My Experience in ‘Bitcoin City’ Arnhem

In October of 2014, CoinTelegraph reported that the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands had become the densest concentration of Bitcoin merchants in the world. And in November, the organizers held a successful six month anniversary event entitled ‘Arnhem Bitcoin Metropolis,’ which attracted nearly 100 people who made over 175 Bitcoin transactions.
First Stop: Bitcoin City
While on vacation in the Netherlands during the holiday break, I decided to bring my bitcoin-filled digital wallet and pay a visit to Arnhem Bitcoinstad, a city with a population of just over 150,000 people, to get an idea of what is actually happening on the ground. My goal was also to rely as little on fiat currency as possible.
I had to pay for the 30-euro roundtrip train ticket from Amsterdam in euros, but the good news was that I withdrew the fiat from a two-way Mr. Bitcoin BTM in Amsterdam. So far so good.
After an hour-long trip by train, I finally arrived in Arnhem, Bitcoin City and arranged to meet one of the organizers of Bitcoinstad, Patrick Van Der Meijde of Bitkassa, a Dutch payment processor.
Naturally, the meeting place was the local Spar supermarket, the first Dutch supermarket to accept Bitcoin, conveniently located right next to the train station.
The Spar supermarket proudly displayed their ‘Wij accepteren bitcoin’ sticker on their front doors, along with a multitude of other payment methods. ‘Of course you can pay with bitcoins,’ said the cashier. So after buying an orange juice and a coffee with bitcoins for the first time in a supermarket, to my excitement, I sat down and waited for Patrick to arrive.
‘I believe you just made a payment over here at Spar,’ remarked Patrick upon arrival. ‘Well, it’s in the statistics and the minute you pay for something, it shows up on our website.’ (You can check out the stats on the Bitkassa website here). As far as growth is concerned, he added:
‘It is still small, but we do see a rise in sales.’

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-01-07.