Bitcoin Miami 2022 is larger than ever and signals the mainstreaming of Bitcoin. That might not be a good thing.
https://ift.tt/ESAfcJ1
There are like 500 speakers for Bitcoin Miami 2022, significantly more speakers than last year.
You can see the list here: [https://b.tc/conference/speakers](https://b.tc/conference/speakers)
This event keeps growing bigger every year and I guess that’s what happens when something becomes more mainstream. Even as a longtime Bitcoiner who has been active in the community, I only recognize about 20% of people on the list.
The event is hosted by BTC INC, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine. BTC INC is trying to be be the unofficial marketing department for Bitcoin, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. The Twitter account for Bitcoin Magazine spreads so much “BREAKING: [Insert misleading and unsourced claims here]” garbage that I had to block them. I don’t think they do a good job a representing Bitcoin, they just engagement farm and spread fake news, which does more harm to the Bitcoin brand than good.
It’s clear that BTC INC is trying to reach a more mainstream audience by bringing celebrities into conferences and I think that’s fine, but the speed at which the mainstreaming of Bitcoin is happening could come at a cost to the culture. The values of decentralization, libertarianism, Bitcoin maximalism and anti-statism gets diluted by the values of the mainstream.
Think of a country experiencing a constant, slow wave of immigration (like the United States). Those immigrants must assimilate and adapt to the norms of the country’s culture, not the other way around. However, when you import a massive number of new people that outnumbers the existing people in a country in a short time, the country experiences something called [Eternal September](https://ift.tt/Nj7xoMc), a phenomena when a flood of new people overwhelm the existing culture.
Mass adoption is the dream that we all have and it’s foolish to think that everyone must be libertarian in order to be a bitcoiner. Onboarding the rest of the world means onboarding people that aren’t like you, and being a gatekeeper on culture just makes you look like an asshole. But I just hope along the way to mainstream adoption, we stay maxis at our core and not become a bunch of shitcoiners.
Cryptocurrency
