Sneaking into BTC Miami 2022: Kurt Wuckert Jr.’s adventures as he takes Bitcoin to BTC HODLers

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BTC Miami 2022 happened in Florida in April, with crypto maxis flocking to the event to listen to what Michael Saylor and Jack Dorsey (who was heckled on stage) had to say. Kurt Wuckert Jr. was at the event as well, but while everyone else was bragging about their BTC portfolio, he was out to educate the people about the real Bitcoin at a BTC event.

“I’m just trying to keep my mouth shut and listen to smarter people than me talk,” one attendee told Kurt when asked about his reason for coming to Miami. 

Others had attended so that they could meet people with a similar passion for digital currencies, while others wanted to learn more about Bitcoin (although they had clearly picked the wrong event for that). There was even one attendee who had come searching for a husband, “but he has to have a lot of Bitcoins,” she told Kurt, with another stating, “I want someone to buy me land in the metaverse. Why else would I be here?”

As expected, not many were aware that BTC had become a project run almost entirely by the Mastercard cartel, which is spearheaded by the likes of Digital Currency Group and Blockstream, the BTC Core development firm run by Faketoshi Adam Back.

For one, the two companies that wrote the Lightning white paper, Blockstream and Lightning Labs, are portfolio companies of DCG, a Mastercard company. 

But as one attendant told Kurt, he doesn’t care who writes what. All he wants is the money.

“I see something like Bitcoin, I see an opportunity to make some money and hopefully get some stability.”

Inside the event, Kurt met a lot of Bitcoin OGs from back when it was just for nerds, and you could mine it using your laptop. He even found a company that uses BSV to store NFTs, which they were giving away at the event, “so now there’s a bunch of BTC maxis walking around holding some BSV UTXOs in their wallets and feeling really cool about it,” Kurt quipped.

Drew Barnard, the co-founder of Bitstop, a BTC ATM company, talked to CoinGeek, revealing why he had settled on BSV to host NFTs.

“They [the NFTs] were actually tokenized on Counterparty which is a layer on top of BTC. However, it’s just a token – the actual image itself is stored in a variety of places. We actually stored this NFT on BSV, Bitcoinfiles.org, which is very nice and easy to use,” Barnard said.

Barnard added that his company “uses blockchain as a tool, and whatever tool works best, and in this case BSV was extremely appropriate and helpful for us.”

Several attendees shared with Kurt what they have heard about Bitcoin SV and what they think about it. As expected, many had heard only negative things about BSV. Their source of information is the likes of CoinDesk, a news outlet that’s owned by the Digital Currency Group, the lead puppeteer for the Mastercard cartel. 

For one attendee, his impression of Bitcoin was shaped by what he describes is a book that delves into the scaling wars between the small blockers who held onto BTC and the big blockers who restored Satoshi’s vision via BSV.

“I came away with the impression that the big blockers were the suits and they were the ones trying to manipulate it [Bitcoin] to get it to bigger block sizes to be able to centralize it a little bit more and control it more. I don’t necessarily believe that 100%, but I do believe that bigger block sizes are not the way to go,” he stated.

As Kurt would later break down to him, it was the other way round. Blockstream was the primary force behind keeping Bitcoin blocks small forever, opening up an opportunity for its higher-ups at Mastercard to launch profitable sidechains in Liquid and Lightning Network.

Some decried the lack of information in the space, while others called for more women in blockchain. Some told Kurt that the biggest challenge in the sector is tribalism, where “everyone wants to do the right thing, but they have different ways of doing it.”

Kurt summed it up, “We still have so much work to do. We have so much to teach these people about the real power of a scalable protocol that allows everybody on earth to have predictable fees and a predictable experience in order to create businesses that can only be created with the Bitcoin protocol.”

Watch: CoinGeek Bitcade in Miami Beach highlights