My reflections on the recent London Muslim Bitcoin Summit. What are we actually building? And where do we go from here?
quoting
naddr1qp…x6hlThis was probably the most engaging summit we've ever been to. And strangely enough, we don't think we were quite prepared for what the summit actually turned out to be, especially with the diversity of people who attended. We had people flying into London from Bulgaria, Spain, France, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Australia, and many other places. We even had two brothers who flew in from Jerusalem!
We were truly humbled that so many people would travel from all over the world just to attend the Muslim Bitcoin Summit learn and engage, and be part of this peculiar little Muslim Bitcoiner space that we've been cultivating over the years. We honestly had trouble processing that we managed to pull all of this off. A special thank you to brothers Ashik and Michael for their Herculean efforts in making this happen.
The first day of the summit went very well. We left plenty of time for questions, and the audience was remarkably engaged, alhamdulillah. We won't go over each talk in detail, as inshaAllah they'll eventually be uploaded for everyone to watch. Besides, going through the contents of every presentation would be somewhat redundant, especially for those already familiar with the topics and discussions we've been having in the Bitcoin Majlis space. But we did want to begin this reflection by highlighting two peculiar things we noticed about the talks on the first day, both of which we found quite interesting.
The first is that none of the talks actually covered the basics of Bitcoin. Like, there wasn't a Bitcoin 101 presentation explaining the architecture of consensus, nodes, the timechain, mining, or any of the usual introductory material. We found this quite funny actually. We could imagine some complete newbie walking into the summit expecting to learn how Bitcoin works, only to find Harris Irfan railing against Islamic banking, Safdar Alam questioning conventional narratives around sovereignty and Bitcoin adoption, Simon discussing Bitcoin in relation to geopolitics and Islamic principles, Tee exploring network states, and Abdullah examining the rather disappointing state of Bitcoin adoption among Muslims around the world.
It's almost as if we all collectively understood, without ever explicitly agreeing on it, that explaining the basics of Bitcoin wasn't what we were supposed to be doing in that room at that particular moment. And to be fair, that information is already widely available online. Anyone can watch a few videos or listen to podcasts or read a book or even ask an AI to generate an entire lesson plan covering the technical foundations of Bitcoin. We did feel a little bad for any newcomers who might have attended expecting something more introductory. But perhaps this wasn't such a bad thing after all. We received some wonderful feedback from newcomers who found the discussions genuinely engaging and unlike anything they had encountered at other Muslim conferences. So perhaps this should be considered a major win. Talking about the basics of Bitcoin for the millionth time would have been absolutely boring anyway.
The second observation is somewhat related. The talks were generally adversarial and strangely cypherpunk in both form and substance. Now, we don't mean adversarial in some hostile or anarchist sense, nor cypherpunk in the strictly technical sense of cryptography or writing code. What we mean is that the speakers were thinking in terms of resilience and sovereignty, and the possibility of building structures that operate outside, or perhaps beyond, the familiar institutions of the state.
Even the discussion about UK tax regulation wasn't simply about lobbying for a more favorable regulatory environment. There wasn't some collective call to go outside and protest, or vote for a particular political party or beg policymakers to recognize our existence. The talks were concerned with empowering individuals and local Muslim communities, exploring ways of thinking and organizing that didn't depend on existing institutional/regulatory structures or groveling before Muslim leaders and influencers.
And of course, we should mention that nobody there was trying to sell a course, or a subscription, or some elaborate Islamic financial product. We were simply doing our own thing, exploring possibilities for Muslim empowerment that were compatible with Islamic ethics while trying to imagine, and eventually build, something new.
On a more personal note, it was quite surreal to finally meet some of the people whose work has influenced these discussions over the years. Seeing Simon in person and watching his presentation was something else. Meeting Harris Irfan was wonderful, and I also finally got to meet Tarek El-Diwany, although I only managed to speak with him for a few minutes.
There was a funny moment when I thanked Tarek for writing his book. I looked around the room and told him, "You know, Tarek, look around you. Your book helped spark the Muslim Bitcoin Summit. You helped start this!" He seemed genuinely surprised by that. Of course, I gave him a copy of my book.
I mention this because it illustrates something that we've been thinking about quite a bit lately. Ideas can circulate for decades, passing between people who may never meet, before eventually finding themselves expressed through something completely unexpected. And here we were, years later, gathered in London with Muslims from all over the world, discussing Bitcoin, riba, sovereignty, and the possibility of building something beyond the monetary and institutional arrangements we've inherited.
Actually, we wanted to explore this a little further. Almost everyone we've met through Bitcoin Majlis seems to operate with an implicit understanding that what we're doing is, in some sense, an act of ibadah.
What we mean is that we certainly weren't organizing this summit to become famous, penetrate the Muslim influencer class, or make money or whatever. As we've mentioned elsewhere, organizing these summits actually costs us quite a bit of sats, which probably would have been put to better financial use by simply HODLing.
But that's not why we're doing this.
By ibadah, we mean that we genuinely understand this work, when undertaken with the right intentions, as a form of worship and service to our Creator. Many of us feel that Allah SWT has placed us in a particular position, at a particular moment in history, where the Ummah desperately needs to be awakened to the dangers of riba money, the possibilities presented by Bitcoin, and the wider monetary, technological, social, and political questions that inevitably follow from taking these matters seriously.
And perhaps this explains some of the energy that people were experiencing throughout the summit. There was something in that atrium that several attendees privately confided to us they simply hadn't experienced anywhere else.
One attendee, an actual Bitcoin OG from the Satoshi email era who had attended countless Bitcoin conferences over the years, went out of his way to tell us that this was the best gathering of Bitcoiners he'd ever attended. That was quite the compliment, and it left us rather awestruck, to say the least. Allahu Akbar!
And because this summit was unlike most Bitcoin conferences, or finance/tech conferences, many of the off stage conversations naturally revolved around questions concerning the nature of Bitcoin Majlis itself, questions that we'd already been wrestling with internally in the weeks leading up to the summit. We wrote last week:
nevent1qqsrcr9ywajzzfnkakhf2g5mm8nfurg3eqr9qtdpsv5nrudy9t6e2vgzyrsfy8tppmn92wtvltrvnyrmdtg37wsamethqq57z2zwdjhqleaa2qcyqqqqqqgu4t6n2
Obviously, attendees weren't asking these questions in this exact language, but the conversations kept returning to the same underlying concerns.
What are we? What is Bitcoin Majlis, really? What are we actually trying to accomplish beyond the general boundaries of our mission and vision? How do we get there? And perhaps most importantly, where do we go from here?
These sound like brutally simple questions, but attempting to answer them can reveal quite a lot. And actually, we're not going to pretend to have good answers to all of them right now. We don't. But we do hope to arrive at better answers as we continue experimenting and learning from what we've already built.
And no, this is not an invitation to indulge in endless Marxist philosophical word salad where nothing ever needs to be defined or whatever. We still need discernible principles, coherent objectives, and definable boundaries within which meaningful action can take place. In fact, we'd go so far as to argue that failing to seriously confront these questions could eventually lead to the stagnation or death of a movement. The recent struggles of The Progressive Bitcoiner offer a useful analogue here. Their experience with organizational continuity and sustaining a volunteer driven movement raises questions that we would be foolish to ignore: https://x.com/ktreywalsh/status/2100588044487201002
But one thing has become increasingly clear to us. We must keep experimenting. We shouldn't be afraid to try and build unfamiliar and new things. We shouldn't be afraid to develop entirely different ways of thinking about Bitcoin, especially as it relates to Muslim adoption.
Alhamdulillah, perhaps inadvertently, we think we've already begun operating within this framework. Many of the talks at the summit explored Bitcoin and adjacent subjects from a politically grounded, critical perspective that went far beyond the usual discussions of price or code. There was something almost post-punk about the whole thing, like in the willingness to challenge established conventions and experiment with new forms while remaining anchored to a set of principles.
And there was plenty of room for healthy skepticism and disagreement. Safdar and Tee, for example, brought a more measured and critical approach to questions about sovereignty, network states, and Bitcoin adoption, which we thought was particularly valuable. So it turns out we're not quite as toxic as the shitcoiners and no-coiners would have you believe!
But we must remain vigilant, especially when considering the rather unsettling question at the end of our presummit reflection, that is, how do we survive success without being reterritorialized back into the system we were trying to escape? (Micro)Strategy offers a rather amusing example of what this process can look like. Saylor and his army of suitcoiners seem convinced that they're revolutionizing finance because they've managed to insert the word Bitcoin into an increasingly elaborate collection of debt based financial instruments. Their obsession with engineering new ways to extract yield and leverage from Bitcoin has become so all-consuming that they barely seem capable of talking about Bitcoin itself anymore. It's always digital capital, digital credit, digital assets, digital this and digital that, an endless procession of financial abstractions that somehow manages to reproduce the logic of the very system Bitcoin was supposed to allow us to escape. These self appointed architects of the Bitcoin financial renaissance are increasingly indistinguishable from the fiat bankers they imagine themselves replacing.
And this extends beyond Saylor, of course. An increasing number of Bitcoin companies have embraced yield products, collateralized lending, and other debt-based instruments, encouraging Bitcoiners to borrow more fiat against their holdings. But don't worry MB, some of them pay their yield in Bitcoin, so apparently that makes everything fine!
In their misguided attempts to break away from fiat, while hilariously presenting themselves as cypherpunk + anti-state innovators, they remain completely dependent on the monetary structures and incentives of the fiat system. They've changed the asset without seriously challenging the machinery surrounding it. And this is precisely the trap we're concerned about. Something can adopt the language, imagery, and even some of the technology of Bitcoin while remaining fundamentally subordinate to the same institutional logic it claims to transcend.
So, is Bitcoin Majlis unknowingly walking into this same trap of being subordinated to the fiat industrial complex?
At this juncture, we do not think so, especially if the success of the summit is any indication. But if we're not careful, the summit itself could eventually morph into another annual Muslim conference series, not unlike ISNA or ICNA, that continually reproduces itself without generating anything genuinely new or addressing the deeper problems of ummatic sovereignty and civilizational decline.
So if we find ourselves organizing the 47th annual Muslim Bitcoin Summit decades from now, complete with corporate sponsors, VIP passes, and the same panel discussions, that would probably be a very bad sign that this majlis has been thoroughly neutered!
So what do we do instead? Well, some of the most fruitful and passionate conversations happened after the formal conclusion of the summit, when attendees began discussing what we could actually build next.
One idea that we believe is worth pursuing is organizing more of our work around the concept of Digital Hijrah, as a way of introducing Bitcoin into the broader Muslim imaginary through a much wider set of technological and civilizational questions. Perhaps we need to be a little more subversive in our orange pilling.
We've even discussed the possibility of renaming the Muslim Bitcoin Summit to something like the Digital Hijrah Summit, which could substantially broaden the range of subjects and practical activities we could explore. Bitcoin would remain central to what we're doing, of course, but it would be situated within a much larger conversation about technological sovereignty, privacy, FOSS infrastructure, and the formation of Muslim communities that are less dependent on the systems we've spent so much time criticizing. We could also become more developer focused where we actively recruit Muslims capable of contributing to Bitcoin software, node infrastructure, mining, and other open source projects.
Something that particularly struck me personally was the interest people had in the NoorNote app that our brother Alp has been developing. I had the opportunity to demonstrate it at the summit, and people were genuinely impressed by his approach to building outside the architecture of legacy social media, or LSM. But what seemed to fascinate people even more was the relationship between the developer and the users. I could publicly request a feature, discuss it directly with the person writing the software, zap him sats for his work, and those zapped sats could then be used to buy kyc free compute. No corporate intermediary, no subscription model designed to capture users, no elaborate bureaucracy governing what could or couldn't be built. There was a feedback loop there that people immediately recognized as something worth exploring further. A small example, perhaps, but one that points toward an entirely different way of cultivating and sustaining Muslim technological infrastructure.
We were also pleasantly surprised by how many attendees were already using GrapheneOS. And once we began talking about Nostr, it seemed to make immediate sense to many of them. There was already a degree of familiarity with the broader principles of technological sovereignty, even among people who weren't particularly technical.
This brings us to something else that we think deserves considerably more attention going forward, which is the workshops. To be fair, we were a little sloppy with how we organized them. We simply didn't allocate enough time, and although the workshops were excellent and full of useful knowledge, they didn't quite accomplish everything we had hoped they would. Muaawiyah Tucker somehow managed to make elliptical curve mathematics interesting, which is an achievement in itself. We were surprised by how engaged the audience remained throughout his session. But next time, whatever event or gathering we decide to organize, we need to place much greater emphasis on the practical workshops. Ideally, we'd have concurrent sessions running, WITH BREAKS THIS TIME, allowing attendees to gravitate toward whatever they find most useful, whether that's basics of transactions, public and private keys, hardware wallet security, running Nostr, installing Linux or GrapheneOS, or learning to operate their own nodes and other sovereign infrastructure.
We really can't afford to slack here, because the workshops are arguably what make these gatherings a fundamentally different animal from the usual Muslim conference circuit. Anyone can fill a conference hall with speakers talking about empowerment and Islamic revival. We've had decades of that already. What matters is whether the people leaving that conference are actually more capable than when they arrived. Can they secure their own wealth? Can they run their own infrastructure? Can they communicate without relying on surveillance platforms? Can they teach someone else to do the same? This is where the cultivation of cypherpunk and lunarpunk sovereignty becomes an actual lived practice. The workshops should function almost like small laboratories of Digital Hijrah, where ideas become habits, habits become competencies, and those competencies eventually spread through families and local communities.
And perhaps this is also where the question of Bitcoin Majlis becoming an assemblage rather than a conventional organization could get some concrete meaning.
We don't necessarily need everyone attending the summit to become a member of some formal institution, nor do we need every new initiative to operate under the Bitcoin Majlis name. We'd much rather see people acquire the knowledge, confidence, and relationships necessary to build things independently, and then see those initiatives develop their own connections with others doing similar work.
Like in previous summits, we had several attendees express an interest in organizing similar gatherings in their own countries, particularly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. This seems like exactly the right direction to us. There are enormous opportunities to reach Muslim populations outside the usual Western conference circuit, and it would be rather absurd for an ideology concerned with decentralization+sovereignty to insist that every gathering take place in some Western city.
Perhaps the next gathering happens in Malaysia, Oman, or somewhere entirely unexpected. Perhaps it only happens online. Perhaps it isn't even called the Muslim Bitcoin Summit. Perhaps smaller regional majalis, workshops, meetups, and developer gatherings begin proliferating on their own, connected through shared principles and infrastructure rather than a single centralized organization. That would allow us to grow sideways rather than simply upwards, which is perhaps one of the more important distinctions we've been trying to articulate.
Exactly where the next gathering takes place remains to be seen.
And we should also be patient. Breaking away from the old and forming something new takes time. Cultivating the soil before the seed can even be planted takes time, and it can be quite boring when all you have to work with is a pile of dirt and barren land. There will be periods when it feels like nothing particularly exciting is happening, when we're simply running nodes, stacking sats, experimenting with software, organizing meetings online, and having conversations with the same handful of people. But perhaps those seemingly mundane activities are precisely what allow something much larger to eventually take root. After all, we're not trying to manufacture another organization that can boast about its membership numbers, annual conferences, institutional partnerships, and other bureaucratic metrics. We want to cultivate something capable of reproducing itself without requiring our constant supervision, something that can proliferate through the Ummah in forms we may not even recognize or anticipate today.
And if this whole experiment eventually succeeds, perhaps the most meaningful evidence of our success won't be how large Bitcoin Majlis becomes, but how many new things emerge that no longer need Bitcoin Majlis at all.
So that's where we are. We're excited, but admittedly also a little anxious, to see where all of this goes. The summit left us with more questions than answers, but perhaps that's exactly what we needed. We came together expecting to organize a Bitcoin conference and left wondering whether we're actually participating in the early formation of something much more interesting. There's still an enormous amount of work to do, and we certainly don't have everything figured out. But let's keep rethinking, recruiting, promoting, experimenting, synthesizing, and building the new and unfamiliar outside the confines of the old and familiar.
And to anyone who attended, or even those who didn't get the chance to attend, Muslim or non-Muslim, we'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts about where this peculiar experiment should go next. Alhamdulillah for everything. May Allah SWT accept our efforts and allow something beneficial to emerge from them.