I was nine years old and reading Hospodářské noviny. Not because anyone told me to. Because money, how it worked, who controlled it, why some people had it and others didn't, seemed like the most important thing in the world that nobody in school was willing to explain honestly. I played Monopoly with the intensity other kids reserved for football. Somewhere underneath all of it was a question I couldn't yet articulate: who decides what things are worth?

I went to study international business, hoping the question would be answered. It wasn't. I dropped out. Twice. Not from laziness, but from the conviction that the lessons I needed were not in the curriculum.

2008 said everything the classroom wouldn't. Watching the financial crisis unfold, watching institutions presented as bedrock reveal themselves as structurally fraudulent, watching governments print money to rescue the people who caused the damage, I did not feel surprised. I felt confirmed.

Bitcoin was around $270 when I first bought it, late 2015, in Prague. Not through an exchange with KYC requirements. In person, peer-to-peer: at events, through LocalBitcoins, at Paralelní Polis, from ATMs, through exchange offices that in those days still processed larger volumes without identity checks. The community around it was small, serious, and ideologically coherent in a way that felt immediately familiar.

These were people asking the same question I had been asking since I was nine. Paralelní Polis, co-founded by Slovak cypherpunk Pavol Lupták, was a physical expression of that question: a space where the answer was being built rather than just debated.

I was working as a director at a company, earning a real salary. Each month, a portion moved into Bitcoin. Not because I had a price target, but because I believed fiat currency was a slow emergency and Bitcoin was a way out.

There was no single morning when I woke up and realised I was a millionaire. It happened gradually, then undeniably. By 25, the numbers had crossed a threshold. By 26 or 27, with XMR near its peak, the portfolio was approaching ten million Czech crowns. Approximately 95% in crypto. The remainder was cash.

What Bitcoin gave me, more than the numbers, was the ability to structure my life differently, to work when and where I chose, to move freely, to make decisions based on what I valued. That freedom was not a side effect. It was the point.

The freedom to leave. To move. To work from Colombia, from Madeira, from Zimbabwe, from wherever the work required. To take risks that salaried employment does not permit.

I am still in this space because the question I was asking at nine has not been answered satisfactorily by the existing system. Bitcoin is still the most honest answer I have found to the question of how a person can hold value outside the reach of institutions that have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they cannot be fully trusted with it.

The spread was the opportunity. Bitcoin prices on Czech peer-to-peer markets were running 15 to 20 percent above what I could buy it for locally in Colombia. I was living in Colombia, trading on LocalBitcoins, operating transparently within a legal grey zone that was, as far as I understood it, entirely my own business.

I was wrong, not about the legality, as it turned out, but about how visible that kind of activity makes you. And about what can happen when buyers on the other side of your trades are not who they say they are.

What the frozen account screen actually showed was worse than zero. My overdraft facility appeared fully exhausted. According to my banking app, I was overnight approximately 70,000 Czech crowns in debt to my own bank. Money I did not owe, for reasons I did not yet understand.

There was one piece of luck. The day before the freeze, I had withdrawn a significant amount of cash to buy Bitcoin, the transaction I was in the middle of completing. The seller's bank had already closed by the time I arrived, so the cash was still in my hands. Colombian pesos. Physical. Unseizable. In a country where Bitcoin adoption was still limited, that cash was the difference between surviving and not.

A week passed before I found out: police. A criminal investigation. Suspicion of involvement in fraud. My trades, legitimate, documented, made in good faith, had apparently been used as a laundering mechanism by buyers I had never met. I was a node in someone else's network, and the law does not always distinguish between a participant and a tool.

Getting back to Prague required asking for help. The person I asked was a Colombian ethical hacker I had met, by coincidence, at the Hackers Congress in Prague, introduced through Pavol Lupták, the Slovak cypherpunk and co-founder of Paralelní Polis. My friend bought me a flight home. I paid him in the Colombian cash I had been living on.

That moment, a hacker I had met at a privacy conference buying me a flight, paid in physical cash, because every other financial channel had been shut down by the state, is the most honest illustration I have of why the communities that build around Bitcoin and privacy technology are not paranoid. They are prepared.

I was found innocent. The court agreed. And I still lost the money. The court's reasoning: it was not clear to whom the funds in my account belonged. So the state would hold them. And then, after I had repeatedly come forward to claim them, after I had won the case, the money was forfeited to the state anyway.

What saved my financial life was not the justice system. It was the fact that at the moment my bank account was frozen, the majority of my savings were not in that bank account. They were in cash and in Bitcoin, outside the system, outside the reach of a court order.

I booked a three-week holiday to Zimbabwe. That was the plan. Three months later I was still there, two weeks in Tanzania, a week in Zambia, and the rest of the time in Harare, which kept offering reasons to stay. The place does that. You arrive expecting a visit and end up trying to understand something larger.

What I found reminded me of something I had seen before, in a different context, on a different continent. China, twenty years ago, had that same quality of velocity and hunger, systems being built, infrastructure going up, a population that wanted things and was prepared to move fast to get them. Africa feels like that now. Not identical, the contexts are very different, but the underlying energy is familiar. Something is beginning. The question is what shape it takes.

I spent most of my time in Harare. Zimbabwe is, counterintuitively, one of the easier entry points into African business for a European, partly because of the country's complicated history with Britain, and partly because of what that history left behind: near-universal English fluency. You can have a real conversation with almost anyone. A taxi driver, a banker, a market vendor. That matters when you are trying to learn quickly.

I learned faster than I expected. I started spending time with two Zimbabwean women, one of them took me across the country, showing me things I would not have found alone. The other explained the city to me from the inside. You understand a place differently when someone who lives there decides to show it to you honestly.

What I came away with was a dense map of contacts and a faster education than I could have gotten any other way. The summit compressed months of due diligence into days. Corruption came up constantly, not as a scandal, but as a structural reality that everyone in the room had already factored into their plans. It is a complication, not a dealbreaker. But it is always present.

You don't need a map to find a bank in Africa. You need eyes. A queue stretching around the corner, people waiting in the heat with patience worn smooth by repetition. That's your landmark.

I spoke with bankers. Actual bankers, people who work inside the institutions. They were candid. Home loans and personal credit running at 15 to 20 percent. Mobile banking services like Econet's EcoCash that function as the country's de facto payment infrastructure, because the formal banking system never reached most people in the first place. The gap between what an African bank offers and what a European neobank like Revolut offers is not a gap. It is a different universe.

The UX of African banking is not bad in the way that a poorly designed app is bad. It is bad in the way that something was built without the user ever being considered. Optimisation, as a concept, does not appear to have arrived. And yet the people using these systems are not unsophisticated. They are operating around the limitations with genuine ingenuity, mobile money, informal networks, cash in currencies other than their own.

Zimbabwe has been through hyperinflation twice. This is not a historical footnote. It is something people remember with their bodies, the way prices doubled week to week, the way savings dissolved into nothing, the way the number on your bank balance stopped having any relationship to what you could actually buy.

I spoke with entrepreneurs who had lived through it directly. They told stories that are difficult to absorb as real. You would leave for work in the morning with the equivalent of 500,000 USD in your account. By evening, that same number could barely cover breakfast the next day. Not a crash. Not a bad week. Just Tuesday. The zeros on the banknotes kept multiplying until the currency became simultaneously a collectors item and a national humiliation.

One man described watching his monthly salary lose half its purchasing power before he could spend it. Another talked about the ZiG, Zimbabwe's new gold-backed currency, with a mixture of cautious hope and bone-deep scepticism. "We've been here before," he said. Not bitterly. Just accurately.

This is the context into which Bitcoin enters in Zimbabwe, not as ideology, not as speculation, but as the most straightforward answer to a question millions of people are already asking: how do I hold value in a system I have good historical reasons not to trust?

The crypto activity in Zimbabwe, and across several African countries, is already visible if you are paying attention. Not from curiosity. From necessity.

This needs to be said clearly: Africa is not a country. Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Zambia are three distinct environments with different histories, different currencies, different institutional structures, and different levels of trust in financial systems. What works in one does not automatically translate to the others.

But the common thread is real. Educated people, hungry for information and new tools, operating in systems that consistently underserve them. A population that is not waiting to be saved, it is already solving problems with whatever is available. Give it better tools and it will use them.

I believe Africa will be one of the fastest-growing economic regions of the next decade. I also believe that for crypto, and specifically for P2P tools that work without banks, the opportunity is not future tense. It is already here.

I was twenty-two when I walked into a job interview for an assistant purchasing role at a sports merchandising company in Prague. The salary on offer was 20,000 crowns a month. I said yes to the job and negotiated something extra: a bonus tied to whatever savings I could generate by rebuilding the supply chain. Within three months, the bonus had outperformed the salary, significantly. Within two years, I was the company's director.

The company managed merchandising for major Czech sports clubs, Sparta Praha, Slavia Praha, the national hockey team. I had been building supply chains since before I was twenty, for my own businesses as well as for companies with e-shops. This was simply the next chapter of the same work at a larger scale.

I negotiated with the company's owner to go two weeks ahead of her so I could see the country properly before we got down to work. I booked a flight and disappeared into China alone before meeting her for the Canton Fair.

China was building cities for people who had not arrived yet, tower after tower, cranes on every horizon. And alongside all this velocity, the ghost skyscrapers: finished buildings standing completely empty. Built for a future population that had not arrived yet, or perhaps because the act of building had its own momentum nobody wanted to interrupt.

The factories were not what I expected, genuinely impressive, well-organised, professional. I came away with better suppliers and better terms. The owner got what she needed. I got a week travelling China alone, one of the more formative experiences of my early twenties.

Between 2013 and 2016 I went to Thailand repeatedly, a month at a time, sometimes two, whenever my physical presence in Prague was not strictly required. The infrastructure for this, coworking spaces, the vocabulary of location-independent work, either did not exist or was only just beginning. I was simply a person who had a laptop and the conviction that working from a different place did not mean working less well.

I travelled alone by preference. When you travel with someone else, you negotiate constantly. When you travel alone, you are entirely available to what is actually in front of you.

In Thailand I met a Spanish woman. She was living in the Philippines. I flew to visit her. This seemed, at the time of booking, like a reasonable and romantic thing to do.

It was 2021 and I had not left Prague in almost a year. The world was running on Covid logic and I had been running on a different kind of logic: stacking. Work, focus, money, repeat. Somewhere around the end of that year, the combination of Prague winter and twelve months without a horizon started to feel like something that needed correcting.

I googled "warmest place in Europe in winter." The Canary Islands came up first, I knew them, had already formed an opinion. Fine, but not what I was looking for. Then Madeira. I knew almost nothing about it. A friend showed me photos and videos and my immediate reaction was suspicion: nothing can actually look like that. I accused him of having too good a phone. He had an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I bought the same phone. And then I bought a ticket to Madeira.

Four hours of flying. Minus five to plus twenty-two. The first day I rented a car and drove. The island reveals itself in a way that is difficult to describe, the cliffs dropping straight into the Atlantic, the levada paths cut into the mountainside. By the end of that first day I had a question that felt both impulsive and entirely rational: what does property cost here?

I did not move immediately. I went back to Prague, finished what needed finishing. By September 2022, I had moved. The logic was simple: I had done the most important work I was going to do in that chapter, and Madeira was waiting.

The first thing I did was renovate the house. The second, which emerged naturally from the first, was that people I knew from Prague kept visiting and wanted to understand the island properly. I started showing them around. They asked questions about property. I started selling it. One visitor told a client who wanted to build a hotel, which turned into setting up a Portuguese company, opening bank accounts, navigating bureaucracy, finding architects and construction firms, and serving as legal director of the new entity. I said yes. About a year and a half later, I moved on.

Madeira is a place that people discover and cannot quite explain why they stay. Four hours from Europe, two from Africa, seven from the Americas. The community of people who have ended up here, entrepreneurs, Bitcoiners, remote workers, people who decided the conventional coordinates of a European life were negotiable, is genuinely interesting.

Recently, I found someone worth staying for. She is, improbably, Czech, which proves that you can travel to the edge of the Atlantic and still end up exactly where you were always going, in the best possible sense. We live in the house I bought on day four.