S15 E29: Tomek Kolodziejczuk on Bitcoin Film Fest

Thirteen days before Bitcoin’s fourth halving, Tomek Kolodziejczuk sat down for Season 15 Episode 29 as co-organizer of the second annual Bitcoin Film Fest in Warsaw. The 2024 edition was not a quiet cinema weekend bolted onto someone else’s conference. It was the Halving Edition: film screenings, workshops, pitches, parties, and a citywide celebration branded as the European Halving Party, timed for the mining of block 840,000. “It’s like Christmas in the world of Bitcoin,” I told him at the top of the show, and I meant the calendar, the kitsch, and the genuine ritual of watching the subsidy cut in half with other people in the room.

I had already been to the first edition in 2023, when Tomek and Pierre Corbin paired Bitcoin cinema with Poland’s Weekend of Capitalism. That earlier tape is still the origin story. This one is the sequel recorded while tickets were still on sale, promo codes were still live, and nobody knew whether the halving would interrupt Dirty Coin at 4:20 p.m. Polish time or force a morning scramble with orange juice toasts in the dark.

Documentaries First, Then Something Called Bitcoin Cinema

Year one screened documentaries almost exclusively, and Tomek treats that as historical hygiene rather than a failure of imagination. Bitcoin was about fifteen years old. “The art that can grow in this culture… needs time to be able to manifest itself in graphic design, in music, in stories, in films,” he said. The earliest “Bitcoin video” they dug up was literally a screen recording of someone buying coins with PayPal. Then came explainers: what is Bitcoin, who is Satoshi, what revolution are we watching. Then true stories from El Salvador and West Africa. Then more experimental docs. Only after that do you get fiction that is not primarily educational.

His bet for 2024 was clear: more fiction, fewer generic explainers, and a category he and the jury were willing to name out loud. “There can be Bitcoin cinema without Bitcoin,” he argued.

Films that never say “decentralized crypto asset” can still carry the ethos. I pushed back with a soft counterexample from the first festival: Rémi Forte’s animated Le Mystère Satoshi, which won the inaugural award and was already a fictionalized Satoshi story rather than a talking-head documentary.

Tomek loved it too, especially the anamorphic wide frame that refused to look like a YouTube explainer. Culture, in his framing, is the vehicle. Films are a powerful one. Stickers of orange B logos on existing memes are craft. Stories that tickle instead of hammer are art.

I asked whether Bitcoin Film Fest and the European Halving Party were separate teams glued together for marketing. “No separation,” Tomek said. “The edition of this Bitcoin Film Fest is the Halving Edition.” The festival half is cinema: workshops, trailers, Q&As, panels, premieres. The party half is celebration around it: community stage, Warsaw trips, bowling, a rock-paper-scissors tournament, a Chain Duel halving championship, boat journeys on the Vistula. “It’s not a typical conference with booths and thousands of people,” he reminded me. When you enter a cinema, you are supposed to stay for two or three hours. That changes the social physics. You cannot treat a premiere like a hallway conversation you abandon for the next booth.

The schedule lived at europeanhalvingparty.com. The emotional pitch was simpler: be in Warsaw when block 840,000 lands, in a room designed for attention rather than badge scanning.

Block 840,000: Price Predictions, Unlucky Movies, and Orange Juice

The fun organizational problem is that halvings do not RSVP. Tomek’s early bet was around noon Polish time after the next difficulty adjustment, while the romantic plan wanted evening or night so the party infrastructure could do its job. He floated Marathon-style ASCII vanity in the block, Ordinals racing into a historical template, and temporarily high fees. For price theater timed to 4/20/2024 at 4:20 p.m., he joked toward “$69,420” energy. Exact market prints are harder than memes.

The sharper question was cinematic: will people do the six-blocks-per-hour math, skip a screening, and leave one film as “the unlucky one”? Filmmakers, he said, had already been notified and were willing to pause or split a premiere if the moment hit mid-reel. “Halving is a bit more important probably in this case.” His Telegram group for attendees would push the plan once the timing became obvious. Visuals from friends, lights, music, and “a glass of orange juice as a toast” were the planned ritual if everyone stayed in the cinema. Countdown theater is awkward when block times jitter. That awkwardness is part of the joke.

I was most curious which title would eat the interruption. Dirty Coin, Alana’s mining documentary premiering Saturday evening, was the hyped candidate. “If it happens during the movie… we need to stop the film and celebrate the halvening together,” Tomek said. Memorable, if slightly chaotic. Exactly the kind of scar a festival wants.

Palace of Culture, Kinoteka, and the Poetics of Venue

The venue is half the thesis. Kinoteka sits in front of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture, the Soviet-era tower that still dominates the skyline. I compared it to Romania’s Casa Presei, the old propaganda headquarters. Tomek leaned into the poetry: a libertarian Bitcoin culture festival inside a building that once symbolized who was “taking care” of the country after World War II. Orange carpet on the stairs. Festival lounge and bar. Food trucks. Before-party energy in Praga, the district with Warsaw’s longest-running bazaar and what he called the most Bitcoin-friendly bar in Poland.

“Warsaw is beautiful, guys,” he said while screen-sharing the map, and the tourism pitch stayed grounded: parks, a rebuilt Old Town reconstructed from photographs and paintings after wartime destruction, a skyline that photographs better than Google Street View suggests. Ambitious tech theater included projecting a Bitcoin logo or timechain calendar onto the Palace for the halving moment, if permissions and equipment cooperated.

If not, minor walls and countdown screens would do. After the weekend, a sailing trip on Poland’s largest lake from Monday to Wednesday was waiting for volunteers and guests who wanted cheaper lodging than central Warsaw and a boat for a bed. I was invited. I still think about that invitation every time someone asks whether Bitcoin events are only hotel lobbies.

Pleb Tickets, BTCTKVR, and Lightning VOD

Standard “pleb” tickets were about €84 and covered festival entry, many activities, merch bus energy, and facilities, with some extras paid separately. Digital pleb tickets existed for remote supporters and unlocked VOD. The VOD angle mattered more than a charity streaming dump: attendees physically cannot watch every screening, so the platform was both archive and experiment. Tomek described a test run of IndiHub, framed as Netflix-times-IMDb powered by Lightning, with sats streamed per minute watched and Value-for-Value splits to producers, cast, and crew. “Value for Value in video finally comes on Bitcoin,” he said. Podcasting 2.0 energy, applied to cinema.

On air we also locked a Bitcoin Takeover discount: promo code BTCTKVR for 21% off, five uses only, while other floating codes gave the inverted-21 joke rate of 12%. “People… don’t use them, they just buy tickets,” Tomek admitted, which is the healthiest problem a grassroots festival can have.

Lineup, Golden Rabbits, and a Lifelong Jury

We walked the homepage titles competing for Golden Rabbits: best movie, best story, best short (jury), plus audience choice via Geyser sat voting. The slate mixed obvious Bitcoin docs with weirder bets. Dirty Coin for mining FUD. Bitcoiners on radical American exit culture. Bitcoin and Friends animated episodes, including forgotten early-season cuts beside the Rick-and-Morty-flavored remake.

That Athletic on Cody Wilson and open-source defense. Gods of Their Own Religion, a midnight Blade Runner-ish fiction with no explicit Bitcoin that Tomek still wanted debated as Bitcoin cinema. Drew Garcia’s short HODL, plus word that Garcia had orange-pilled afterward and was chasing a feature. Leave Feeling on a South African Bitcoin embassy story that fundraised for the community it documented.

Notes on the Margin, the rare Polish production, on Carl Menger (born in what is now Poland) via the Mises Institute. My Trust in You Is Broken, a ~42-minute BTCPay Server documentary premiere after I had already taped Nicolas Dorier earlier that season. What Bitcoin Did season recap energy from Peter McCormack’s Malawi arc. Kids’ and junior stage cartoons like Who Is Bitcoin and Adventures of Yathan, a libertarian money story without the ticker.

On Dirty Coin he was bluntly optimistic: “I’m sure Alana delivers.” “Don’t Trust Verify” had fallen out of the festival by recording day. Chris from Cedor predicted in chat that the BTCPay film would sweep. Tomek and Julie were still watching everything. Jury seats were “lifelong” in his telling: himself, Pierre Corbin, Brad Mills, Avi Burra, Valerie Belov, and filmmaker Terence Michael, scoring entertainment, engagement, experimental quality, and how enlightening a film is on a 1–10 grid.

Pierre was still a founding member even if he might miss this edition while finishing another film and building Lightning payment tooling with Flash on Nostr Wallet Connect. Weekend of Capitalism was off for 2024 so the Halving Party could own the calendar; Tomek expected it back the following year. Satellite cinema evenings in places like Lugano, Cape Town, and Madeira had already happened. One big Warsaw festival a year, he thought, was already a lot for Bitcoin space. Spreading the brand at conferences was partnership, not a franchise roadmap he wanted to overpromise.

Culture, Not Another Multisig Workshop Track

Near the end Tomek boiled the mission down without TED-talk syrup. People should come for the changing-of-eras feeling around block 840,000, for networking that feels cozy rather than extractive, and for aesthetics. “It’s a conference about Bitcoin culture… not specifically about Bitcoin digital asset and how it works, but about aesthetics, art, values that surround Bitcoin.” There would be beginner workshops. There would not be a primary product thesis of teaching multisig to a thousand badge holders.

That is also why he cares about the maturation curve from PayPal screen recordings to subtle stories. “You cannot convince people with a hammer. You need to tickle them a bit.” Stick a B logo on a meme and you get craft. Put romance, tension, and worldbuilding next door to Bitcoin and you get cultural osmosis. He wants science fiction that uses Bitcoin as financial fuel the way Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix used networks and dualities, without turning every frame into a white-paper lecture.

Sora, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Whether AI Gets Its Own Rabbit

I dragged him into the AI hole on purpose. Would next year’s submissions be Sora prompts, or does Film Fest stay camera-and-interview purist? He refused the purity trap. Synths once let Jean-Michel Jarre be an orchestra without managing twenty musicians he disliked.

AI can make good films and bad films easier, remove intermediaries, and help people with a story but no production army. Documentaries were already often interviews plus B-roll plus animation, not pure cinema vérité.

“We cannot give up on it,” he said, especially if propaganda and hostile narratives arrive first while Bitcoin culture is still writing scripts. Separate award categories for camera-first versus prompt-first work was a question he parked for the next edition. Strategically, refusing the tool looked worse than learning it.

For comic cruelty I asked ChatGPT-4 live what it would ask him. Some prompts were open-ended fluff. Some assumed he was a filmmaker bridging two industries he does not inhabit that way. The useful one was curation: how do you pick the lineup when there still are not hundreds of finished titles?

His honest answer: maybe twenty ready pieces that cycle, creators who can attend get priority for the main stage, and it is not yet a problem of cutting a top twelve from an ocean of masterpieces. ChatGPT also claimed satellite fests in El Salvador, Lugano, Cape Town, and Madeira as if they were a managed empire. The real version was invited cinema evenings and local collaborators, which is already impressive enough without the LLM’s empire DLC.

See You in Warsaw

“We wanted to meet in person,” he said near the end, after we joked about AI interviewers replacing both of us. I closed by thanking him for noticing every sponsor logo in my corner like a professional. Fundraising is hard; content is hard to monetize; businesses ride wagons that podcasters and film people pull. Tomek gets that alliance without turning the show into a shopping channel. I was flying in Thursday or Friday. He still wanted me to buy a ticket anyway. Fair.

If you want the first-contact version of this crew and the 2023 launch, read S13 E6 with Tomek and Pierre Corbin. If you want the April 2024 tape, when the second festival was thirteen days out and the fourth halving was a moving target with orange juice on standby, this is the one.

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Time stamps:

00:00:00 – Intro: Tomek Kolodziejczuk, Bitcoin Film Fest 2024, European Halving Party
00:01:00 – Weekend of Capitalism vs Bitcoin conferences; gender ratios; LOLA / Ayn Rand aside
00:03:10 – Second Film Fest; Vlad’s music video on community stage; docs vs fiction ratio
00:04:30 – Culture needs time; from PayPal screen recordings to explainers to stories
00:06:00 – Experimental docs; Athletic Anatomy; fiction that inspires vs educates
00:07:20 – “Bitcoin cinema without Bitcoin”; Le Mystère Satoshi (Rémi Forte) as opener
00:09:20 – Dirty Coin hype; Alana; Saturday 4:20 premiere vs noon halving bet
00:11:00 – No separation: Halving Edition = Film Fest + European Halving Party activities
00:12:20 – Cinema attention vs conference booths; europeanhalvingparty.com schedule
00:13:00 – Block 840,000 timing predictions; unlucky film problem; difficulty adjustment
00:14:30 – Vanity / Ordinals / fees; $69,420 joke; orange juice toast plan in cinema
00:16:40 – Splitting premieres mid-halving; filmmakers already consented
00:17:30 – Palace of Culture / Kinoteka venue; Casa Presei comparison; orange carpet
00:19:00 – Praga before-party; Warsaw tourism; Old Town rebuilt from paintings
00:20:40 – Palace projection ambitions; countdown screens; post-event sailing trip
00:22:40 – MetaMask joke; pleb ticket ~€84; BTCTKVR 21% (5 uses) vs 12% codes
00:25:00 – Digital pleb ticket; IndiHub Lightning VOD / Value for Value video
00:26:50 – Wasabi Wallet sponsor read; Chaum, mixnets, CoinJoin history
00:29:00 – Wasabi + ShopinBit buy-anything; ShopinBit at Film Fest; Polish plates cars
00:31:20 – CoinJoin fees, remixes, chain analysis FUD; peer-to-peer festival payments
00:33:40 – Samourai vs Wasabi; toxic change; Monero swaps vs full-amount mixes
00:36:00 – Hodling.ch self-custody advisory sponsor; Alexander Potocki
00:37:20 – Toyota Supra digression; fit check; Mark IV prices; JDM lore
00:40:20 – Cryptosteel capsule; Nostr key joke; Polish makers vs cheap clones
00:42:50 – Cedor chat; Layer Two Labs / Drivechains / prediction markets aside
00:45:00 – Satochip / Satodime cash-like cards; Rare Pepe design; OpenDime comparison
00:47:30 – Phil Nevins / Ten Thirty One mention; Vlad on underground guests and value
00:49:50 – Podcasting 2.0, Fountain, boosts; Alby / Blink; PodHome / TrueFans
00:51:20 – Sponsors vs donations; Alby Hub / non-custodial Lightning plans
00:53:00 – LNBits, Ben Arc, fiatjaf Lightning skepticism; back to Film Fest
00:55:00 – Homepage walkthrough; Golden Rabbits categories; Geyser audience vote
00:56:00 – Film slate: After It, Bitcoiners, Bitcoin and Friends, That Athletic, Dirty Coin
00:57:40 – Gods of Their Own Religion; HODL short; Leave Feeling; Notes on the Margin
00:59:00 – My Trust in You Is Broken (BTCPay); What Bitcoin Did; kids’ cartoons
01:00:40 – Sponsors list; agenda extras (range, Bicycle Day, salsa, retro bus)
01:02:00 – Super pleb ticket; hardship / volunteer paths; BTCPay sweep prediction
01:03:40 – Pierre Corbin status; Flash / Nostr Wallet Connect Lightning payments
01:05:10 – Xcashify non-KYC shout; lifelong jury names; Brad Mills maybe in person
01:06:40 – Weekend of Capitalism off this year; libertarian branding mission
01:08:20 – Supercycle girlfriend bit; prediction markets invite (@itsTomekK)
01:10:00 – Why come: era change at 840k; culture and aesthetics over multisig tracks
01:11:40 – Hash rate drop predictions post-halving; ~20%; mempool timing updates
01:13:40 – Visualizers: mempool.space, timechain, ordinals.com/clock aesthetics debate
01:15:00 – Wasabi CoinJoin mechanics digression; Yuval Kogman / 2.0 drama aside
01:18:20 – Music video section hopes; maturing Bitcoin art beyond logo craft
01:20:30 – Cultural osmosis; tickle not hammer; science-fiction Bitcoin fuel vision
01:24:20 – AI / Sora: Jarre analogy; propaganda risk; no purity ban; categories later
01:29:30 – ChatGPT-4 live questions; curation reality; satellite events Lugano/Cape Town/Madeira
01:37:40 – Closing thanks; sponsor ecosystem; BTCTKVR reminder; see you in Warsaw
01:41:00 – Outro; live audience thanks