Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights.
Last month, I attended all three days of the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. I’ve only attended smaller conferences before, like BTC++, BitBlockBoom, and my own academic conferences on Bitcoin, so this was on my bucket list. This is much bigger, with 20,000+ attendees, many concurrent sessions, and hundreds of sponsors and booths. Here are some of my major reflections.
First, bitcoin is getting noticed. The scale of the crowds was impressive. Broadly speaking, there are three primary communities: Miners, developers, and capitalists. They had separate sessions for each of them. The general stage was aimed at the general public, mostly for people who were new to bitcoin or for speeches that pertained to all Bitcoiners.
There were plenty of newcoiners at the conference. Some flew in from all over the world, and many knew little about bitcoin. And finally, there were a bunch who don’t go to any of the smaller, more specialized conferences, like Ed, who operates excavators and has followed bitcoin for years, now planning on starting a small mining operation.
The best speech was by Ross Ulbricht. He talked about his time in jail for the last decade, and how he essentially lived in a time capsule. In his time, bitcoin was priced at less than a dollar, and there were no altcoins, major mining operations, or AI. His story is remarkable: he got into jail because of bitcoin, but then it was bitcoin that let him out. It was the unity of the entire community that rallied around his freedom that is the most remarkable proof that Bitcoin is a movement, more than just a technology.
Saylor also hit a home run, focusing this time more on the individual than his usual corporate audience. He had some nice lessons on the need to focus and, ultimately, the humility that brings people to bitcoin. Many people came to bitcoin before Saylor, but they wasted their time and treasure on other projects, either within the cryptocurrency space or outside of it. All would have been better served had they recognized the high value of Satoshi’s innovation and simply taken the humble path of buying and holding. It’s a hard lesson to swallow in our age of innovation, where Silicon Valley and now New York and Miami constantly strive for the next big thing. Sometimes the next big thing is right under your nose, and we tend to overestimate incremental change and underestimate radical tectonic shifts.
The other novelty in the conference program was the rise of the bitcoin treasury companies. They occupied a new space in the program, and there was a large community around them, both the ones around MicroStrategy (MSTR), but also the newer kids on the block like Metaplanet, Semler Scientific, and Nakamoto.
My last observation is that bitcoin education still has a way to go. The educators had no time in the program. But even beyond that, there is a vast distance between the developer sessions and the rest of the conference. They really were separate conferences within a larger conference. Why is this a problem? For me, I acquired conviction only by looking under the hood of how bitcoin works. So maybe that will be an opportunity for next year.
