Vienna has its own Satoshi statue

The statue stands at the head of the lake in Viertel Zwei, next to the OMV building Hoch Zwei in Leopoldstadt, Vienna's second district. The U2 station Krieau is a few minutes away on foot, and Bitpanda has its headquarters right next door. The figure has been open to the public around the clock since the unveiling.

The Vienna Bitcoiner Philipp Horwath, known in the scene as Der Fil, hosted the unveiling for Bitcoin Austria. The association goes back to its first Bitcoin meetup in Vienna in July 2011, so the evening also marked fifteen years of regular meetings in the city.

Valentina Picozzi designed the figure for her art project Satoshi Gallery. Valentina Picozzi has worked with Bitcoin since 2012 and started the project as street art before it moved to public squares. Her series 21 Nodes plans 21 identical statues in 21 countries, spread out like the nodes of the Bitcoin network.

The statue shows a programmer sitting cross-legged with a laptop on the knees. The figure is about 90 centimeters tall and roughly 1.5 meters high with its Corten steel base. It consists of 61 mirror-polished stainless steel profiles, a construction method that goes back to the sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae. From the side the programmer is easy to recognize, while from the front the figure almost disappears into its surroundings.

A person who stands behind the statue appears to the viewer in the place of Satoshi's face. The work follows the community motto "We are all Satoshi" in this way. Tobias Girstmair of Bitcoin Austria told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard that the figure honors no single person. The statue would stay as it is even if the identity of Bitcoin's inventor became known one day.

Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper on 31 October 2008, launched the network in January 2009 and then withdrew from the project. Several people have been named as the inventor over the years, but nobody has produced cryptographic proof to date.

Bitcoin Austria links the location to the Austrian School of Economics, which began in Vienna. Carl Menger described how money emerges from barter without any act of the state. Friedrich August von Hayek later called for competition among private currencies in place of a state monopoly on money.

Between December 2025 and August 2026, more than 120 private donors (in German) and several companies gave over 1.3 bitcoin. At the rate of 14 October 2026, that amount was worth roughly 97,000 euros. Bitpanda was the Genesis sponsor of the campaign, and the asset manager Incrementum and the developer of Viertel Zwei also supported it. Donations that arrive now go into a fund for the care, insurance and small repairs of the statue.

The first statue of the series was unveiled in Lugano in October 2024 during the Plan B Forum. Vandals tore it from its mount in August 2025, and it was recovered from Lake Lugano shortly afterward. Further figures stand in front of the Tokyo Bitcoin Base, in Hanoi and at Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte, El Salvador. Since December 2025, one has also stood in the museum of the New York Stock Exchange, which Satoshi Gallery counted as the sixth of 21.

A Satoshi bust in Budapest is older and belongs to a different project. The sculptors Réka Gergely and Tamás Gilly made it, and it was unveiled at Graphisoft Park in September 2021.

Finance Loop connects professionals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland who work with Bitcoin and digital assets in finance. Investors who want to understand bitcoin as an asset class can take the Bitcoin for Investors course. The Bitcoin seminar in Austria explains the Austrian rules and the case for bitcoin as an asset of its own.