Highlights from the Bitcoin Conference
The Annual Gathering in Vegas
Howdy Bitcoiners!
At the end of April I popped into Las Vegas to attend the 2026 Bitcoin conference. Even though we are technically in a bear market, there were still big crowds and a lot of energy.
For me, getting there was a snafu. I booked my flight and hotel as a package six months ago, and the flight was free (with Frontier Airlines). When I boarded the plane in Houston, they had a mechanical malfunction, forced us all to deplane, and then the flight kept getting delayed until it was ultimately canceled eight hours later. What a mess! I guess I got what I paid for.
The Bitcoin conference is a great example of network externalities. So many people from so many parts of the industry convene in one place that the value of the conference grows year by year. Even outside the programming, the chance to randomly run into anyone who works in Bitcoin is high. It’s entirely possible to simply bounce between different side events and not even attend the main conference, if you want. I did attend some sessions though, especially the ones on the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) stage. Justin Moon did a bunch of vibe coding demos and they had some great examples of human rights and Bitcoin.
I met several faculty for dinner interested in Bitcoin education and we traded war stories about dealing with our own universities. My favorite space was the open source stage, where there’s a very high chance that you could answer a technical question very quickly from the people in that room.
I will say there were just one too many sessions on quantum computing, especially given that not much has happened and there’s no single candidate signature that everyone likes so far. It reminds me of covenants! The good news is that Core devs, Blockstream, and Strategy are allocating resources to ensuring a post-quantum signature works.
Oddly, the best part of the conference was actually walking through the expo hall where you see all kinds of creative expressions of Bitcoin. An artist from California was doing a live painting of the birth of Bitcoin after the financial crisis. Another person was selling a book of all of Satoshi’s emails. The culture of Bitcoin is as important as the code, and it’s fantastic to see all the art that represents this social and political movement.