CTO in Residence on the EU public sector blockchain project “TOKEN”, and member of the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum Expert Panel.
Jed has worked with leading minds, including Prof. Jorge Sanz, IBM Research Retail Banking Lead, Prof. Thomas Engle, member of the European Security Research Advisory Board, and Jacques Santer, 9th President of the EU Commission and Prime Minister of Luxembourg. In his early career Jed was a senior civilian officer, IT section chief, at NATO and CTO of Artemis Information Management.
Advisor with many years of experience in various areas of software and website development. Operational involvement in FinTech startups in Switzerland, Poland and Liechtenstein with a special focus on sustainable growth and system security.
Despite complex technologies, fierce advocate of the concept that the product should be as simple and clear as possible and as professional as necessary for the customer. Background in computer science from the TU Munich and founded his first company in web development in his early twenties."
Emzy is working in IT security for over 15 years. He runs his own Internet servers and started early to run services for Bitcoin users, like Electrum servers and Bitcoin Core nodes. For a few years he is a Bisq contributor and recently joined the Mempool.space team.
Nam Sardar is the founder and CEO of Neel Capital, a return-focused cryptoasset investment firm that combines fundamental analysis with an active management approach. Previously, she spent 15 years in the TradFi space within private equity, asset management, project finance and strategy.
She became interested in cryptocurrency and DeFi in early 2020, and has since made it her mission to help others understand blockchain technology and its potential, hedge against inflation in a sustainable and emerging asset class, and generate and store wealth securely.
She believes that privacy is a critical aspect of human freedom and has a special interest in Monero and privacy-enhancing currencies. She has a Bachelor's in Business Administration from the University of Georgia and a Master's in Business Administration from Carlos III Madrid. She passed CFA level 2 in 2018.
Josef is a long-time bitcoiner with a background in Austrian economics and political philosophy.
Josef founded the Czech and Slovak Ludwig von Mises Institute in 2010 and is the author of two books: Bitcoin: Separation of Money and State, and Enemies of State, Friends of Liberty (published in Czech).
Josef believes that Bitcoin is the next step in mankind’s monetary evolution. His passion is Bitcoin education, both as a teacher and a student.
Anita Posch is a Bitcoin advocate, author of (L)earn Bitcoin, host of the Anita Posch show and Founder of Bitcoin for Fairness, a non-profit initiative that‘s fostering grassroots Bitcoin adoption in emerging countries.
