We’ll bring you a comprehensive report from this year’s BTC Prague next week. But before that, we’re returning to one presentation from the Anycoin stage that clearly showed that bitcoin doesn’t have to be discussed only in the language of charts, technology, and price. Sometimes it’s enough to start much more simply. With the story of a grandmother who repeatedly witnessed throughout her life how money changes, loses value, or disappears from people’s hands.
BTC Prague is among the largest bitcoin events in Europe. This year’s edition took place from June 11 to 13 at Prague’s PVA Expo Letňany venue and over three days offered lectures, panel discussions, an expo zone, and meetings of people from the bitcoin, technology, and financial world. For some, it was a professional conference, for others a place where they could get closer to a topic that has been appearing more and more frequently in recent years: who actually owns our money, how to protect it, and what role bitcoin can play in that.
The program was so packed that cramming all the interesting moments, interviews, and insights into one text wouldn’t make sense. Between the main stage, expo zone, company booths, debates, and parallel programs, you constantly ran into another lecture where you thought it would be worth staying. But such conferences have one inexorable rule: you always miss something.
That’s why I selected several moments from the Anycoin stage program that caught my attention the most. One of them was a lecture by Jana Kubalová, a financial literacy instructor who educates about money and investing, among other places on the channel Aj ženy investujú. At BTC Prague, she presented a lecture titled Bitcoin for Beginners: A Revolution That Has Already Begun. And she started differently than one might expect at a bitcoin conference. Not with a chart, nor with price, and certainly not with a technical explanation. She started with her grandmother’s story.
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Grandmother, chocolate, and a century of distrust
“Today I’ll share three stories with you. Perhaps a bit too personal stories,” Kubalová began her lecture. The first belonged to a woman who during a single lifetime experienced World War II, the 1953 currency reform, normalization, the division of Czechoslovakia, and the inflation of recent decades.
Kubalová recalled how her grandmother as a little girl longed for chocolate. But she grew up during World War II. She saw that someone stronger could come and take people’s jewelry, paintings, houses, and even lives. Later she experienced the currency reform, when according to Kubalová, ordinary people practically overnight lost a large part of the purchasing power of their savings. Then came 1968, normalization, more uncertainties, and more disappointments.
It’s no wonder that her grandmother carried through life a sentence that in the bitcoin community sounds almost like a manifesto: “I want to have my money at home. I don’t trust banks, I don’t trust anyone.”
In Kubalová’s delivery, however, it didn’t come across as a learned slogan from the crypto world. Rather as family memory. As the words of someone who experienced that money isn’t as self-evident as it sometimes seems to us. That savings can exist, and yet their value can dissolve. That the state can change the rules. And that trust cannot be commanded.
When her grandmother finally opened a bank account after years, it wasn’t because she suddenly started trusting banks. The reason was much more ordinary. She lived on the fourth floor without an elevator and started to fear that one day she wouldn’t be able to go collect her pension anymore. She needed a practical solution.
That was precisely the strength of the entire presentation. Kubalová showed that financial decision-making isn’t just a spreadsheet, return, or percentage. It’s also experience, fear, family history, and the question of who we actually trust.
Do we really have it so easy?
The second story was no longer about grandmother, but about a generation that is sometimes said to have nothing to complain about. Kubalová reminded us that millennials are often described as people who have it easier than their parents and grandparents. They didn’t experience queues for bananas, the StB, or censorship in the form known by previous generations.
But then she asked a question that could hit even those in the hall who didn’t come to the bitcoin conference to hear a debate about housing – do we really have it so easy when we want to build an ordinary life?
Kubalová described how she and her husband planned their future. A house, children, a classic “bungalow with a mowed lawn,” meaning the vision of a quiet life that people know from mortgage advertisements and developer catalogs. But as they saved, real estate prices ran away from them faster than they could approach their dream goal.
“I restrict myself, I don’t go on such an expensive vacation, I save more money – and instead of getting closer to the goal, I’m moving even further away from it,” she described the frustration that many people know today regardless of whether they’ve ever owned bitcoin.
It was precisely this experience that led her first to investing in general. She started learning about ETFs, bonds, stocks, or gold. Investing for her, according to her own words, was like the “eighth wonder of the world” because it gave her at least some hope that merely setting money aside might not be the only option.
Bitcoin opened yet another door for her, though. Not just to investing, but to questions that according to her own words she had never properly asked herself before.
“I started asking: is my money really mine?” she said. “When I see it in an app on my phone, does it mean that no one else can come, change it, or take it?”
At that moment her lecture stopped being an ordinary introduction to bitcoin for beginners. It became more of a challenge to look again at things we take for granted. What is money? Where does it come from? How long will it hold value? And what does it actually mean to save in a world where inflation isn’t an exception but part of the system?
Bitcoin as a revolution, not a quick bet
Kubalová tried not to frame bitcoin as a shortcut to quick wealth. On the contrary. She repeatedly emphasized that for her it’s not just another investment product.
“Bitcoin isn’t a great investment opportunity. It’s a revolution,” came from the stage.
This sentence was one of the strongest moments of the entire lecture. Bitcoin here wasn’t described as an asset you can profit from, but as a tool meant to give ordinary people back the ability to protect the value of their own work. Not as a promise that everyone will become millionaires, but rather as a chance that a person won’t just passively watch their savings depreciate over time.
At the same time, Kubalová didn’t come across as someone who wants to push listeners toward one single correct answer. She didn’t say that everyone should sell everything and bet only on bitcoin. She spoke rather about doors that can be opened a crack. About a space that a person can enter at their own pace, ask questions, make mistakes, educate themselves, and find people they trust.
This is important even for those who are cautious about bitcoin. In her delivery, bitcoin wasn’t a fashionable asset for tech enthusiasts, but one of the ways to rethink money. About who manages it. Who has control over it. And what all can happen when we leave this control exclusively to someone else.
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You can start with a hundred
In the practical part, Kubalová returned to the very beginning. To people who may have come to the conference, hear about bitcoin over and over, but at the same time feel that it’s something distant. Something that costs tens of thousands of dollars and an ordinary person can’t afford it.
So she reminded them that a person doesn’t have to buy a whole bitcoin. One bitcoin is divided into one hundred million satoshis, so you can start with a very small amount. Even symbolically.
“Even if you came to the conference and have a hundred crowns in your pocket, you can buy bitcoin,” said Kubalová. Then she gradually described where bitcoin can be purchased. Through investment apps, banks, crypto exchanges, exchanges, bitcoin ATMs, or directly from another person. She mentioned the last option as the original idea of bitcoin: a system in which people can send value to each other directly, without the need for an intermediary.
She also explained basic concepts like wallet or address. Not technically, but simply. She compared a wallet to an app on a phone or physical device, an address simplistically to an account number, though with a caveat that such comparisons have their limits.
The goal wasn’t to exhaust every topic in detail. Rather to open doors for listeners. To awaken curiosity. To show that bitcoin doesn’t have to be an inaccessible world for a few insiders, but a topic that can be approached gradually.
From BTC Prague 2026 we’ll also bring separate interviews with representatives from Trezor and Sygnum. And as mentioned at the beginning, we’re preparing a comprehensive report from the entire conference for next week.
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