How prone we human beings are to psychological awe.
To sit in front of Michael Saylor, who is staring you in the eye with a motionless expression. A stone that lets no emotion show, and find yourself with a blank mind. Displaced with questions by nervousness. By awe, in fact.
Yet the boss of Microstrategy is a small, slender man. But he exudes charisma and intelligence. He has an edgy humor and I think he plays with it a lot, with his character. I suspect that in his personal life he’s a funny guy. Someone to shoot the shit with while drinking vodka and talking about the Bitcoin Event Horizon. He also owns a lot of Bitcoin. He is a leader. There’s little we can do about it.
We were only able to have a few minutes with him. But it came out to be a very interesting conversation. I think you’ll enjoy it.
The second day of the conference was punctuated by the very American announcement of Jack Mallers and Strike, and us running like crazy for miles looking for every possible guest to have an interesting conversation with. We are quite satisfied. We come home with our saddlebags pretty full. We missed a few juicy whales, we have to admit. But we realize that’s part of the game. And there will be other opportunities.
We also carve out a few hours to tour the booths. We stop to chat at the one of Shiftcrypto, one of our sponsors. BitBox02 is the official wallet of the conference. It is also sold in the main store, the one with the merchandising. They are very happy to be there and happy with how the conference is going, but also a bit surprised. They tell how many visitors are coming to the conference and asking what is a hardware wallet. It’s surprising and it shows once again how an event of this size now goes well beyond industry experts, but is something much more mainstream. This is good perhaps. It can be part of the growth process. But it tells us that there is still a lot of work to be done because education is sorely lacking. Especially in the cryptonian population.
We also meet the Bitrefill team, all people with whom I’ve only had virtual contact and to whom I’ve finally managed to put a face. It’s incredible to work remotely, to think how a few decades ago it would have been unthinkable gives a clear measure of how socially revolutionary the internet has been.
Impossible not to make the parallelism with Bitcoin. Today we can’t even imagine what it will be capable of. We can only speculate.
The hours pass quickly and the conference is approaching its end after two very intense days. So many announcements and insights, at the same time, we will have material for several episodes. Honestly, I found everything too condensed. Impossible to follow. If you are aiming to offer all this amount of material then this is perhaps an event that deserves to last an extra day. It would be much more convenient and orderly.
In the myriad of sensationalist launches, however, we didn’t notice anything striking. Nothing all that memorable. But you can’t always have historical events on stage. The general feeling is that Bitcoin lives a state of absolute vitality. The scene is vibrant, constantly growing and extremely diverse. Bitcoin’s pace today is rapid. Much faster than that of many other shitcoins. And that can only be pleasing.
The signs are there for the taking. Everything is converging towards the Protocol. Exactly as planned. The machine is perfect.
Glory to Bitcoin.