Inside Lugano's Bitcoin City as Plan B Week Packs 25 Events Into 10 Days

Simply Bitcoin broadcast this week from inside the Plan B podcast studio in Lugano, Switzerland, in the middle of Plan B Week, the city's annual push to show what five years of calling itself "Bitcoin City" actually looks like on the ground.

FIVE YEARS OF BUILDING A PHYSICAL BITCOIN HUB

The studio sits inside a larger space the local Plan B initiative calls the Proof of Work space, one of five pillars the project built to make Lugano's Bitcoin push tangible rather than theoretical. The guest, Plan B's head of ecosystem, explained that the space includes two co-working areas, one aimed at Bitcoiners and one at startups the project is trying to bring into Bitcoin, plus a large mirrored recreation of the Bitcoin whitepaper near the entrance. The building's renovation and art, including a Bitcoin statue elsewhere in the city, came through a collaboration with artist Valentina Picotti.

Anyone can walk in. A membership covers regular desk use, but a single day's workspace is available as a walk-in payment, and the studio itself doubles as a free, open info point for Bitcoin questions, technical or not.

A MEETUP THAT GREW TO 10,000 PEOPLE

Outside his role with Plan B, the guest also runs Satoshi Splits, a local Bitcoin meetup he started five years ago that now counts roughly 10,000 members, with 20 to 40 people typically showing up to its regular Monday sessions. The format evolved from informal gatherings of three or four people into a standing educational series, first called Academia's Bum and run for two years with guest speakers from the Italian-speaking Bitcoin community, before moving into the Proof of Work space itself.

WHAT PAYING WITH BITCOIN IN LUGANO ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

The other pillar of Lugano's Bitcoin City project is payments. Somewhere between 400 and 500 merchants in the city, including major retail storefronts near the studio, accept Bitcoin through a point-of-sale system called Naka. During Plan B Week specifically, Bitcoin purchases made through a promotion called Satoshi Splitso enter buyers into a raffle worth roughly 10,000 Swiss francs, paid out per invoice rather than per transaction, which the guest noted means splitting a large purchase into multiple payments buys more raffle entries.

A WEEK BUILT AROUND 25 EVENTS

Plan B Week itself has grown from an informal run of Telegram meetups three years ago into a 10-day program with roughly 25 events this year. The lineup includes a university panel on Bitcoin, a day focused on Lightning Network scaling run by the CEO of a local Bitcoin club, a shooting-range event featuring large-caliber firearms, three nights at a squatted club called Underground, and a pitch event called Cipher Tank. A separate, more formal Italian-language conference called Spatio Ventuno runs alongside it, drawing roughly 1,000 attendees from the local community each year.

Taken together, the week is the clearest evidence the project has that Bitcoin adoption in one city can move past price speculation into something closer to local infrastructure: a currency merchants quote prices in, a community that meets every week whether the market is up or down, and a building anyone can walk into and ask a question.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.