I’d heard Helsinki was safe.

They were right. 

The only predator I met was a tiny murderous goose barely tall enough to clear the curb.

Someone told me the most violent fight they saw in Helsinki was two drunk guys outside a bar.

One shouted, the other swung a half-hearted punch, and then they hugged and apologized—each insisting the other deserved the last beer. It ended in a round of karaoke.

And, yes, I tried the reindeer.

BTC HEL

I also made it to BTCHEL—apparently pronounced “BTC HELL.”

It was the first big Bitcoin conference to hit the Nordics, and it didn’t disappoint. In fact, it was better than any hell I’ve ever been to.

(Photos were discouraged, which meant no selfies—proof enough this wasn’t actually hell.)

The conference felt like a revival of the early Bitcoin optimism—except steadier, like someone swapped out the back-alley stimulants for green tea.

Inside its walls, big things weren’t going to happen in the future. They were already happening. I met people paying rent, buying food, raising kids, all with Bitcoin.

I saw Finns relaxing in a hot tub fueled by Bitcoin miners. Hand-carved steel plates for seed phrases that looked more like heirlooms than hardware. Lesser-known peer-to-peer social apps where trade, conversation, and trust flows without middlemen.

The keynote speaker was Jeff Booth, which years ago would’ve raised eyebrows. Now it raises expectations.

Booth’s book The Price of Tomorrow hardly dwells on Bitcoin. It’s referenced once.

Still, its core message—warning about inflation, debt, and embracing deflation—has been picked up by the Bitcoin community and reimagined as a modern-day manifesto.

Booth’s Case For Bitcoin

During his keynote, he kept coming back to one idea: the natural state of the free market is deflation.

Entrepreneurs compete to give you more for less. Technology accelerates this trend—AI, robotics, software, all driving costs toward zero.

But somehow you and I don’t live in that world.

We live in a credit-based system that must expand the money supply forever to keep from imploding.

Deflation is the death sentence. So the system steals your productivity—what should make life cheaper—and funnels it into debt, monopolies, and control.

The insecurity you feel everywhere… jobs, housing, politics… isn’t an accident. It’s not due to incompetence or stupidity.

It’s baked in.

Most can’t see the theft. They get numb to it. The bailouts in 2008 were $350 billion. Then $700 billion. Then $7 trillion. Each time, people marched for a week… then went home.

Meanwhile, the system metastasized.

Today, your house, your savings, your stocks all sit on a pyramid of insolvent debt. The only way it survives is with more debt.

Which means more centralization, more division, more enemies manufactured at home and abroad. That’s how it always works: blame the other, consolidate power, and eventually stumble into war.

But to Booth, Bitcoin isn’t just code. It’s a cure. That’s when his talk drifted into the spiritual.

Everything’s Falling Toward Zero

He showed us a picture of a vibrating plate of sand.

Play a low tone on the plate and the grains scatter into a simple shape. Raise the frequency and the pattern changes—becomes more complex, more intricate, more alive.

Both of these shapes are “true.” Both exist. Just at different frequencies.

Booth says that’s us.

Atoms, energy, vibrating in patterns. The higher the frequency, the more we see. And what looks obvious at one level is invisible at another.

Now apply that to money.

Fiat is the low frequency. It extracts, centralizes, divides. You can live there if you want. But you’ll only see scarcity, insecurity, and control.

Bitcoin isn’t just digital gold, Booth said. It’s a higher frequency. Those who really get it see a completely different pattern in the world.

From this angle, prices aren’t “rising.” They’re falling toward zero. Technology isn’t stealing jobs. It’s unlocking abundance. The economy isn’t a zero-sum contest. It’s an infinite game of creating value.

The hard part? Almost no one’s lived in that world.

We’ve only known credit-based systems—designed to extract, centralize, and dominate.

Our schools, history books, even our definitions of “free market” were written inside that bias.

Manipulated money bends, inverts, and distorts this natural state of expansion. What should be falling prices get turned into rising debt. What should be shared abundance gets siphoned into cartels.

Bitcoin, he says, breaks the pattern.

A house once priced at 300 BTC now costs 5. Energy priced in Bitcoin falls the same way. Everything re-denominated in sats looks cheaper, year after year.

With sound money, life bends toward abundance.

The transition to this more abundant world won’t be smooth. It will feel chaotic, even dystopian, inside the fiat lens.

But the new frequency is already here.

Entrepreneurs are building on top of it. Venture capital is forming around it. People are moving their time, energy, and careers into it.

Every block, the pattern strengthens.

The economy is not as complicated as they told you. It’s trade, value, and trust. Break the money and you break it all. Fix the money? Everything else follows.

While I’m optimistic about the future and love Bitcoin…

I’m not the type to tattoo “Bitcoin fixes this” on my forehead.

I don’t buy into every breathless prediction about it curing male pattern baldness and ushering in world peace.

But walking out of Helsinki, with BTCHEL buzzing in my ears, I felt lighter. The future doesn’t look like some utopian cyberpunk poster—but it does look alive, messy, and oddly possible.

That’s not heaven…

But it isn’t hell either.