Highlights from BitBlockBoom 2026
Hello from Fort Worth!
Last weekend, I did my first BitBlockBoom, the original Bitcoin maxi conference held in the Fort Worth Stockyards. This was the ninth year for the conference. The turnout was impressive, given that we are in the midst of a bear market, with about one hundred people showing up.
The conference is in the Stampede Ballroom of the Stockyards, which fits a lot of people. One challenge is that the conference had two concurrent sessions. So, they had a clever technology that allows you to wear headphones and dial into either of the two stages. If you got bored listening to one session, you could switch to the other by pressing a button on your headphones. If you wanted to check out of the conference and talk to your friends, you can still do that in the same room and not interrupt everyone with the headphones. It was a great piece of tech that made the whole conference better and didn’t penalize you for having side conversations.
My favorite session was from Matt Hill, who presented the new Start9 router. Start9 is a company that advances the idea of sovereign computing. In contrast to cloud computing, sovereign computing puts everything in the hands of the user. It’s consistent with the ethos of running your own Bitcoin node. I ran an experiment last summer where I bought a GPU and ran local open-source large language models on proprietary data that I received from companies who didn’t want their secrets in the hands of Scam Altman.
The newest Start9 device is not a server, but a router. The company rethought the router from scratch and decided to make it programmable in the same way that Bitcoin is programmable money. This third-party router can now let you configure at the device level. So, you can, for example, limit your daughter’s iPad to only access specific websites, or limit your son’s laptop to the internet, except for a specific list of websites. You can shut off Wi-Fi for your whole house for a certain time range or give guests access to your same Wi-Fi network, but just with a different password. All this configuration would be a pain on a regular router, so Start9 rethought the router from scratch.
The wife of one of the Samurai developers told her story of how federal agents infiltrated her house at 5:00 a.m. one morning to take her husband into custody. Apparently, the crime was money laundering. He’s been in prison for over 3 months; Open-source wallet development is somehow worthy of a SWAT team. I’m not privy to all of the details of the case, but this certainly feels like a failure of the justice system. There’s a movement now to convince President Trump to pardon the Samurai developers, which seems like a better use of a pardon than CZ Zhao.
Exegy is a company that is part of the heat punk movement. The basic idea is to connect mining machines to your heating system for your house. This would not make sense in Texas, where I live, because I use my heater for 10 days a year. It makes plenty of sense in Boston, where I grew up and is cold AF.
Tyler, one of the founders of The Space in Denver, gave a detailed presentation on the underlying economics and how the sales pitch for this is quite simple: Do you want to reduce your energy bill? Then recover some of the cost of heating by installing a miner that can heat your home and mine Bitcoin. This could change some of the economics of mining at scale, giving access to a large retail market and decentralizing mining even further.
Ledn spoke about their bitcoin-backed loans. Their business model is to take custody of bitcoin from borrowers and then lend that bitcoin out through Asset-Backed Securities, ABS, into a secondary market. The borrowers receive loan and interest payments over the term of the loan, after which they must repay the principal. The company does no underwriting of the borrower and only requires collateral in terms of bitcoin.
This certainly simplifies the issuance of the loan since it skirts the entire underwriting process. The rates that borrowers receive for these loans are around 10 percent. One issue I see is that this business model pools risk across low and high-risk borrowers, since it utilizes only the collateral for underwriting. A low-risk borrower with good credit is treated the same as a high-risk borrower with lousy credit, since all that matters is the bitcoin that they deposit to get their loan.
So even if a borrower’s objective is to acquire as much bitcoin as possible, there are cheaper ways to borrow, like taking a HELOC on your house. (That, of course, exploits the implicit subsidy of the Federal Reserve on the mortgage market). I want to see companies like Ledn succeed in the long term, so I encouraged the founder to develop mechanisms in the future to attract low-risk borrowers as well as high-risk.
Unfortunately, the entertainment for the conference was Casino Night, which jars with the ethos of Bitcoin and its emphasis on savings over gambling. That’s the same problem I’ve always had with the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, a location which represents the antithesis of everything that Bitcoin stands for!
Overall, I think the conference was worth attending, mostly because it’s a high-signal group of like-minded Bitcoiners. It was a little light on the technical side, but it’s a good cross-section of the Bitcoin industry, distributed equally between mining, treasury companies, custody, and payments.