My Experience Attending the Satoshi Roundtable in 2017
This week I went to Cancun, Mexico to find out what some of the most notorious minds in the Bitcoin space had to say about the pressing issues facing us in 2017. I also came to basically listen and not talk a lot. I think many people want to broadcast out to others their opinion, but would rather not reciprocate and actually absorb some of the most fascinating information to be gathered. These are my thoughts on what went down.
First off I’d like to thank Bruce Fenton for including me in the event. I agree with Rick Falkvinge and others that the event was well organized and provided a great forum for everyone to foster good conversations. And conversations were had. It’s a bit disappointing to not be able to have the event completely open to others or livestream the conversations, but I understand there are some developers and interested parties that will opt out of participation if their privacy is not protected. It’s a weird trade off.
I had several group chats with people I didn’t even think liked each other, much less wanted to work together closely. That was extremely inspiring to see and probably something a lot of people don’t know happens considering the brutality on the forums. If you ever get the opportunity to go to something like this where so many people doing interesting things in Bitcoin gather, I recommend you jump on it, because it will bolster your confidence on the potential of the technology we are so passionate about. The unconference format is a really strong alternative to the regular format, because most of us just want to talk informally anyways.
Day 1
The first day of the conference was basically a ballet dance around the scaling topic, but it seemed like everyone in attendance was pretty exhausted from the same conversations and we just really wanted to figure out what was going to help us move past the whole block size debate. It’s obvious to all in attendance that the whole process was being held up by some individuals who have a good amount of influence and feel burned by the actions of everyone in the last year and a half. It’s fair to say that the miners from China did not really show up (only one showed up and didn’t provide much input).
There were several notable businesses and individuals who declined to attend the conference. I was surprised to hear but understand that some key individuals didn’t feel comfortable confronting issues in any other way than in IRC or other online forums. It’s kind of sad, because I actually found myself liking and learning more about people I previously had petty beefs with. I even spoke with Peter Todd a bit who I previously had issues with over his double spend on Coinbase, but I really in a lot of other regards.
The special guest for the day was a congressman and she pretty much gave us a rundown of what to expect from the Trump administration in respect to Bitcoin and blockchain. She had met with Trump personally and seemed very optimistic that he was going to do a good job. Crazy like a fox, not crazy is how she characterized him. This was followed up by a short discussion from Jerry Brito about Coin Center (go donate if you can, we did at OB1) and how they’re working similar to the EFF to support and protect Bitcoin and blockchain interests. One interesting question that was posed was “Do you feel like you’re advocating for scam coins?”. Jerry’s response essentially was we don’t advocate or promote specific coins. They’re more interested in helping educate lawmakers and work with them to better understand how what they’re doing impacts our nascent technology.
The rest of the day was spent really trying to get a good grasp of how everyone felt about the governance, or lack thereof, in Bitcoin and how to just start making progress forward considering segwit was sitting on the shelf waiting to be activated and the signaling does not seem to be gaining much traction as of recent. 99% of the people in the room agreed that segwit was a good thing and should be activated. It truly seems like it’s a people problem keeping consensus from evolving. Segwit is a complex addition to Bitcoin and we’re all learning that for good or bad there are several perspectives on what Bitcoin is exactly. In fact the most notable person in the conference even suggested a sidebar discussion called “What is Bitcoin?”.
In a final short discussion before the day ended we started getting into the challenges around online discussions and how toxic they had gotten. Several people seemed to think that the people who needed to get shit done were getting shit done and the rest was noise. Most everyone agreed that the subreddits were just going downhill. We weren’t able to brainstorm many potential solutions for that issue though. One suggestion brought up was to work hard to condemn those who troll and instigate regardless of your position and who was doing it. It was contested though that chastising people for ad hominem attacks was actually an ad hominem attack in it’s own right. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I don’t think the community is actually strong enough to fight back like that against the shitposters at the moment.
There was another room that discussion ICOs and other stuff, but I did not attend so I cannot confirm or deny the smell of that room.
Day 2
The second day kicked off with a talk from Patrick Byrne who I’m sure many of you have seen speak before at other events so I don’t really have to rehash all of his viewpoints. He reinforced the opinion of the Congressman that Trump’s cabinet seemed to be somewhat Bitcoin friendly, but differed in that he thought Trump was probably crazy and not like a fox. He has a certain reverence and respect for some of the OGs in our community and even got caught as a fanboy of one of the attendees and gave them an I’m Not Worthy bow. It was cool seeing the CEO of Overstock.com paying respects to people in the space. I think it’s easy for large companies to try and appropriate ideas and communities without acknowledging those who came before them.
Once again a discussion around the block size debate came back up and someone suggested that perhaps two Bitcoins wouldn’t be such a horrible thing if the two sides of the debate simply cannot move forward in unison and have different interests to protect. Everyone respectfully listened but it didn’t seem to be getting much support. Pointing to Ethereum right now as a model doesn’t seem like a prudent action to me. I like that they’re trying new things, but suggesting that Bitcoin fork into two coins is a pretty wild notion, one which I do not support.
After lunch we broke into groups and I lead a group with Riccardo “Spaghetti” Spagni of Monero to talk about Monero, OpenBazaar and Privacy, Security. We had a couple people join us and it was extremely interesting to hear about how much overlap our goals are in these two areas. I’m looking forward to multisig Monero in the autumn and excited to watch that project flourish. It’s truly one of the most innovative coins in the space unlike so many others. In addition to that, their origin and path has gone a very similar way to the OpenBazaar project and it’s nice to share experiences with another team struggling through open source challenges.
Conclusion
In conclusion the conference was really enjoyable and not just because it was in Cancun. The people in Bitcoin are amazing and working in person is something I don’t get to do often since I live in DC and work remotely even with my own team. In true cypherpunk style we spent a lot of time poking holes in ideas and not people. No one was really offensive or attacking people for the most part and I forgot how nice it is to debate with human beings and not frustating avatars or pseudonyms online.
I’m not about to land in San Francisco for the Construct 2017 conference and can’t wait to meet even more people and realize once again how little I know about all of this and how much there is to learn.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
