 I heard rumours that the UK Bitcoin scene was opening up a Bitcoin hub. So I took a trip down to Satoshi's place in Greater Manchester to interview founder Lee and check out the bar, co-working space and workshop. Everything, and I mean everything at Satoshi's place, is Bitcoin themed. Even the hand dryer uses heat from a Bitcoin miner. So I'm at Satoshi's place in Burry, and I'm at the bar. I've got an agronie Nakamoto here, but I'm going to ask my friend to pay for it this evening. I'm calling Mateo now. I'll spin you around. Where are you right now? Amazing. I'm in Manchester, I'm in a bar that accepts Bitcoin. I'm just wondering, would you be able to buy my cocktail? Yeah. I'm going to spin the camera around. You see that on my screen there? That's the cocktail. Okay, so there's your invoice just there. Is it reading? Nice. It's done! Oh my days, that actually worked. Yeah, hi, my name is Adam from Satoshi's place. So how did it all come about? Why did you decide to turn a bar? Are you local to Burry? That's the first thing. Yeah, just up the road. I've had this place since 2018. I opened it as a coffee shop to build on experience from events. So building a merchant adoption system for Bitcoin. So in 2018 we took Bitcoin for coffee. And we had an ATM back when all that stuff was legal. Yeah, so we just sold coffee and breakfast for Bitcoin. Okay, so that goes and flies in the face of those people that say you can't buy a coffee with Bitcoin. It worked, and that was literally a layer one. It wasn't lightning. It was slow, but I mean, we was only kind of small amounts anyway, so we just let the user sit down and watch the transaction and stuff. Yeah, and so when did you first implement the lightning network? How did that, how was that received? We did lightning testing over the years really, and it wasn't, there wasn't as many apps out there. The adoption kind of wasn't as easy. With the framework I was building for merchants, it wasn't as easy for them to understand it. So really from the coffee shop, I turned it into a pizzeria, so where we did Bitcoin pizza day, and we sold pizzas for Bitcoin, and then really went after CoinFest 2021. I sent the reception to Bitcoin then, and the amount of growth that we had for the workshops, so then I decided to turn this place into Satoshi's place. Wow, and it's really cool just sitting here and saying everything, I'm pretty sure everything is Satoshi theme, or Bitcoin theme. Yeah, it will be eventually. Yeah, there's still a lot more that I need to do. I need to update. We're going to get Euro notes for these tables. We've got Monopoly notes for them, tables, you know, to theme them. Yeah, I mean the Bitcoin artwork everywhere, the cocktails are all themed, you know, Negroni, Nakamoto, and Mind Teenies, even down to the food. Yeah, my partner did all that. And there's an educational or a community element to it, isn't there? You mentioned workshops. Yeah, so there'll be a charity that's formed that will operate the workshops from everything from, you know, lightning, education, Bitcoin for kids, Bitcoin development, all different types. There's about 16 hosts that I've got up to now that want to do workshops. Pretty much I'll be free. Yeah. Or a small fee just to kind of get the space to confirm the amount of users. But yeah, that's the focus of that part of it. Right, okay. There's a lot going on, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah, when did you first get into Bitcoin? 2012, 2013. Okay, so definitely a Burry OG. Can I say that? You can if you're here. The Bitcoin Burry OG. And what would you, or how would you describe Bitcoin now if you were to sort of, if someone walks into Stochie's place and they're like, you know, I've heard about this Bitcoin thing, you know, my son's been playing with it or I don't know, my granddaughter or whatever it may be. How do you break it down to them in like a sort of an easy to understand way? It depends on, you know, what the son's doing with it. If they're gaming and they've heard about it, then it's a payment system that can be added on to games that gives them much more control as opposed to like Fortnite points or whatever that works. If they're trading it, you know, there's all different ways in which people need to be approached. It's not just one. We can't just throw one kind of explanation at them because they come from different backgrounds. Most people have heard it from, you know, I've lost a lot of money in Bitcoin or I've gained a lot of money in Bitcoin or it can make me a lot of money. So in that sense, you need to kind of educate them that it's not just about the money side of things. It's the network. It's the community and it's how it all kind of comes together for a new type of monetary system. Yeah. Wow, tailor-made. That's the way to orange pill. Okay, cool. Is there anything that you really want to highlight or address or just bring up generally about, you know, Bitcoin adoption in the UK? Is this a good way to do it? Well, I learned from 2018 and talking to the local business. I've got about 40 businesses that are interested in from 2018 for Bitcoin adoption. Now they watched my journey with the banking. I had a bank account here which got blocked for about a year just for taking Bitcoin payments. We had the ATM which we did a turnover of about 20,000 a month. Just through the ATM? So people were putting 20,000 pounds with a cash into an ATM on a monthly basis. From teenagers up to, I think, our eldest was 93. The 93-year-old hodler. Yeah. I hope they're still hodling. So of course the coffee shop wasn't making 20,000 a month. So that ended up having bank accounts getting blocked but everything was done by the book. So a lot of the Bitcoin adoption was built around my experiences. So I wouldn't just give a merchant Bitcoin payment system because then what happens if the bank got blocked? What if they got people coming in asking questions about, you know, the POS or any of the interaction in the network? So there's a lot of that that goes into kind of building the system for it. Wow, so it's actually really hard to make a Bitcoin business in the UK. I think this is kind of what I'm taking from this. I think someone's written a dissertation about me and the banking issues that I've had in Bitcoin because I've had twice now the banks block. I think the smallest transaction was £500 but it was all documented in here. All the IDs were taken. It was all documented properly. It was a full exchange system, well literally to the minute and the cash was all accounted for and everything but even still that evidence was presented to the bank and they still blocked me. I mean it's funny because Danny from FastBitcoins literally just wrote about when I was school with him about saying how the banking system doesn't necessarily victimise Bitcoin companies but it makes it very hard for them to do business and as I say, even if you're doing it by the book. So it's kind of, you know, the general sort of feeling was they're not out to get Bitcoin companies but they don't understand it and therefore the easiest thing is just to ban it because they don't understand it. So again it sort of plays into the idea that there needs to be more education. There needs to be more space like this where people can come in and ask questions. We'll have merchant workshops as well so any merchants that are interested in just learning from my experiences from the coffee shop to the pizzeria to Satoshi's place and then they can be shown the different coin corner of FastBitcoins POS systems and then hopefully we can build the merchant kind of network up slowly but kind of tailored to them and how they want to do it. I hosted CoinFest for like the past five years and of course Barclays stopped my banks here that I had for 11-ish years so through the other businesses they stopped it but then the last CoinFest, they tried to sponsor it they tried to do a workshop at the last CoinFest. So they come as far as sending me an email they introduced themselves and then I got in the phone call with them and they were like, we'd love to be a part of it with a little initiative that we've got and I was like, nope, no chat, I've recorded all the calls and you've got no chance. I said, you won't succeed in anything you do with Bitcoin because you just don't even look into it or investigate it, you just they just sent me a check for my bank balance and said, no comment, literally there's your money. So everything that I had to do with them was just gone. Yeah, it was about I think eight or nine months that they blocked the account for initially. You've been in Bitcoin now for 10 years and yet you're still doing stuff in Bitcoin still believing the movement, you know, what it represents there's a lot of people that sort of fall off the map and spend three, four years in it get hit by a bear market and they're like it was good while it lasted. What's kept you working, what's kept you coming back? So that's what I formed kind of from the business side of stuff in 2012 I was in it slightly earlier as a hobby but I did mining, I built gaming machines for people so when they went under, I ended up using them to mine Bitcoin so from that I learned Python and then did development on people's Bitcoin websites pulling APIs and prices and stuff like most of the prices here are ours that we pull and then we kind of group them together database so all the systems that we built over the years that's the main area that I'm still working now this will hopefully run itself I've got confidence in the staff so then I can step back carry on doing the development work but then bring much more of the merch and bits and bobs into it as it progresses and grows Cheers mate, best of luck with it and yeah, to Satoshi's place