They Biked, Ran and Swam Over 200 Miles Across Europe

A group of bitcoin enthusiasts just ran, biked and swam across Europe, all to promote the cryptocurrency they believe is leaving a powerful, positive mark on the world.

Running purely on bitcoin donations, the loose group dubbed "Team Satoshi" embarked on the quest in an attempt to raise positive awareness of bitcoin, which even 10 years after its release as open-source software, they believe gets too much negative press in the media.

The brainchild of Vitus Zeller, a German who started the project with a 10-day adventure of his own dubbed "Tour de Satoshi," Zeller used bitcoin to pay for his hotel stays as he biked across the country.

"In mainstream perception, bitcoin is mostly the money of the dark web , an energy over-consuming technology or a purely speculative asset."

"Bitcoin needs all kinds of voices that make people get curious about it," he said.

"We have now together many hundreds of hours of intense training for this event. I, for example, ran about each week a half marathon," Zeller said, which is running a distance of 21 kilometers.

Day two was swimming across a Bodonsee, a lake where Austria, Switzerland and Germany meet, which Zeller repeatedly called a "Monster." Measuring 12 kilometers in distance, it took the crew five hours to cross.

"With my 49 years of age the biggest challenge for me was keeping up with the young guys in the uphill sections. I think I managed that quite well, which is great," said Anita Posch, bitcoin podcast host and one of the Satoshi Team.

"With Team Satoshi I had the idea to create a decentralized [] marketing instrument for bitcoin and the values it represents which derive from the Cypherpunk Manifesto," Zeller said.

As far-fetched as it sounds, Zeller wonders if this could morph into a profession someday: "Team Satoshi members can even try to make this a profession all over the world, if they can find sponsors or people out of the ecosystem that support them."