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My experience in Miami

Events

Joshua Henslee

For the first time in 18 months, I decided last minute to travel down to Miami for the weekend of April 8, 2022, to attend several Bitcoin and blockchain related events. This article will review my experience and recap what I witnessed in South Beach.

Unbounded Capital Dinner

Unbounded Capital hosted a private dinner on Thursday night, inviting traditional venture capitalists along with some BSV enthusiasts. The seating arrangements at the tables was strategic with the intent to mix and match individuals with various backgrounds to spur conversation. The dinner was extremely well done, led by Zach Resnick, the Managing Partner at UC.

Personally, I spoke with VCs involved inside and out of the ‘crypto’ space with wildly different views. Some held the same views as myself that the entire space is in a giant bubble; they seemed to be surprised that I, as someone building in the space leveraging the underlying utility, agreed. Others were purely investing in token and NFT projects on different chains, and others were more nuanced, interested in the Gaming, DeFi and “GameFi” aspects. The dinner went extremely well, with some great conversations and debates held throughout the night.

Bitcoin SV Meetup Treehouse feat. Freenauts

On Friday night, Randy, organizer of the NYC Bitcoin SV Meetup put on a meetup and concert at the Treehouse club in Miami. The first couple of hours were a meet and greet, with short talks by Kurt Wuckert Jr. and Rafael LaVerde, followed by a concert by “The World’s Premier Liberty Rap Group” the Freenauts. I finally met some folks in the BSV space that I had only interacted with online in person, which was great. Rafael of The Crypto Vigilante invited some people from the Monero community as well as a (former?) Blockstream developer whom I actually had a great conversation with. This weekend was a great reminder that people are so much nicer in person and not everyone involved in the blockchain space is a toxic troll.

This event particularly reminded me of one of the primary reasons that I took the leap into the Bitcoin space, which were individuals I never met before introducing themselves and thanking me for my work. That aspect is so fulfilling and such lacking opportunities to meet in person over the last two years has sorely been missed.

CoinGeek Miami Bitcade

The last event I attended was on Saturday night at The Broken Shaker where Joe DePinto, co-founder of Haste Arcade, Dave Mullen-Muhr and Jackson Laskey from Duro Dogs and Greg Ward of SatoRunner had games on display for people to try out. Entry to the event was technically ‘free’ but signing up for a HandCash wallet was mandatory to enter the event. I was surprised to see “normies” attend the event, who were simply interested in the technology. Some folks and businesses from the Miami BTC conference attended as well, one of which who won $500 in BSV for placing atop the leaderboard in the Haste Arcade games.

The event ended on a heartwarming note, where podcaster Brittany Bitz gifted Kurt Wuckert Jr. an amazing Gorilla Pool themed painting of his children.

Overall, the weekend was a great experience. Now that I have a taste for travel again, I cannot wait to go back to hang out and work at the “East Coast Citadel” with the strong community forming in South Florida. I look forward to this positive momentum continuing throughout the rest of 2022.

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