Absolutely incredible what we managed to pull off on such a shoestring budget, with people scattered across the world, most of whom had never even met in person, somehow coordinating and bringing it all together.
Allahu Akbar!
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naddr1qq…7l9rHow we hosted the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London for under £15k
People keep asking me how we did it, so I thought I'd write it down properly while it's still fresh. We ran a two-day international conference in London on a budget most event organisers would laugh at. Four months of planning. Ten people, none of us doing this full-time. Not a penny of corporate sponsorship. Delegates who flew in from across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. This isn't a victory lap. It's the unofficial playbook - what we did, in what order, what it cost us in time rather than money, and the bits we could've done better. If you're sitting in another city thinking about doing the same thing, you should read this, rather than starting from nothing. It was important that we operated on a 'shoestring' budget. We are just ordinary guys, like most people, with regular fiat jobs, families to feed and rent to pay, but we're all committed to taking back control of our money, data and digital tools. There are no 'Bitcoin whales' in this team. One thing worth saying up front, because it shapes everything that follows: there is no organisation behind this. No company, no board, no staff, no office. I'll come back to that at the end, but keep it in mind as you read.
What we actually ran
The Muslim Bitcoin Summit London 2026 ran on 10 and 11 October at the Atrium in London, under the banner of the Anti-Riba Money Conference. Day 1 opened with Qur'an recitation and consisted of three keynotes and five panels, including a closing Q&A at the end, with breaks built into the schedule including lunch and prayers. Day 2 was different in kind. We ran the Digital Hijrah workshops on Bitcoin, Nostr and GrapheneOS, and a closing group discussion. Tickets were £50 for Saturday and £70 for the weekend, lunch included in both. Delegates travelled from across the world: from the United States, to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Bulgaria, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Palestine, Malaysia, Australia and more. Every speaker and panellist came unpaid. The whole thing was community-funded and non-profit, with no major corporate sponsors.
Why cheap was the point
We could have raised more. There is money in this space, and a conference about Bitcoin in London is not a hard sell to a sponsor looking for a logo on a backdrop. We chose not to, and the reason sits at the centre of everything the Summit was about. If you are going to stand on a stage and tell a room full of Muslims that the debt-based monetary system has captured our institutions, you cannot have arrived there on capture. A conference funded by the community who attend it answers to the people who attend it. A conference funded by a corporate sponsor answers to the sponsor, and the answer shows up in the programme, in who gets a keynote, in which critiques quietly do not get made. There is a second reason, less principled and more practical. Cost is a filter on ambition in the worst way. If running an event costs £100,000, then only people with access to £100,000 run events, and the community waits for permission from whoever has it. If it costs under £15,000, a determined group in Istanbul or Abu Dhabi or Kuala Lumpur can do the same thing next year without asking anyone. Keeping the number small was not only a necessity, it was an attempt to make the thing repeatable. And the third reason, which I may as well admit: we didn't have the money anyway. All three are true at the same time. But I want to be clear that we set the ceiling deliberately, in June, before we had any idea what we could raise.
Four months, one small team
We started in June. That gave us roughly four months, which is tight for an international conference and would have been impossible without a highly committed and disciplined team, alhamdulillah. The core UK team was Ashik and Michael, with support from Hasnain and Fraz. The offshore team, from the US, Denmark and elsewhere, was Abdullah, Bashar, Salah and Salman, with support from Tee and Subhan. Nobody on the team did this full-time. Everyone had jobs, businesses and families. The offshore arrangement turned out to be a blessing rather than a handicap. They had first-hand experience of organising and delivering the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in Dallas for two years running. But the part we did not anticipate was what happened when they arrived: the offshore team flew in from Friday afternoon and evening and were hands-on for the entire weekend, carrying equipment, handling the registration desk, and running workshops. They were not remote contributors who turned up to watch. They were part of the crew. Between us we did nearly everything, Allahumma baarik. Content creation, marketing, design, web development, the ticketing system, the giveaway platform, video and graphics, print. We were blessed with a multi-skilled team, and that single fact is responsible for more of the cost saving than any negotiation we did. We had built and assembled a decentralised team. No head office. No single point of coordination. Work moved to whoever was best placed to do it, in whichever time zone they happened to be in. The weekly sync was what made part-time effort add up to a finished event, because it forced everyone to show progress out loud, every week.
We picked a date first, but privately - a weekend all the core team could genuinely commit to. Then we went looking for a venue, and we did not announce anything until that venue was signed. Only after the venue was ours did we start approaching speakers. I know the temptation is to announce early and build momentum. Don't. A date you've announced and can't honour costs you more trust than a late announcement costs you attendance, and approaching speakers before you have a venue means asking people to commit to something that doesn't exist yet. Get the room, then announce, then build the programme inside it. Once the date was public, though, it became immovable, and everything else got negotiated against it. For security reasons, we kept the venue location private and only disclosed it to ticket holders.
The team we built, and the one we're still building
Something we thought about deliberately, and which I don't think gets talked about enough: who was actually in the team. We tried to build diversity into it from the start - geography, ethnicity, background, madhhab, and most importantly diversity of thought. That mattered to us for a practical reason as much as a principled one. A group that only recruits people who already think identically produces an echo chamber, makes worse decisions, and starts to look from the outside like a cult. We are a community with a shared concern about riba and surveillance, and within that there is a great deal of honest disagreement, which we accommodate rather than suppress. The gap we haven't closed is gender. We would love to have sisters properly represented on the organising team, and we tried: we published articles, we reached out across forums and community groups, we asked. The response was slower than we hoped, but alhamdulillah we now have a handful of sisters who have come forward and could get more involved in future events and initiatives. That is progress, not a solved problem, and I'd rather write it down as an open gap than quietly leave it out of the story. If you're copying this playbook, build that in from the first week rather than noticing it in month three, as we did.
What the backlog actually looked like
Everything lived on one shared board.
Housekeeping was the longest list by a distance, and hardly any of it is interesting. Fire exits. Lapel mics. A table for the book stall. Nobody comes home from a conference talking about the podium, but get a couple of those wrong and the day feels amateurish in a way delegates can sense without being able to name. The glamorous work - the programme, the speakers - took a fraction of the effort that the boring work did.
The venue problem
Finding a venue willing to host a Muslim Bitcoin conference is harder than it should be. Say the word to a booking manager and you are competing with every scam, every collapsed exchange and every headline of the last decade. Some venues declined outright. Others asked questions they would never ask of a traditional 'Islamic Finance' or Tech Fest event. Within the Muslim community the difficulty compounds. Bitcoin still carries a reputation as something controversial, speculative, or at best religiously unsettled, and a venue that serves that community reads a booking request through that lens. We were, in a small and frustrating way, running into exactly the misconception the Summit exists to correct. The event was difficult to host for precisely the reason the event needed to happen. The venue search was simply the first place the work had to be done. There was also the unglamorous half of logistics. We arranged accommodation for core team members travelling in, and moved every piece of equipment and every prop to the venue ourselves. Nobody writes articles about who carried the boxes, but the boxes do not carry themselves, and the budget assumes they will not be hired out.
Where the money went
I'm not going to publish our actual numbers, but I'll tell you where the money went and roughly in what order, because that's the useful part anyway. Venue hire and catering were far and away the biggest two lines. Between them they ate most of the budget, and I'd spend it the same way again. The catering decision is worth explaining. Our venue provided the food and cooked it on the premises, which meant it came out fresh and properly hot rather than sitting in trays losing heat since the morning. Anyone who has been to a conference knows the difference, and it is the kind of thing people remember about a day long after they've forgotten which panel said what. We also ran a reception area with tea, coffee and water available all day, and seated the room cabaret style - round tables rather than rows. That last one costs you capacity, and it is worth it. People talk to each other at a round table. They stare at the back of someone's head in a row.
On the income side: ticket sales at £50 and £70, plus community contributions. We ran early bird pricing until 1 August, then standard. No corporate sponsorship, no grant, no debt. And here's the thing I want to be straight about, because an article like this is worthless if it's only the flattering half: we did not even break even. Ticket income came nowhere near covering what the weekend cost, and we knew it wouldn't when we set the prices. £50 for the Saturday and £70 for the weekend, lunch included, was never a number arrived at by dividing costs by expected attendance. We picked it by asking what a family in this community could actually afford on a Saturday, and then worked backwards. You can price an event to break even or you can price it so the people you built it for can walk through the door. We couldn't do both, so we chose. If we'd charged what the weekend genuinely cost per head, a good number of the people in that room would not have been in that room, and the ones most likely to have stayed home are the ones who most needed to hear it. The core team picked up the shortfall out of our own pockets. I'm not saying that for sympathy - we made the decision deliberately and we'd make it again. I'm saying it because "community-funded" can sound like the money appeared from somewhere, and it didn't. Somebody always pays. In our case it was us, and we'd rather carry that than price people out of the room. So work out who is carrying the gap before you set your ticket price, not after the invoices land. If the answer is nobody, you don't have a budget yet. Notice what never appears in that budget at all. No agency. No event production company. No designer, no video editor, no web developer, no ticketing platform taking a cut. Those are the lines that would have doubled the budget, and we didn't pay them because we didn't have to.
What we refused to pay for
Run the numbers on a conference the ordinary way and a surprising share of the budget never touches the room. It goes on software: a ticketing platform taking a cut of every sale, an audience polling tool charged per attendee, a survey product, a competition platform, an email service, a landing page builder. Each is a modest fee. Together they can add up to thousands, and every one of them puts your delegates' data on someone else's server. We built ours instead, on hosting we already paid for: * *The giveaway platform.* Entry missions, referral links with per-entrant tracking, bonus entries for following sponsors, knowledge-level capture, and a random draw after close. Commercial equivalents charge monthly and take the data. * *The feedback survey system.* Two survey pages, a submit handler and an admin dashboard, so we owned the results rather than renting access to them. * *All brand, slide and print design.* The schedule graphics, the Escape Riba and Discover Bitcoin material, the Digital Hijrah leaflet, the stage backdrops, the full Day 2 workshop deck. Built in-house on a shared template. * *The promotional videos and the campaign itself.* No agency, no media buy.
I want to be honest about the cost of this, because "we built it ourselves" is the sort of line that sounds free and is not. It cost evenings and weekends. Time away from family and friends. If you do not have someone on the team who can build, paying for the tools is the correct decision and you should make it without embarrassment. But money wasn't really the reason. We spent two days telling people to leave surveillance platforms, self-host, and stop handing their data to middlemen. If we'd collected their names and emails on a platform that monetises exactly that, we'd have been talking nonsense. Nobody would have known. That's sort of the point - it was the one place where cheating would have been invisible, which made it the place that mattered. There's a bigger point here: we didn't only talk about decentralisation and sovereign architecture from the stage. We ran the event that way. Think about what the conventional route looks like: you hire an agency or a consultancy, and everything routes through them. They own the relationships, they own the platforms, they own your delegate data, and they take a margin on every piece of it. One central intermediary, sitting between you and everything you are trying to do - which is, structurally, exactly the arrangement we spent two days arguing against. What we did instead was the sovereign version. The team was distributed across the UK, the US, Denmark and elsewhere, and each person brought a speciality rather than a job title: design here, development there, content, video, logistics, community. The platforms were ours - ticketing, giveaway, feedback - running on hosting we controlled, holding data we could delete when we said we would. That isn't a cost-saving dressed up as a principle. It is genuinely why the thing was possible at the price. Decentralised means you use whatever capability the network already has instead of renting it back from a middleman, and the network - our community - already had almost everything we needed.
Speakers: handpicked, not bought
Not one speaker was paid a fee. Every one of them was asked personally, by someone on the team who knew their work. This is the part people assume must be the hardest, and it was the easiest. Scholars, economists, developers and practitioners said yes because the invitation was specific: here is the argument we are making, here is the session we think only you can take, here is who you will be on stage with. Nobody was offered a slot because they had a following. Several people with large followings were not asked, because the session did not need them. Handpicking does something to a programme that money cannot buy. Two things happened that no budget could have purchased. Simon Dixon has not presented at a conference in years and was planning to join us remotely. He turned up in person, unannounced, and the room knew what it meant. And Tarek el Diwany came as our guest - the man whose work has been the inspiration behind the global anti-riba movement for over thirty years, sitting in a room full of people carrying on what he started. Neither of those is a booking. They are what happens when people judge that something is worth their presence. You cannot plan for it, but you can build the kind of event that earns it, and the way you do that is by being serious about the argument rather than the production values. It also means you must be willing to hear no, and to hear it late. Build the programme around sessions rather than names and a late drop-out costs you a replacement, not a redesign. That's exactly what happened when two of our originally scheduled speakers had to drop out for different reasons. It's a risk we had to factor into our event planning. One thing we would say plainly to anyone copying this: unpaid works only when you are honest about what you are asking for and when the cause is genuinely shared. We were not extracting free labour from professionals. We were asking people who already believe this to spend a weekend with the community that needs to hear it, and we covered what we could. That is a different transaction, and it does not scale to every event.
A flexible schedule
Look at the Day 1 running order and you will notice something that seems wasteful: breaks everywhere. Ten minutes after the first keynote. Ten after the first panel. Breaks between almost every session, plus lunch and the prayer breaks. That was deliberate, and it is the single best piece of event design we did. A conference schedule with no slack is a row of dominoes. One keynote runs eight minutes long and every session after it starts late, the keynote after lunch gets cut, the afternoon compresses, and by the closing Q&A you are either forty minutes behind or you have quietly stolen the time from the last session of the day. Built-in breaks are not downtime. A session that overran simply ate into the following break and allowed us to re-synchronise the day, with minor intervention. The breaks earn their place twice over, because the conversations in them are half of why people came. Nobody flies in from another country to sit in silence facing forwards. I should add that we only applied this discipline properly to Day 1. Day 2 we treated more loosely, and it cost us - more on that below. Murphy's law, or Sod's law, applies to events more than to almost anything else. Whatever can go wrong will, usually in the fifteen minutes when you are not looking at it. You can prepare for a great deal of it, and you should: walk the venue, check the AV, write the run sheet, agree who makes the call when something breaks. But you cannot prepare for all of it, and the second half of the answer is temperament rather than planning. Expect the unexpected. Stay flexible. Accept that things will go wrong on the day, and that how your team responds in that moment matters more than how neat the plan was. The same goes for afterwards. Take the feedback, including the uncomfortable parts, and treat it as a gift rather than a verdict. We ran a post-event debrief as a team, and I'd put that on any list of things we got right: what worked, what didn't, what we'd change, while it was still fresh. A lesson you don't record is a lesson you will pay for twice. If you take one operational lesson from this piece, take this one. Put more breaks in the schedule than you think you need, and build the programme so that any one person can be missing from it.
Getting the word out with no ad budget
We spent nothing on advertising. Not on X, not on Meta, not on Google. The entire campaign was organic, and it ran on four things. *Daily posting with a plan.* One post a day in the final stretch, each with a job: a speaker, an objection answered, a Jumu'ah reflection, a deadline. It's a good idea to write them in advance. The posts went out on X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Nostr and other platforms. *Speakers as the distribution network.* Speakers with their own audiences will out-reach any budget you could plausibly have bought. We wrote the posts so they were easy to share. *The giveaway.* Companies in our community who donated prizes: a two-night stay at The Bitcoin Shepherd Guest House as the grand prize, Blockstream Jade hardware wallets, Bitcoin books, t-shirts, and free sats for anyone who installed a Lightning wallet and submitted an address. The giveaway's design is worth dwelling on, because it was not a raffle. Entries were earned by completing missions, and the missions were the campaign: follow and share on X, Nostr, Instagram and TikTok, follow the sponsors, and install a Lightning wallet. Referral links gave five extra entries per friend. Entries had to use the same email as the ticket booking, and prizes were collected in person at the Summit. Every entry was a ticket holder, and receiving the prize required attendance. We deleted the entrant data after the event, as we had said we would. The free-sats mission deserves a note of its own. To claim it, a person had to install a Lightning wallet and give us a valid Lightning address. It is onboarding dressed as a prize, and some number of people took self-custody of Bitcoin for the first time in order to enter a competition. *Podcasts and live television.* We went on Islam Channel, and we did podcasts. Long-form does something no advert can - it lets the actual argument be made, at length, to people who have never come across it before. Several attendees told us they'd come off the back of one appearance. All of it was free, and all of it came from asking. And this is where I want to name two people, because neither of them had to do what they did. Azad Islam, from Simon Dixon's team, premiered the Majlis podcast across all of their associated social channels. That single decision put the argument in front of an audience we could never have reached on our own, and you can draw a line from it to people who ended up in the room. It made a huge difference and we can't thank them enough. May Allah SWT bless them all. The two Islam Channel interviews came about through sister Tehreem Noor, who we met through councillor Shukry Haleemdeen. She arranged them. We had no media contacts, no PR agency and no budget - what we had was somebody in the community who knew somebody, and who was willing to pick up the phone. That's a lesson worth stating plainly, because it's easy to miss when you're deep in a niche. You need allies outside your own bubble. Not everyone who helps you has to be a Bitcoiner. Some of the most valuable support we got came from people with no particular interest in Bitcoin at all, who simply believed the community deserved a hearing and were well connected enough to arrange one. Build those relationships before you need them, and treat them as what they are: a gift, not a transaction.
Day 2 could've gone better
Day 1 is where the argument gets made. Day 2 is where it gets acted on. The gap between those two things is where almost every movement dies: a room full of convinced people who go home, mean to do something about it, and do not. Every delegate received a lanyard with a mini booklet to take home. Wallet recommendations were checked against BDS boycott status as well as whether they were open source, because telling a community to escape one unjust system while buying from another would be incoherent. And the Nostr client we recommended is maintained by a solo indie developer rather than a funded company. Day 2 did not go completely to plan. We went off script early, people turned up late, the first session ran long, and by the afternoon we were out of time. The Nostr and GrapheneOS workshops got rushed when they deserved room to breathe, and the Linux workshop got dropped altogether. We built excellent material and didn't have time to rehearse it as a team against a clock. A conference talk is a known quantity; a workshop expands to fill whatever space you give it, because people ask questions, their phones behave differently from yours, and someone always gets stuck on one of the steps. So: rehearse your workshops, time them properly, and stick to the brief. We applied real discipline to the Day 1 schedule and not as much to Day 2. Although the more I sit with it, the more I think the timing wasn't really the problem. The problem was that we were trying to fit an entire event inside half a day. Six pillars. Wallets, nodes, identity, private communication, de-Googled phones, Linux, self-hosting, sovereign AI. Any one of those deserves a morning of its own, and we gave the whole migration only half a day. So the thing we're now seriously considering is a standalone Digital Hijrah event - its own weekend, properly structured, with room to take each pillar at the pace it actually needs rather than sprinting through them, inshaAllah.
It was never only about Bitcoin
The name on the door says Bitcoin, and people arrive expecting a monetary conference. They are half right, and the half they are missing is the reason the event exists. Riba is not the only thing extracted from us. The same arrangement that creates money as debt also runs on a business model where the product is the person: your attention, your location, your contacts, your messages, your search history, and now your prompts. Surveillance capitalism and the debt-based monetary system are not two separate problems that happen to be fashionable to criticise together. They are the same move, made twice. In both, something that should belong to you is quietly made into someone else's asset, and in both you are told the arrangement is simply how the modern world works. Digital Hijrah is the response: a migration away from surveillance capitalism toward self-sovereignty, using open, ethical and privacy-respecting tools. Hijrah is the right word deliberately. It was a migration undertaken because staying meant living under conditions that made practising your deen (way of life) impossible, and it was not a retreat. It was a relocation to the place where the community could finally be built properly. The migration has six pillars, and it's something that we'd like to cover more deeply over the coming months:
Put the pillars next to each other and the shape of the thing becomes clear. Bitcoin is the first pillar, not the whole building. A person who holds their own keys but runs their life through an ad-funded phone, an identity that can be deleted by a platform, messages read by whoever hosts them, and an AI that logs every question they are afraid to ask aloud has escaped exactly one of six enclosures.
Who we actually are
One last thing, because I think it reframes everything above. The Bitcoin Majlis is not a registered corporation. It is not an organisation in any formal sense. There is no company behind it, no board, no legal entity, no office. We are a completely decentralised, grassroots community. We have nobody on a payroll. No staff. Not one person was paid for any of this. Everyone who built this weekend did it as a volunteer, in the hours around their job and their family, and for most of us that wasn't charity or networking or profile-building. It was ibaadah. An act of worship. That is the only budget line that genuinely explains how a two-day international conference happens for under £15,000. It also explains the mistakes. A volunteer community without a professional events team will get things wrong, and we did. We know we made mistakes, and I've tried to set the honest ones out here rather than tidy them away. Please forgive us for our shortcomings.
Thank you
An event that costs under £15,000 to run is not cheap. It is subsidised, heavily, by people who were not paid. To our speakers, panellists and helpers, who gave a weekend and asked for nothing: Harris Irfan, Simon Dixon, Safdar Alam, Shaykh Mu'aawiyah Tucker, Shaykh Abdulwahid Stephenson, Michael Howe, Bashar Humeid, Abdullah ibn Oda, Subhan Tariq, Tee Politics, Maher Janajri, Hasnain Dhalla, Shukry Haleemdeen, Adam Mashrique, Fraz Mahmud, Muhammed Khan, Imaan Mohammed, Sumaiya Islam, Sara Adam, Ahsan Mohammed, Musa Mahmud, Mokhtar Naamani, and the Bitcoin Majlis community. JazakumAllahu khayran. And to Tarek el Diwany, who joined us as our guest. More than thirty years ago he was making this argument when there was no movement to make it to, and much of what was said from our stage rests on ground he cleared. To Azad and the team around Simon Dixon, for premiering the Majlis podcast across their channels, and to sister Tehreem, for the Islam Channel interviews. None of you had to. May Allah SWT bless you all. To our community sponsors, who contributed without asking what they would get for it: Bitcoin Majlis, Blockchainology, The Bitcoin Guide, Frostsnap, The Bitcoin Shepherd, Bitcoin Lawyr, Rizq Revolution, Grynvault and My Crypto Tax. And to everyone who bought a ticket. You didn't cover the cost of the weekend - we never expected you to - but you were the reason nobody else could buy influence over that programme. An event with no sponsor to please answers to the room, and the room was you. The current system cannot be saved. It can be succeeded. We will see you at the next one, inshaAllah. May Allah SWT accept it from us and from you all. Ameen.
