For roughly seventy days between September and November 2017, Thomas Hunt — host of MadBitcoins, co-founder of World Crypto Network — abandoned his Sacramento studio and shot daily five-to-ten-minute travel dispatches from eight European cities. The trip threaded three Bitcoin conferences — Breaking Bitcoin Paris (September 12-13, 2017), the inaugural Blockchain Hotel at the Welcome Hotel Essen in Germany (autumn 2017, Thomas-confirmed[14]), and HCPP17 at the Hacker's Congress Paralelní Polis in Prague (October 6-8, 2017) — and filled the weeks in between with museum walks, canal boats, palaces, and goat farms. Thirty-two episodes. The only travelogue playlist Thomas ever curated. All thirty-two videos went up between February 13 and March 21, 2018 — four to six months after they were shot.
The Mad Tour - Europe 2017[1] is one of 52 MadBitcoins playlists and the only one Thomas Hunt built as a continuous travelogue. The other 51 are conference dumps, format buckets ("MadBitcoins Live"), or year folders ("Videos 2016"). This one is a numbered diary — Episode 1 to Episode 32, in chronological order — covering Thomas's trip across Europe in the fall of 2017. Despite the title's "Europe 2017" branding, every video in the playlist was uploaded post-trip, between February 13 and March 21, 2018, in three batches.
The trip itinerary, reconstructed from titles alone (the per-video descriptions are all boilerplate Patreon / ProTip / cryptohwwallet ads, with zero per-episode body text[2]): Sacramento → Iceland (Ep 1) → Iceland → Paris (Ep 2) → Paris (Eps 3-10, 8 episodes, includes Breaking Bitcoin at Ep 3) → Versailles (Ep 11) → Essen, Germany (Ep 12, the inaugural Blockchain Hotel conference at the Welcome Hotel Essen — confirmed by Thomas Hunt in personal correspondence, May 2026[14]) → Amsterdam (Eps 13-25, thirteen episodes — the largest single-city block) → Berlin (Eps 26-28) → Prague (Eps 29-30, includes HCPP17 at Ep 29) → Vienna (Eps 31-32).
The dominant city, by episode count, is not any of the conference stops. It's Amsterdam, with 13 of the 32 episodes — Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk, Rembrandt House, Cromhout House, Hermitage Amsterdam, Banksy & Dali (Moco Museum), Bitcoin meetup, canal boat (titled "I'm on a Boat"), the Goat Farm, walking-and-biking, "Beautiful Amsterdam," and "Goodbye Amsterdam." Paris is second with 8. The three conferences — the ostensible reason for the trip — get just one to two episodes each: Breaking Bitcoin Paris (Ep 3), Blockchain Hotel Essen (Ep 12), HCPP17 Prague (Ep 29). The Mad Tour playlist is, by volume, a museum-and-canals playlist with three conference stops embedded in it.
Total runtime: 8,169 seconds — two hours sixteen minutes. Total lifetime views as of May 18, 2026: 3,645, an average of 114 views per episode. The most-viewed is Ep 32 — the Mumok Museum in Vienna — at 590 views, a clear long-tail outlier from people searching for the museum itself. The least-viewed is Ep 22 (Rembrandt House) at 40. These are not viral numbers. They are diary numbers.
The tour pattern that emerges: this is the only Mad Tour playlist Thomas ever curated, but it is not the only Mad Tour he ever took. A November 15, 2017 WCN episode description archives Thomas's own tweet — "No Backups for 70 days. #MadTour"[3] — placing his Europe departure at roughly September 6, 2017, six days before Breaking Bitcoin Paris. A May 2, 2019 WCN description hashtags a Coinfest Manchester interview #madtour3[4]. So there were at least three Mad Tours; only Europe 2017 got a playlist. The 2019 trip and whatever was numbered "2" were never curated. As the MB Playlists report puts it: "The Mad Tour got a great playlist; later trips didn't."[5]
What's unique about this playlist, set against the rest of the MadBitcoins archive: this is the human side of Thomas Hunt. The studio-bound news show — "Good morning, Bitcoins!", headlines, price line — disappears entirely. There is no daily-news format here. There is a man with a camera in a coat in front of Napoleon's Tomb. There is a man on a canal boat shouting "I'm on a Boat." There is a man walking past Banksy stencils and the goat farm at the edge of Amsterdam. The conferences happened. The interviews from the conferences live in other playlists — HCPP17 in particular has its own 34-episode WCN playlist with Eric Lombrozo, Peter Todd, Alena Vranová, Slush, Whale Panda, Amir Taaki[6]. The Mad Tour playlist is the connective tissue — the walking-around-the-city, eating-the-food, getting-lost-in-the-museum footage that fills the days between the conference panels.
All 32 episodes in playlist order. City tags reconstructed from titles, with one exception: Episode 12's title gives only "Essen, Germany" — Thomas confirmed (May 2026) that it documents his attendance at the inaugural Blockchain Hotel conference at the Welcome Hotel Essen[14]. Conferences marked in amber, museum-day episodes in cyan, transit episodes in violet. Episode URLs link to YouTube. The "(better audio)" suffix on Episode 1 implies there was an earlier upload Thomas re-cut and replaced — it is the only video in the playlist with that note.
All durations from yt-dlp against the live YouTube playlist on 2026-05-18. Dates shown are upload dates; the actual filming took place in late summer / fall 2017, with the trip starting roughly September 6, 2017 (back-computed from Thomas's "No Backups for 70 days" tweet of November 15, 2017[3]). Episode 1's "(better audio)" suffix indicates a re-upload of a video that originally appeared on the channel earlier than the playlist's batch dates suggest. The November 15, 2017 WCN episode that archives the #MadTour tweet predates the playlist's own first upload (February 13, 2018) by three months — Thomas was filming, sharing on Twitter, and only later collecting into a curated playlist.
Episode counts per city, derived from titles. Where a video's location can be inferred from the venue (Versailles Palace = Versailles; Mumok = Vienna; Brandenburg Gate = Berlin) it is counted at the city level. Transit episodes are counted at the destination side.
Essen, until May 2026, was the unexplained stop on this map. Versailles makes sense — Paris was the hub, Versailles the day-trip from it. Iceland makes sense — Reykjavík is the WOW Air layover everyone took between the US and Europe in the late 2010s. Even the goat farm makes sense — Amsterdam has a working goat farm at the edge of Amsterdamse Bos park, and Thomas is the kind of show host who will dedicate two minutes and ten seconds of his Bitcoin travelogue to it. But Essen — a former coal-and-steel city in the Ruhr Valley, sandwiched as a single-shot dispatch between "Versailles" and "Amsterdam" — had no obvious reason to be on the itinerary. The title gives no clue. The description is the standard ad block. The corpus surfaces no episode filmed inside the venue. Thomas Hunt confirmed in personal correspondence (May 2026) that Episode 12 documents his attendance at the inaugural Blockchain Hotel conference at the Welcome Hotel Essen (the former Hotel Bredeney), a European Bitcoin event run by Gideon Gallasch and Gökhan Köse. Two adjacent corpus artifacts corroborate the connection: a WCN #HCPP17 interview with Gideon Gallasch from Blockchain Hotel[14], and a December 2018 WCN Malta Blockchain Summit interview with Gökhan Köse, also of Blockchain Hotel[14]. The Essen stop is the bridge between Breaking Bitcoin Paris and HCPP17 Prague — the missing third pillar of the trip's conference itinerary.
The three conference stops are all undersized in the playlist: one episode each. Paris gets eight, but only one of those (Ep 3, "Breaking Bitcoin") is the conference; the other seven are Parisian sightseeing. Essen gets exactly one episode (Ep 12), the Blockchain Hotel cut. Prague gets two — one for the HCPP17 conference itself (Ep 29) and one for "Prague" generally (Ep 30). The conferences functioned as anchors, not as the trip's content. The 13 Amsterdam episodes — none of which appear to anchor on a conference, except a tantalizingly under-described "Bitcoin Meetup" on Episode 19 (66 seconds, the shortest episode in the entire playlist) — are the bulk of the trip.
Cross-referencing against the WCN Playlists report[7], which catalogs every WCN conference playlist: HCPP17 Prague has its own dedicated 34-episode WCN interview playlist (PLPj3KCksGbSYtIJUp0IALHK8VSsbjt44n). Breaking Bitcoin Paris does not have a dedicated playlist on either channel — its coverage is folded into the WCN "Videos 2017" bucket. Blockchain Hotel Essen does not have a dedicated playlist either; the only on-site footage is Mad Tour Ep 12 itself, and the two surviving WCN interviews with Blockchain Hotel principals (Gideon Gallasch and Gökhan Köse) were both filmed elsewhere — at HCPP17 Prague and at Malta Blockchain Summit 2018 respectively[14]. So out of the three conferences on this tour, exactly one got the proper archival treatment.
The Mad Tour playlist itself doesn't name guests in its episode titles — these are travelogue cuts, not interviews. But the conferences Thomas attended on the trip did, and those interviews live in adjacent WCN playlists. Here are the people Thomas was filming alongside the Mad Tour, drawn from the HCPP17 Prague interview titles[6]:
One small but real finding from the metadata: the Mad Tour description boilerplate changes between Episode 28 and Episode 29. Episodes 1-28 carry only the Patreon / ProTip / MadBitcoins ad block. Starting with Episode 29 ("HCPP 17"), every description adds: "Support Our Sponsor (Get Trezors, Leather Cases & More) https://www.cryptohwwallet.com/". That sponsorship was secured at HCPP17 itself — Joseph Wang of CryptoHWwallet is interviewed twice in the HCPP17 WCN playlist, by both Thomas and Theo Goodman. The sponsorship boilerplate then appears in all the remaining Mad Tour episodes (29-32, the Prague and Vienna ones), uploaded together in the final batch on March 20-21, 2018. The Mad Tour playlist is, by accident, a timestamp on when CryptoHWwallet started sponsoring the channel.
The longest episodes are the museum-dives: Versailles (9:08), Rijksmuseum (8:36), Salvador Dali (7:09), Prague (7:06), Napoleon's Tomb (6:50), Mumok (6:10). The shortest is the Bitcoin Meetup at 1:06 — a curious inversion. The actual Bitcoin event on the tour gets the smallest cut; the art history gets the runtime.
Source: yt-dlp metadata for every video in list=PLbYZp8RGbKd1ibSqK-5UQqBpzI1kSYTqx as of 2026-05-18.
The brief asks: were there eras? Early (2014-2017), Middle (2018-2020 / COVID and cohost departures), Recent (2021-present, Vegas-anchored)? In the Mad Tour playlist, there is exactly one era: autumn 2017. Every episode in the curated playlist comes from a single ~70-day European trip. There are no Mad Tour episodes from any other year inside this playlist.
But Thomas did take other Mad Tours. The metadata trail makes that plain:
"The Mad Tour got a great playlist; later trips didn't." — 1n2.org, MB Playlists report (May 17, 2026)
So the "eras" pattern here is: one curated tour (2017), one unbranded second tour somewhere, one hashtagged-but-uncurated third tour (Manchester 2019), and then silence. The 32-episode Mad Tour playlist is a singularity — a one-shot project that established a brand Thomas then never returned to with the same archival discipline.
Across the broader MB / WCN corpus — 594 live + video shows[9], 779 unique videos across 52 playlists[5] — Thomas Hunt's on-screen presence is overwhelmingly studio-bound. Today in Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Group, MadBitcoins Live are all desk shows: Thomas in front of a laptop, a microphone, a wall, sometimes a webcam grid of co-hosts. The conference playlists (HCPP, Baltic Honeybadger, Malta, Texas Bitcoin, CoinCongress, etc.) put Thomas on location but always in interview mode — Thomas holding a microphone, the camera trained on a Bitcoin person, the location backgrounded.
The Mad Tour playlist is the only place in the entire 12-year archive where the camera is trained on Thomas at a place, with no guest, no interview, no headline scroll. Episode 6 is Napoleon's Tomb. Episode 11 is Versailles. Episode 16 is a canal boat. Episode 20 is a goat farm. Nobody is being interviewed. There is no news cycle. The price line is absent. It is sightseeing — by a 40-something man who runs a Bitcoin show — and it is the closest thing to a personal record of who Thomas Hunt is when he isn't behind the desk that the public archive contains.
The other unique element: museums. The Mad Tour episode count by venue type breaks down roughly as: 10 museums / palaces (Orangerie, Invalides, Dalí Montmartre, Versailles, Moco, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk, Hermitage Amsterdam, Rembrandt House, Cromhouthuis, Leopold, Mumok), 3 conferences (Breaking Bitcoin Paris, Blockchain Hotel Essen, HCPP17 Prague), 2 transit (Sacramento→Iceland, Iceland→Paris), 1 sightseeing landmark (Brandenburg Gate, Sacre Coeur grouped under city headers), 1 Bitcoin meetup (Amsterdam, 1:06 long), 1 goat farm. The trip — read through what got the playlist treatment — is a museum tour with three Bitcoin events threaded through it. Not a Bitcoin tour with museum side-trips. The orientation of the playlist tells you something about how Thomas thought about the trip in retrospect: he edited it for the art, not for the conferences. The Blockchain Hotel cut at Essen got the same one-episode rationing as Breaking Bitcoin Paris — the conference happened, the camera turned off.
"No Backups for 70 days. #MadTour" — @MadBitcoins, November 15, 2017, archived in the description of WCN's Today in Bitcoin (2017-11-15)[3]
That tweet — "No Backups for 70 days" — is the closest thing in the archive to an emotional admission about what the trip cost Thomas operationally. Seventy days without his studio backups. Seventy days running a daily-news show from hotel WiFi in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna. The Mad Tour playlist is the visible side of that — the museum trips, the goat farm, the canal boat. The unseen side is the seventy days of trying to keep a daily-news cadence going from the road, which is precisely the side of the story that doesn't show up in the curated travelogue.
The Mad Tour playlist is a 136-minute, 32-chapter answer to a question almost nobody in the Bitcoin commentariat ever bothered to ask: what does it look like, on tape, when one of the daily-news guys actually leaves home? Most of the people who built English-language Bitcoin video coverage between 2013 and 2020 were studio operators. Andreas Antonopoulos lectured from podiums but rarely posted travelogue. Tone Vays interviewed people at conferences but didn't film himself at the conference. Stephan Livera recorded podcasts. Peter McCormack flew to the events but the deliverable was the conversation, not the city around it. Thomas Hunt is one of the only people in this scene who took the camera, pointed it at the museum guard at Espace Dalí Montmartre, and uploaded it.
The thesis here is not that the Mad Tour is great cinema. It isn't. The view counts — 3,645 lifetime views across all 32 episodes, averaging 114, a long-tail outlier of 590 for Mumok pulling from museum-search traffic alone — tell you it failed as content. The 70-day trip's biggest single video by views is a Vienna art museum people Googled. The Bitcoin conference videos in the Mad Tour playlist average well under 200 views each. What the playlist does instead is establish a posture: the Bitcoin commentator as traveling correspondent, the person who shows up. The conferences were happening regardless of Thomas. Breaking Bitcoin Paris had a livestream. HCPP17 had its own video team. What Thomas added was the connective tissue between them — the bridge episodes, the Versailles day, the canal boat — that put the conferences into a continuous personal narrative rather than two isolated content drops.
The places that mattered, on this tour and as it turned out for the broader scene: Paris became the European Bitcoin city for a brief window — Breaking Bitcoin Paris was a real annual conference, ran from 2017 to 2019, then moved to Amsterdam. Prague became and remained the cypherpunk capital — Paralelní Polis ran HCPP every year from 2014 onward and is the only conference Thomas attended on this trip that he would attend again in person across multiple years (the WCN Playlists report catalogs HCPP17, HCPP18, HCPP19 as three of his most curated conference playlists). Essen turned out to be a relationship more than a city: the inaugural Blockchain Hotel conference of autumn 2017 introduced Thomas to Gideon Gallasch, who would appear again at HCPP17 days later, at Joesmoe Show #4 in 2019, and as a featured panelist on The Bitcoin Group #448 as late as March 2025 — eight years after the Essen visit, longer than most relationships in the Bitcoin scene survive[14]. Amsterdam got 13 episodes here and would later get its own Bitcoin moment with Breaking Bitcoin Amsterdam 2019 — Thomas filmed that too but didn't make it a Mad Tour. Vienna, surprisingly, would also return for him: Mises University Vienna 2018 became an 18-episode WCN playlist. Berlin's real Bitcoin moment came at the Lightning Conference 2019 — also Thomas-covered, also not a Mad Tour. The 2017 Mad Tour, in retrospect, was a scouting expedition for cities and conference families he kept coming back to.
The people who showed up: the HCPP17 interview list is striking for how much of it is still load-bearing in 2026. Peter Todd is still a Bitcoin Core figure. Eric Lombrozo is still cited in Lightning research. Alena Vranová's Trezor work seeded a generation of hardware wallets. Slush and Jan Čapek still run Slushpool. Amir Taaki vanished into Rojava and came back. Whale Panda is still tweeting. Paige Peterson is still in Zcash. Pavel Ševčík still runs Paralelní Polis. The Mad Tour, indirectly, captures the people who held — the cohort that didn't churn out of the scene during the 2018 bear market, the 2022 collapse, or the inevitable later collapses. The cohort Thomas was filming in October 2017 is mostly the same cohort being filmed at Bitcoin conferences nine years later.
The shows that didn't show up — and the trips Thomas didn't curate — are at least as informative as the trips that did. There is no Mad Tour: Hong Kong 2014, even though Thomas covered Occupy Hong Kong / the Umbrella Revolution from afar (per the Umbrella Revolution report). There is no Mad Tour: Cafayate 2015, even though Thomas covered the Cobden Centre / Doug Casey / Galt's Gulch property scene that year. There is no Mad Tour: Working Man's Bitcoin Cruise 2019, even though that boat conference clearly demanded a travelogue. There is no Mad Tour: Bitcoin 2023 Miami. There is no Mad Tour: Las Vegas for any of the years Thomas anchored Bitcoin Investor Vegas / Bitcoin 2025. The Mad Tour brand existed for exactly one curated trip and then stayed retired even as Thomas kept traveling for the next nine years.
Why? The simplest read: the Europe 2017 trip was the moment Thomas was solo enough, brand-confident enough, and pre-decline enough to do it properly. Per the MB Output Rates report, his per-channel video output peaked in 2014 and started a slow decline; by late 2017 he was still vigorous but had begun consolidating his identity onto WCN. By 2019 (the Manchester #madtour3 era) the output collapse was well underway. By 2020 COVID killed travel for everyone. By 2021 the studio show was the asset he was protecting and the road show was the brand he didn't have time to maintain. The Mad Tour playlist is what one self-curated Bitcoin commentator's traveling correspondent persona looked like at peak — and there was never enough bandwidth, energy, or audience signal afterward to do it twice. Thirty-two episodes, eight cities, three conferences, 3,645 lifetime views. That's the whole record. That is the Mad Tour.
PLbYZp8RGbKd1ibSqK-5UQqBpzI1kSYTqx, 32 episodes, retrieved 2026-05-18: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbYZp8RGbKd1ibSqK-5UQqBpzI1kSYTqxyt-dlp --write-description for every video in the playlist. All 32 descriptions consist only of the standard MadBitcoins boilerplate ad block (Patreon, ProTip, Twitter, madbitcoins.com). Episodes 29-32 add a CryptoHWwallet sponsor line. No episode has body description text — every "what happened in this episode" detail in this report is inferred from the title alone.jzCQYz8k_9k: "No Backups for 70 days. #MadTour" · twitter.com/MadBitcoins/status/930854557185462272 · archived in local mirror at ~/Sites/LOCAL-SITES/media-archives/mad-bitcoins-mirror/metadata/WCN_20171115_jzCQYz8k_9k.info.json.0C4W4aAAmHQ: "Recorded #LIVE at @CoinFestUK #Manchester 2019 #madtour3" · twitter.com/WorldCryptoNet/status/1123659461363519488 · archived in local mirror at ~/Sites/LOCAL-SITES/media-archives/mad-bitcoins-mirror/metadata/WCN_20190502_0C4W4aAAmHQ.info.json.PLbYZp8RGbKd1ibSqK-5UQqBpzI1kSYTqx, 32 episodes.PLPj3KCksGbSYtIJUp0IALHK8VSsbjt44n, 34 episodes. Retrieved 2026-05-18: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPj3KCksGbSYtIJUp0IALHK8VSsbjt44n. All HCPP17 interview titles and the people list in §IV are derived from this playlist's video titles.zp2iLKcyypY, 5:49 runtime, uploaded 2018-02-25, 76 lifetime views. Specifically called out in a much-later (April 29, 2019) WCN Today in Bitcoin description as a back-pointer ("The Mad Tour: Europe 2017 - Episode 12 - Essen, Germany"), which is the only piece of post-2018 archival evidence we have that Thomas himself returned to the Mad Tour as a referenceable corpus. See also [14] for what was happening in Essen on the day this was filmed.yt-dlp against the live YouTube playlist on 2026-05-18. View counts are point-in-time and will drift; the figures cited reflect that snapshot.QOPxy_7BWvc, uploaded 2018-11-10, recorded at HCPP17 Prague in October 2017, with the description linking @blockchainhotel; (b) WCN Interview with Gökhan Köse, Blockchain Hotel #LIVE - Malta Blockchain Summit (Malta 2018), video id v4DWJk7T3Eg, uploaded 2018-12-23, with the description linking blockchainhotel.de/en/conference. Gideon Gallasch then reappears as a featured guest on WCN's Joesmoe Show #4 (August 2019, id FbfMWLH5Cj8) and again on The Bitcoin Group #448 (March 29, 2025, id I_h0H6dFSjM) — an eight-year throughline from the inaugural 2017 Essen visit. Mirror sources: ~/Sites/LOCAL-SITES/media-archives/mad-bitcoins-mirror/metadata/WCN_20181110_QOPxy_7BWvc.info.json, WCN_20181223_v4DWJk7T3Eg.info.json, WCN_20190827_FbfMWLH5Cj8.info.json, MB_20250329_I_h0H6dFSjM.info.json. Blockchain Hotel Essen extends the European arc of the Mad Tour into a three-conference itinerary (Breaking Bitcoin Paris · Blockchain Hotel Essen · HCPP17 Prague) that fits naturally alongside Thomas's later HCPP / Honeybadger Riga / Lightning Conference Berlin / Mises University Vienna circuit, all flagged in the WCN Playlists report.