Think about what a conference for thousands actually is: someone deciding who speaks, who doesn't, what messages get amplified, what Bitcoin "should" look like to attendees.
That's before we get to the secret meetings of "local Bitcoin leaders" planning the future of Czech Bitcoin community. Or threatening legal action against anyone who dares list their events without permission.
Its basically central planning with Bitcoin characteristics.
You are against the idea of a conference?
Otherwise sure, threatening with legal action is shitty, but without knowing any details I don't have any specific opinion about this case.
I'm not against conferences - I'm against conferences operating as top-down institutions that control narratives, curate speakers based on influence rather than substance, and function as businesses gatekeeping who gets heard instead of open spaces for builders to coordinate.
That's sort of bound to happen as soon as the conference is bigger than 100 people, so then the question is whether there are spaces during the conference where people can share, it's open to all, anyone can chat and make connections, etc.
At the big Bitcoin conference in the US this was the space in front of the Open Source stage - many random developers and folks.
I don't think it's about scale - even events for thousands can be done differently, as CCC and similar demonstrate. It's about approach and principles. We did UTXO.22 for 1.2k locals - gave space to anyone who wanted to speak with minimal curation, didn't sell any stupid commercial stands etc. It's just hard to imagine how these events can work because most conferences operate on classical top-down curated models.
Understood. Do you have links to the conferences you mentioned? I'm not familiar with either.
CCC (Chaos Communication Congress) https://events.ccc.de/en/congress/
UTXO.22 was czech local confererence: https://explore.prgblockweek.com/23/event/utxo
