I got the overall feeling this year was somewhat more informative and less about sensational announcements than last year. There were many sessions taking the macroeconomic and political angle as well as an entire stage dedicated to the topic of mining. It is always fascinating to hear industry insiders talk about mining. However I was suprised to hear that home mining is making a comeback: some people know how to mine at home with minimal noise while heating up their swimming pool.
The most exciting presentation was the one Jack Mallers gave about how Strike is using the bitcoin network as payments rail for paying online and at points-of-sale. It is available here. The description he gave of the existing obsolete credit card network is EXCELLENT. You’ve got to watch it.
Some small jurisdictions announced that they were welcoming bitcoin, making it officially ok to pay with it without generating a tax event: Prospera in Honduras and Madeira in Portugal. Operating on small territories is a smart approach: from the point of view of the country it involves little effort and it’s a zero-cost way of getting worldwide visibility and attracting investors. It also looks less daunting than the huge undertaking by El Salvador, where the government is going through the hassle of deploying its own wallet to the entire population while standing up to the IMF. Instead, why not start small and fly low.
You have to give credit to the team organising this event for making the conference available live on Youtube on three different live streams (main stage, mining stage, open source stage) and posting each individual session just a few hours after it happened. Great job. And all this despite YouTube taking down the channel for a few hours in the middle of the event.
Some good quotes:
Michael Saylor during his firechat:
“Competition will decide. Banks that embrace it will grow, banks that reject it will shrink.”
“Not supporting bitcoin is not supporting sound money,
not supporting Lightning is like not supporting the internet.”
Ricardo Salinas about CDBCs
“Fiat religion has its high priests and this religion is not tolerant: it hates heretics.”
Jordan Peterson about central planning of money.
“one of the lovely things about cash is that it is a decentralised monetary system. It’s not that easy to track cash. Thanks God because you could be certain that if it was easy to track cash then every agency with some ethical notion would be tracking everything you’ve ever purchased trying to nudge and tap and compel you into making the decisions they regard as ethical. And it would be fine if they were right but they won’t be and so that’s a big problem.
The reason they won’t be right is because you can’t make those assumptions a priori. One of the fundamental axioms of a free market system is that the only way to properly compute the value of the emerging horizon of the future is by sampling and summing the free choice a multitude of free agents. There is no central planning way even in principle that can substitute for that.”
