Reporting from Helsinki, Finland…

Rachel Geyer didn’t set out to be one of Bitcoin’s most persuasive voices on the continent.

She’s a British mom of four, married to a German, living in Bavaria.

Her demeanor doesn’t exactly fit the “backwards-cap miner bro” she encountered at her first Bitcoin meetup.

But maybe that’s why she’s become such a powerful force for Bitcoin in Europe.

Like any good gap-bridger, her gift is translation—not of languages, but of worldviews.

Between British irreverence and German rule-following. Between dudes in server rooms and policymakers in Brussels.

Between people who think Bitcoin is about money and others who think it’s all about freedom.

Her specialty? Convincing European policymakers it’s not about either: and that it's really about energy. 

In much of Europe…

Money talk is tacky.

Like wearing socks with sandals.

But energy? They’ll debate kilowatts over coffee until the café closes.

Germans will argue over solar panels, the French will die on the hill of nuclear pride, and your new friend will give you a TED Talk about their heat pump before you’ve even finished your first cappuccino.

Energy is Rachel’s wedge to spread the gospel of Bitcoin.

And at a small Bitcoin conference in Helsinki, she explained precisely why…

Europe Doesn’t Think It Has a Money Problem

In America, Bitcoiners talk about freedom from the Fed. In Europe, try that pitch and you’ll lose the room.

Rachel learned fast: “Europeans don’t yet understand they have a money problem. But they do understand they have an energy problem.”

So instead of running headfirst into ideology—taxes are theft, central banking is communism—she reframes Bitcoin mining as an energy solution.

That’s the Trojan Horse.

Don’t tell Brussels Bitcoin is freedom-from-you money. Tell them Bitcoin helps stabilize the grid when you’re drowning in intermittent wind and solar.

Don’t tell German regulators about fiat corruption. Tell them miners can heat entire towns with captured waste heat.

It’s not a lie.

It’s just meeting them where they are.

From Cosmetics to Hashrate

The story of how she got there is serendipitous.

Her friend, Christian Cleger, runs a midsize German manufacturing company making high-end cosmetics.

When the Ukraine war sent electricity prices soaring, his factory became uncompetitive.

His solution? He stuffed a few Bitcoin mining rigs in the cellar.

Their heat went into the production process. Their energy draw synced with solar on the factory roof.

What started as a desperate cost-cutting hack turned into Terrahash, a company pioneering “integrated mining”—where Bitcoin mining is never just about coins, but about dual outputs: digital money and usable heat.

In Finland, Terrahash is the company that mines on nuclear-powered electricity, pipes heat into the district heating system, and provides flexible load balancing to the grid.

Bitcoin is the waste product. The real product is energy efficiency.

Try banning that.

Why Europe Could Lead

Europe is one of the toughest places to mine profitably.

Electricity is expensive. Bureaucracy is suffocating.

But Rachel believes that constraint is a gift.

Because you can’t just plug in and pray, European miners are forced to innovate—tying mining to district heating, biogas plants, factories, farms.

The result? Mining woven into the fabric of society, impossible to unplug.

It’s not the American model of giant anonymous warehouses in Texas. It’s something more decentralized, more resilient, and maybe—more powerful.

Bitcoin mining in Europe won’t succeed because politicians suddenly love Bitcoin, says Rachel. 

It’ll succeed because miners like Rachel sneak it in through the back door, disguised as a solution to the only problem Brussels admits exists: energy.

Subsidized “green energy” distorted prices and killed innovation. But with Bitcoin, the rules are simple, natural, and non-negotiable.

Play by them, you thrive. Ignore them, you fall behind.

And in the new rules of money…

…the market doesn’t care what you believe. Only whether you can keep up.