Some thoughts / observations out of Nashville

MINING TAKES CENTER STAGE. CONSUMER LAYER IS SCARCE.

Since I refused to spend hours in line or submit myself to unnecessary deep security screening, I hung out in the pit the whole time. Honestly, based on the pit, this felt like a mining conference, like Scott Offord’s Mining Conf level of mining focus. All the major minors were there with huge set ups and mining shipping container / rig demos. The mining stuff just DOMINATED the pit, especially when you add in the yield / staking / cloud mining scams that were also out in full force and marketed themselves and mining adjacent. Suits were EVERYWHERE and all the mining companies seemed to have people there whose job it was to give the hard, fully-credentialized sell of “mining companies as exciting investable assets.”

In itself that was not a problem, mining is ESSENTIAL to bitcoin and the industry having a glow up moment is something we should all celebrate. What felt lacking in the pit has that companies representing consumer tools / services were almost COMPLETELY NON EXISTENT in terms of booth presence. No Cash App, no Swan, no Bullish, no Bitpay, no Bitwage, no Bitrefill, no Fold, no Lolli, no Foundation, no Coinkite, No Blockstream, no mechanical bull, NOT A SINGLE reputable Lightning wallet, shit even Coinbase and Binance were fully ghost. This gap was filled by Bitcoin L2 staking / defi scams replete with booth babes who were clearly Chinese and Russian kompromat agents. Bad look all around.

For someone like me, this gap was glaring and sucked a lot of the fun out of the room. Many of these companies certainly had people or teams around at the conference but there seemed to be basically ZERO pull interest for retail - which is pretty dark IMO if the “Biggest and Most Important Bitcoin Conference Ever” has completely abandoned retail, at least at a vibe level.

Even if the ETF pushes the convo in an institutional and “financial advisor managed” onboarding direction, we as bitcoiners CANNOT leave it at that. We should view ETFs as a potential starting point for the next wave of retail but not the END POINT. There are surely main people who will buy into the ETF who will have interest in self custody, or something closer to it, if we are there to educate them.

#Bitcoin

#Plebchain