A reply to “Italy’s Bitcoin Problem” by Joe Nakamoto

A few weeks ago a widely watched video by Joe Nakamoto travelled the length and breadth of bitcoiner Italy — from Brescia to Turin — to answer a simple question: does Italy have a problem with Bitcoin? His thesis, built on the “Blue Banana” map drawn by geographer Roger Brunet, is as fascinating as it is, I believe, incomplete: everything would mainly come down to English. Only 13.6% of Italians speak it well, against 91% of the Dutch, and that would explain why Italy has stayed on the margins of a financial revolution that instead took root all along Europe’s historic industrial belt.

It’s an elegant explanation. But having myself helped found one of the first Italian Bitcoin communities, in Bologna, and having watched three radically different ecosystems up close — Bologna, Turin and Milan — I believe Joe mistook a symptom for a cause. The problem isn’t that Italians don’t understand English. It’s true, as the guy from Blox mentioned, that for at least three generations, people have never learned how to manage money, take risks, or invest—and when someone tried to do so, they were often taught to be ashamed of it.

It’s not a question of language, it’s a question of culture

Before getting to the numbers, it’s worth spelling out what I mean by the “money taboo”. I’m not talking about the ability to balance a household budget — on that score, as we’ll see, Italians actually do better than others. I’m talking about something more specific and more serious: the idea, passed down by school, family and public discourse, that investing — buying a share, risking capital, building a business, and today also holding an asset like Bitcoin — is a suspicious activity, reserved for a few, if not outright morally dubious. Saving is fine. Investing is not.

This distinction is no accident: in Italian we say “savers” (risparmiatori), not “investors”, to describe people who hold financial wealth. An economist who analysed the reforms of the Italian financial market pointed out how this lexical choice is loaded with cultural meaning: where an Englishman or a Swede “invests”, an Italian “puts aside”. These are two opposite mental attitudes toward risk and toward the future.

Half a century of hostility toward the market

The roots of this culture are political before they are economic. The Italian Communist Party was, throughout the First Republic, the strongest communist party in the West, with a unique capacity for cultural penetration well beyond its own voters — think of the phenomenon of cattocomunismo, which brought large parts of the Catholic world to converge on hostility toward capitalism too. Alongside it ran an intellectual critique — I’m thinking of Pasolini — that for years publicly attacked consumerism and capitalism as a corruption of Italy’s popular identity. The result was a cultural climate — not just a party, but a whole atmosphere — in which profit, finance and the stock market were perceived as something alien, if not hostile, to “true” Italian values.

It should be said, for honesty’s sake, that Italian economic statism was not born on the left: the IRI, the public conglomerate that controlled entire industrial supply chains for decades, was founded by the Fascist regime in 1933, and it was then the Christian Democrats who kept it alive for another fifty years. When people tried to dismantle it in the 1990s, there were even those, inside the IRI itself, who imagined a future of “widely spread shareholding” on the model of Margaret Thatcher’s popular capitalism — the era in which London turned millions of savers into shareholders through privatisations. In Italy that forecast remained, in the words of the very person who made it, “perhaps too optimistic”: our “widespread public company” never really materialised. So yes: the left played an enormous role in making money a moral taboo, but it did so by grafting onto a statist framework that runs across the entire Italian constitutional spectrum, not just one political colour.

The result, however it was produced, is in the numbers. Only 4.1% of Italians have bought or sold a share at least once in their life, and household wealth invested in listed shares is worth barely 1.4% of the total. Fewer than 10% of Italian households hold shares directly — a figure similar to Germany’s, but a world away from the equity culture of countries like Sweden, where the so-called Folkaktier (“people’s shares”) are a genuine national identity phenomenon. A study by the fintech company Bravo, based on OECD/INFE data, ranks Italy 32nd out of 39 countries worldwide for sound financial behaviour, behind numerous African countries.

The financial-literacy numbers — and what they really say about over-50s

Here I get to the central point: how much do adults born in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s — those who today are between 60 and 86 years old, and who grew up in a school system that never taught them what a share or a bond was — actually know about economics and finance?

The answer is subtler than you’d expect, and precisely for that reason instructive. On general financial literacy (understanding inflation, managing a budget), the average score of Italians recorded by the Bank of Italy in the IACOFI survey rose from 10.2 to 10.6 on a 0–20 scale between 2020 and 2023 — a level that is, in any case, very low by international comparison. And on this general component, a study cross-referencing OECD data notes that knowledge grows with age, largely thanks to the generation that lived through the inflation of the 1970s first-hand: those who did the shopping when prices doubled every year understand inflation better than a twenty-year-old.

But as soon as you move from “understanding money” to “knowing how to invest it”, the picture flips completely. An analysis by the Bank of Italy published in Menabò di Etica ed Economia is explicit: more financial education is urgently needed “especially among the older classes, aimed above all at making known the various ways to invest one’s savings” — a propensity to save that, the study stresses, is precisely higher in these age brackets. In other words: Italians in their sixties and eighties have put money away, they did exactly what they were taught to do (save), but they have no idea how to make it work. They know how to save. They don’t know how to invest. It’s the exact distinction I spoke of at the start, confirmed by the data of the people who study Italian finance for a living.

No surprise, then, that when you look at who owns Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies today, the picture is sharply skewed toward the young: 64% of Italian crypto holders are under 40, and among the over-55s only 13% would choose to access cryptocurrencies through direct platforms, overwhelmingly preferring to rely on an advisor. It’s not that Italian pensioners are more stupid or more frightened than their Dutch or Swedish peers. It’s that for their whole lives no one — not school, not public discourse — told them that risking capital was a legitimate option.

Three cities, three Italies: Bitcoin as litmus test

Here I’ll let direct experience speak, rather than national statistics — because there’s no aggregate data on this, but the difference between these three cities tells you something no survey manages to capture.

Bologna. The community I helped found years ago grew almost entirely among people over 40–50. People coming from political dissent, who had decided to study seriously in search of an answer to the current economic and political situation. None of those who came to our meetups did so for the profit: everyone wanted to better understand the technology and the money. Out of it came small ventures in outreach and teaching. But the young Bolognesi — the ones who, by stereotype, should be the most rebellious, the most “anti-system” — sat on their prior convictions and gave no room to seriously explore a real alternative. Honestly, it was disappointing.

Turin. Here adoption happened above all among the young, and it was university-driven. The Politecnico was lucky to have a few professors genuinely open to exploring alternatives, both economic and technological. Out of it came genuinely solid university courses on Bitcoin, and a community of young people that built an ecosystem — between the student group Bitpolito and the Blocks space in the city centre — able to guide anyone interested along a serious path, on both the technical and economic side, always staying Bitcoin-only.

Milan. By contrast, despite being Italy’s financial capital, a real community still doesn’t exist here. There are isolated meetups, courses, the occasional lecture — but compared with what emerged in Bologna, and taking into account the difference in size between the two cities, the gap can’t be justified in any way.

Three cities, three different answers to the same cultural question: those who approached Bitcoin to understand an alternative did so either because they came from a path of dissent already matured elsewhere (Bologna), or because they encountered an institution — the university — willing to culturally legitimise economic exploration (Turin). Where both triggers were missing, as in Milan, the city’s GDP wasn’t enough to create a community.

The Blue Banana, but inverted

To come back to Joe’s map: I too think that European industrial belt still matters, but not because of the language spoken there. It matters because of the gradient of economic and digital education that descends from north to south — and which is measurable far more precisely than the rate of spoken English.

The most recent ISTAT data show that basic digital skills cover 51.3% of people in the North, 49.9% in the Centre and just 36.1% in the South. The regions at the top of the ranking are Emilia-Romagna and the Province of Trento (around 61%); at the bottom, Campania and Calabria, below 43%. It’s exactly the same north-south gradient that describes the ancient Blue Banana — except that here we’re not talking about medieval trade routes, but about who today has the conceptual tools to understand what a private key or a wallet is.

A necessary update: it’s true that for decades computer science was never a structured subject in Italian primary schools — a real historical lag, at the root of much of the digital gap we’re discussing. But things are moving: Ministerial Decree 221/2025, published in the Official Gazette on 27 January 2026, introduces new National Guidelines that make computer science a compulsory, structural subject starting from kindergarten, beginning with the 2026/2027 school year — although, in the first phase, it will be integrated into maths, science and technology rather than taught by a dedicated teacher. It’s a step in the right direction, arriving forty years later than it should have — but the gap we describe in this article is now, finally, starting to be addressed at the institutional level.

On one point Joe is right: politics

I don’t want to be ungenerous toward Joe’s analysis: when he talks about regulation and the tax burden as a brake on Italian entrepreneurship, he hits the mark. Italy’s tax burden reached 43.1% of GDP in 2025, almost two points above the Eurozone average — the widest gap in the last ten years. 74% of Italian entrepreneurs cite bureaucracy as a serious obstacle, eight points above the EU average. And whoever decides to invest in cryptocurrencies faces a capital gain taxed at 26% in 2025, rising to 33% from 2026 — among the highest rates in Europe on the asset class.

It’s not an isolated case: it’s the same culture I’ve been describing, translated into law. A state that has always viewed private capital with suspicion could only build, over time, a tax and bureaucratic system designed to discourage it, not to let it flourish.

Conclusion

Joe Nakamoto is right that Italy has a problem with Bitcoin. He’s wrong about the cause. It isn’t the 13.6% of Italians who speak English that keeps us out of the Bitcoin revolution: it’s half a century of schooling that never taught what investing means, of a public discourse that made profit almost indecent, and of a fiscal policy that keeps punishing those who risk capital instead of rewarding them. The gap between Bologna, Turin and Milan — like the one between North and South — isn’t measured in English words learned, but in decades of missing economic culture. The good news is that, unlike language, culture can be rewritten: the coming school reform is a first, timid signal. It’s up to us, as a community, to do our part.

An honest objection, for those who disagree

Intellectual honesty means dwelling also on what complicates this thesis. First: Italian economic statism, as mentioned, was born under Fascism and kept alive by the Christian Democrats for decades — pinning it solely “on the left” oversimplifies a more tangled story. Second: weak financial culture is not exclusively Italian. Spain and Greece show equally low levels of financial literacy despite twentieth-century political histories very different from ours: perhaps the common factor is more Mediterranean and Catholic than specifically “left-wing”. Third: the generational gap in Bitcoin adoption is a global phenomenon too — boomers invest less in crypto everywhere in the world, not just in Italy. It remains convincing that the Italian case has a specific and recognisable political-cultural component, but anyone who wants to read this piece critically would do well to keep these three limits in mind as well.

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