MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Conference in Vegas

I spoke at MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas last week. Here is the roundup of Day 1.

Howdy Bitcoiners!

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Last week, I spoke at MicroStrategy’s Annual Bitcoin Conference, this time in Las Vegas. The Bitcoin portion is the last two days of a three-day conference called MicroStrategy World. The whole conference is available online; I will summarize the main points and offer my commentary.

Day 1

Alex Leishman of River gave an overview of the Lightning Network and Bitcoin adoption. It was a lot of facts and figures about the growth of the Lightning Network, growth in Bitcoin users, as well as a dash through some of the more exciting developments.

I spoke next on the past, present, and future of Bitcoin R&D. My role mostly was to give the perspective of the research and academic community and its interaction with Bitcoin. I offered some new data on the research community and Bitcoin’s underlying scarcity, which I will discuss in later posts. I mentioned that Bitcoin rests on 50 years of science and engineering, surveyed what kinds of problems Bitcoin can solve today future, and speculated on some new use cases for Bitcoin in the far away future. I had fun speculating on future prediction markets, decentralized auctions, vehicle to vehicle payments, and autonomous trade, all of which will be possible in the future with Bitcoin. It was an opportunity for me to review some of the recent developments like Taproot and BitVM, and also to dream about a future where machines transact and bargain with each other using Bitcoin.

The head of engineering at MicroStrategy revealed their Orange check program, which implements decentralized identity on Bitcoin. The idea is to use a public/private key pair on the Bitcoin blockchain to verify identity, to know when you're getting an email from a real person rather than an imposter or bot. It uses inscriptions, which is admittedly controversial among some Bitcoiners. I'll dive in more on the underlying tech in a later post.

David Marcus of LightSpark did a fireside chat with Saylor at the end of the day. It was somewhat odd to see Saylor ask questions, as usually he is the one answering them. Marcus made the case for open protocols over closed systems from his experience at Facebook, and that Lightning is inevitable for fast, cheap payments. His remarks were solid though a little predictable. Saylor asked him about some of the controversies in Lightning these last six months and he did not address them. There are some nuances with the way the Lightening Network interacts with the base layer, in particular, pre-signed transactions may not get confirmed if the fees change substantially while the channel is open. I'm guessing Marcus wanted to present a united front on Lightning, even though I've always believed that the best way to earn credibility is to present the raw truth and let the audience decide.

In the next post, I will discuss Day 2 of the conference and the MicroStrategy Bitcoin strategy overall.