Earlier this month I attended my second Bitcoin Conference, held at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas.
I attended the conference for the first time when it was held in Nashville last July. Both events were rumored to have around 35,000 attendees. These are huge numbers, and it certainly felt very full in the Expo hall and main stage on the two full days of the event. The venue coped well with those numbers though, as the conference center was just a part of a huge overall complex. The Venetian is the largest resort in the USA, with over 7000 rooms and suites, and is also one of the largest globally.
I did not know what to expect from Nashville heading into last year, but the city was not what I expected. The main thoroughfare, Broadway, was packed with blaring bars and bachelorette parties. Both for the city and the conference, at times it was a brash circus and I felt that it might as well be in Vegas. Indeed Vegas was a good match and the conference will return to The Venetian in 2026.
What was Las Vegas like?
This was my third visit to Las Vegas, and the first two trips were 15+ years ago. Much of the Strip was pretty similar to my earlier trips, but one stunning addition was The Sphere. Beyond the external display there is a huge hemispheric screen in the interior which showed “Postcard from Earth”. Think an IMAX screen, but 10x larger and better. It is the largest and highest resolution screen in the world, with 16K resolution. There are 167,000 speakers, haptic feedback on most of the 17,600 seats, with wind, temperate changes and scents. It is incredibly immersive and well worth the trip.
I also took the opportunity to attend some magic shows and to eat at Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen.
There was talk about how Las Vegas had become a rip-off in the post-Covid years and did not offer the same value which it once did. I was there while it was Memorial Day weekend and it still felt like pretty good value to me, coming from Canada.
Las Vegas is like an amusement park for adults – a hedonistic paradise – and is an awful lot of fun for a few days with numerous dopamine hits available, but it gets old fairly quickly and I think two or three days is sufficient for most people.
What was the conference like?
The conference was pretty similar to the previous year but I enjoyed it less than in Nashville. I had hoped that the strong focus on politicians as headline speakers was something which would have been tied to the 2024 US elections, not as an ongoing primary focus. The 2024 event had Donald Trump and RFK Jr, along with many other state and federal elected officials. The 2025 event had Eric and Donald Trump Jr, JD Vance and Nigel Farage, but also many other members of the house and senate and state officials.
It all feels rather nasty and boot-licking, driven more by shallow number-go-up thinking than by empowering individuals to control their own destiny. It’s all rather empty and sad to my perspective.
While one of the many main stage sessions with politicians was happening, there was an amusing session happening on the Genesis stage where all the speakers were spitting fire on the topic of “Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?” You can guess what the panelists answers were, and they were not stated politely.
I was quite disgusted to see that Freedom Law School were making an appearance in the Expo hall for consecutive years. They offer their “go straight to jail” services, peddling the fiction that US Income Tax is something which is optional. Not tax avoidance through jurisdictional arbitrage, but just “you don’t have to leave the US – just don’t pay” delusion. Unsurprisingly, the top Google hits for them are for one of their customers who was sentenced to 33 months in prison for tax evasion. That the organizers are fine to have them back is very disappointing.
It was quite clear that we have entered a new phase on the regulatory front, as Justin Sun made a rare appearance on US soil.
On a more positive note, Peter Schiff was in attendance, both speaking and at the Euro Pacific Asset Management stand where I was able to speak with him and thank him for the education on precious metals which I had through his public appearances years ago. That ultimately led me to blockchain and crypto. That was an unexpected treat.
Also, the fabulous Daniel Batten interviewed John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I was lucky enough to persuade Daniel to be a headline speaker at my POW Summit 2024 event last year in Frankfurt. He presents excellent data on the environmental benefits of POW mining with extreme patience, and has made significant impact fighting FUD over several years, as a climate technology investor and educator.
John Perkins was another important individual in my own journey. In his whistleblower account published twenty years ago he detailed how the World Bank and International Monetary Fund implement economic colonialism over developing nations through extortionate loans and “Structural Adjustments”. He is starting to understand how Bitcoin can be used as a tool outside of that malevolent influence. It was great to see him speak and to hear his perspective.
More to the environmental story, the famous Skull of Satoshi artwork was on display in the Expo hall. This was commissioned by the misguided and now abandoned “Change The Code” campaign waged by Greenpeace USA with $5M funding from Chris Larsen of Ripple. It was meant to be horrifying but was quickly adopted as a beloved meme by Bitcoiners. Now that the campaign has failed, the artwork was donated to the Bitcoin Conference by Ripple, in a cynical looking attempt at an olive branch.
The Expo hall was full, with exhibitors showing mainly same kind of projects as in prior years. Mining solutions, exchanges, payments, lending against Bitcoin. No much that was particularly exciting.
One exception was that Square announced that they will support Bitcoin payments using Lightning later this year and into 2026. That could be really impactful.
What about developers?
The Open Source stage was off in the back of beyond, not connected to the main expo hall or to the industry hall, but off away with other meeting rooms. That was a downgrade from 2024 and indeed it did feel that progress and excitement had slowed about what else is possible with Bitcoin other than simple payments and store of value. Bitcoin layering projects (usually building on BitVM) are still progressing, with some announcements soon after the event, but were not the “hot new things” of 2024.
Overall, this felt like a regression from the 2024 to me, with politicians, podcasters and influencers and shallow rhetoric overwhelming the builders and project work. As in 2024, Max Kaiser and Michael Saylor were headline speakers and not saying anything very insightful or useful. Just performing in front of the fans.
Michael Saylor’s talk looked entirely AI generated, with 21 different shallow talking points and AI generated images. He spoke second-to-last, before Ross Ulbricht, who closed the event. Seeing rafts of people walking out of the main hall after Saylor finished when Ross was about to speak was entirely indicative of that audience and deeply disappointing to see.
I guess it’s not too surprising given how mainstream things have become, but was pretty sad. I heard somewhere that likely 50% of the audience for each conference was brand-new, so they are missing 10-15 years worth of context. Ross was arrested in late 2013 for running a dark market called Silk Road in the very early days of Bitcoin. Many people say that Silk Road was the first killer app for Bitcoin. He was recently released from prison with his sentence commuted by the president.
In his talk he spoke about having been in a time-capsule. He has missed pretty much the entirety of Bitcoin’s development. It was great to see him free, and a credit to the conference for giving him that closing talk.
I went to Litecoin Summit on my final day, where it was announced that a BitVM-based project called LitVM would be building on top of LTC, which was pretty exciting. BitcoinOS are the tech team.
Would I go to Bitcoin Conference again? Back to Vegas in 2026?
I am not sure that I would. It’s a spectacle, that is for sure, and Las Vegas is a fun destination, but the conference itself left me feeling rather icky and dejected about the state of the Bitcoin community. It felt that the kind of Bitcoin technical renaissance which seemed so close in 2024 was further away and still might never happen. The high priests were back and number go up was the focus.
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