The last day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference was sort of a letdown. The big-name speakers didn’t deliver, the announcements were mild and there was no El Salvador moment. That was in the afternoon, though. In the morning, the bitcoin-famous speakers did their thing, brought forth interesting ideas, and doubled down on their theories. The host was comedian and YouTuber JP Sear. The stream’s number of viewers oscillated between 5.2K and 5.7K.
An interesting fact is that, the night before, YouTube suspended Bitcoin Magazine’s channel for some kind of algorithmically-detected offense. The news sent Twitter into a frenzy, with a group of people trying to get a human in the YouTube camp to reverse the decision and another group trying to find alternative ways to access the stream. Luckily, the first group succeeded and everything was fine in the morning.
BTC price chart for 04/12/2022 on Binance | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com
Bitcoin 2022 * A Storm Is Coming
- “Bitcoin Macroeconomic Landscape” with Jeff Booth, Dr. Jeff Ross, Mark Moss, Preston Pysh, and Trey Lockerbie as a host.
Host Trey Lockerbie qualified this panel’s guests as “the biggest heavyweights in the bitcoin space,” and he’s not exaggerating. Dr. Jeff Ross kicked the festivities off by declaring, “bitcoin truly is the safe-haven asset that we should be flocking to.” Later on, he explained the reason all fiat currencies go down to zero eventually.
If so-called first-world countries “can’t export their inflation onto other countries as they have been doing” a tragedy occurs. What’s the tragedy? “They have to deal with it themselves.” However, Ross offered an even simpler and cleaner explanation. “If you can print something to infinity the value of each individual unit goes down to zero over time. That’s just math. It’s guaranteed.”
Author of “The Price Of Tomorrow,” Jeff Booth, explained the reason countries inflate their currencies. “You have to keep growing or you have a credit collapse.” He also considers Inflation as a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The free market is deflationary by nature because it’s driven by technology. Inflation lets governments pretend to be in a growth cycle forever. Them, he expressed what might be the biggest idea of the panel:
“The technology of bitcoin allows you to build a system, peer to peer, that doesn’t require debt for velocity of money.”
Piggybacking on that idea, Mark Moss brings back Peter Thiel’s talk. He qualifies Thiel’s blunder as old-world thinking. “Gold was slow, so maybe we need something like silver to be faster. Or, maybe, we need to put a paper on top of it to be faster.” What Thiel hasn’t figured out yet is that in bitcoin it’s all built into one.
For his part, Preston Pysh predicts the storm that titles this section. “We’re in for an incredible shock to the global economy.” Rampant money printing, inflation, and the current macroeconomic conditions put the US in “the biggest negative spread that anybody in this room has ever seen in their lifetimes.” It’s unprecedented and, inevitably, it’ll lead to “further printing, further manipulation, central banks have to step in.”
Later on, Pysh makes clear that only bitcoin is decentralized. The reason is that you can run your own node “10 years from now, 20 years from now, not just today.” He closes the panel with a mic-drop of an advice:
“Buy bitcoin and fall asleep for five years.”
Bitcoin 2022 * Climate Concerns Squashed
- “You Are The Carbon They Want To Reduce” with Nic Carter, Darin Feinstein, Stephen Barbour, Amanda Fabiano, and MacKenzie Sigalos as a host.
To begin with, according to Darin Feinstein, “the total energy use of this network is inconsequential on a global scale.” The question is: are we solving a problem? And the answer is a resounding “YES.” For her part, Amanda Fabiano talked about squashing the ESG narrative and talked up the Bitcoin Mining Council by saying that they were transparent with their sources.
The most interesting concept came from Stephen Barbour, who said “energy usage is a byproduct of productivity.” He also asked the most important question: whatever happened to job creation? Doesn’t the benefits that bitcoin brings to the world factor into the ESG equation?
The star of the show was Nic Carter, who claimed green energy is unreliable and bitcoin can help balance the force. “The more renewable you use, the more insurance you need,” Carter said. He also explained that bitcoin brings equilibrium because miners can participate in Demand/ Response programs. It’s the only industry that can power down at a moment’s notice, without affecting the functionality of the network as a whole.
As a bonus, he predicted:
“Energy-rich states will have nationalized bitcoin mining operations. It’s just another commodity.”
Bitcoin 2022 * A Primer On Bitcoin
- “Annual State of Bitcoin” with Dr. Adam Back, Steve Lee, and Aaron van Wirdum as a host.
The Bitcoin 2022 conference’s intention with this panel was to present a report on the current state of the bitcoin network. Both the legendary Adam Back and Block’s Steve Lee talked about mining pool centralization and, and asked, who’s running the machines? And, who produces the chips? They revealed, and this is BIG, that not only Intel is manufacturing chips, but Block and Blockstream are also having a go at it.
According to Steve Lee, the current dream is millions of home miners that also run nodes. The company he works for, Jack Dorsey’s Block, is building an open-source mining system. According to him, that “open datasheet” mixed with the chips the three companies are making will make it possible for people to create new refrigeration systems and apply industrial design to make a new generation of custom miners.
Since Lee’s main job in Block has to do with Spiral and their Lightning Development Kit, he talked about the explosion in Lightning Network adoption.
Back to the ASIC miners, the legendary Adam Back reminded the audience that his Blockstream recently acquired Spondoolies, an Israeli-based mining equipment provider. He also touched on the Lightning Network and spoke about their product Greenlight. It’s a hybrid node and wallet. It’s still hosted, but it’s non-custodial and the keys remain in the wallet. According to Back, the company’s also working on a channel rebalancing product that will do everything automatically.
Featured Image: Screenshot of Preston Pysh on stage | Charts by TradingView
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