S11 E4: Adam on the Bitcoin Bar in Budapest

If you ever visit the city center of Budapest and walk by the Synagogue, you’ll inevitably walk by Adam’s Bitcoin Bar – a shrine of sound money culture where you can exchange some of your scarce digital liquidity for an intoxicating liquid that will help you drown every ounce of sorrow (or else celebrate a joyful moment of your life). This Bitcoin Bar is located on Károly körút 3/c and features most of the elements that you’d expect to find in such a place: an ATM which allows you to exchange fiat for BTC, screens that show the momentary price action, art which depicts digital currency in its skewmorphic digital state, as well as drinks that you can purchase with bitcoin.

Adam, the co-owner of the bar, is walking in the steps of Jörg Platzer by enabling bitcoin enthusiasts to enjoy a cold one that they’ll most likely regret a decade later. He even HODLs every BTC unit sent to the venue’s wallet, as paying for drinks with bitcoin will make Adam reach for his fiat pocket to cover the bill. Such is the nature of the regulations in Hungary, and the co-owner of Bitcoin Bar takes advantage of it in order to get his stack as close as possible to the 21 million supply cap.

However, not every detail has been figured out: as you’re about to find out from this interview with Adam, there are still uncertainties regarding the Lightning Network‘s regulatory status which keep the use of the second layer on the bar’s bucket list, while the menu still won’t let you buy the Satoshi Nakamoto cocktail or the Laszlo Hanyecz pizza (the names are generic, like in every bar).

On the other hand, Adam is open to having Bitcoin-related events and meet-ups at his venue. He enjoys talking about the knowledge he’s acquired down the rabbit hole and hopes that many more locals and travellers will become part of the experience.

Listen to Adam on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & More!

If you would like to have a truly anonymous and registration-free listening experience which also grants you the power to download the episode for offline listening, then check out this player. It’s where Spotify, Apple and Google also source the audio, except that they have the nicer user interface. If you choose to access it this way, you should also make use of the Tor browser so I can’t know anything about your location based on IP.

Otherwise, if you don’t mind the big tech tracking algorithms you can also check out YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Google, and pretty much every other platform. If you do go for these popular options, then it would really help if you subscribed and left feedback. It isn’t only about making statistics look good – it helps others discover the content more easily.

This Episode Is Sponsored By Vaultoro And Wasabi Wallet

Joshua from Vaultoro is a big fan of the show and I’m happy that he sees potential in my work and supports it without caring about numbers and growth statistics. So I must thank him for his generosity and invite you to check out Vaultoro – the exchange where you can trade with honest money (bitcoin, gold, and silver). 

None of this is financial advice from me, but I’m pretty sure that the shiny rock is a better store of value than any fiat currency or “stablecoin”, so maybe it would be wise to use this commodity to preserve your purchasing power during bear markets and get back into bitcoin as soon as you’re convinced that the downwards movement are over. You can also have the gold bars delivered to your house… because you know, if it’s not in your safe then it’s stored somewhere in Switzerland where you can’t touch it whenever you please. For more information, check out Vaultoro’s website.

Also, Joshua from Vaultoro is sponsoring a Lightning Network faucet – he hopes that Bitcoin’s second layer will one day become potent and popular enough to replace the smart contract and tokenization features of Ethereum. And he also supported Giacomo Zucco’s layer 3 RGB Spectrum experimentation from 2019. 

If you would like to increase your network-level and transaction privacy, you should download Wasabi Wallet on your computer. It routes your connection through the Tor network to hide your IP, it downloads block filters so you validate your own transactions locally without appealing to a trusted third party, and it also connects to your own full node to boost your financial sovereignty. Extra features include advanced hardware wallet integrations, easy UTXO management (in Wasabi 2.0, you will have to press CTRL+C+D to unlock the UTXO window), address reuse prevention, and even a lurker wife mode.

Wasabi is best known for its link-breaking CoinJoins, which are giving a hard time even to the EuroPol. Use the wallet to increase your financial sovereignty, but don’t do any illegal stuff – use your financial sovereignty with responsibility (also read the Wasabi terms of service).