Four Days In Miami With Crypto’s Most Faithful Fans

It’s Saturday afternoon in Miami Beach near the end of Bitcoin 2022, a 92-hour, bacchanal-style conference. The summit has drawn over 25,000 people to discuss and glorify cryptocurrencies, and it’ll close with a concert—the so-called Sound Money Fest—featuring two Grammy-nominated headliners, Logic and Steve Aoki.

But a smaller gathering is happening across town at a Hilton a few miles from the airport, a couple dozen men and four women in a windowless room at the back of the hotel. They’re here for Bear Arms ‘N Bitcoin, a two-day conclave on untraceable 3-D printed guns. (Crypto is used to fuel this shadow industry.) This conference is formally separate from Bitcoin 2022 but nonetheless connected to it, enticing attendees from those already in town for Bitcoin 2022. Bear Arms ‘N Bitcoin encouraged people to register pseudonymously if they liked, and for some, this makes check-in at the sub-conference difficult. It’s tough to do so when your name doesn’t match your alias, and you’ve forgotten what alias you used.

One speaker, Jeff Rodriguez, gives a presentation on his popular Liberator 12K shotguns and sets up a table to sell at-home Liberator 12K kits, available for $350 in bitcoin. (“I guess if someone really wants to pay in dollars, I’d make an exception,” he says, five versions of his firearm spread out before him.) Another speaker is hacker-programmer Rachel-Rose O’Leary, who pitches Dark-Fi, a new blockchain she promises will provide better privacy than existing ones. “We decided we had to have better, more anonymous technology that was more adapted to the degree of surveillance possible in the contemporary world,” says O’Leary, dressed all in black from her midriff-cut shirt to her thick-soled boots. She and the others behind Dark-Fi intend to turn it into a DAO, a co-op run through social media. Several Dark-Fi engineers came from Assange DAO, the group that raised $50 million online putatively to donate to Julian Assange’s legal defense.

Such was Bitcoin 2022, which began last Wednesday and finished early Sunday morning, and all surrounding it. In four years, the conference has become one of the largest conferences of any kind in the world, bigger than Collision and South by Southwest and increasingly close to the size of Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show.

Its organizer is BTC Media, publisher of trade-focused Bitcoin magazine, and the young event does a remarkable job of drawing in average investors, politicians and billionaires alike. It presents a moment for the crypto faithful to bask in the booming attention around what was once seen as an obtuse, worthless technology. Technology embraced by a widening number of industries and groups beyond finance as Bear Arms ‘N Bitcoin and other adjacent event make plainly apparent.

The forum is also an occasion for the crypto rich to flaunt the sudden, enormous wealth cryptocurrencies have generated. (Bitcoin’s value alone has soared approximately 1,100% since the conference’s 2019 start.) They get the chance to do so in a city offering bountiful opportunities to strut and spend, a place that has deliberately pitched itself as a Mecca for crypto enthusiasts and techno nonconformists. You needed some wealth just to afford Bitcoin 2022 tickets. They started at $1,099 and went up to over $20,000 for a “whale pass” offering VIP treatment, including chauffeured golf carts around Miami Beach.

The conference “is a cultural gathering, a celebration of bitcoin, the bitcoin movement and counterculture,” says Christian Keroles, a managing director at Bitcoin magazine. “There’s the old way of doing things, and I think the internet is moving things in a new direction.”

Much of Bitcoin 2022 focused on familiar topics: how to value the cryptocurrency, buy it, store it, sell it, market it and spend it. The opening speaker, billionaire investor Mike Novogratz, suggested bitcoin could reach $500,000 a coin, what would be a meteoric rise from today’s $42,000 or so. Wyoming’s Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis attended for the second year, promising bipartisan support for cryptocurrency, which will likely soon face its first wave of federal regulation. Meanwhile, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and tennis star Serena Williams hosted a panel to encourage the sports world to better adopt bitcoin and other blockchain-based technology.

A keynote speech came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel and was most notable for the harsh words he had for fellow billionaires Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink. They formed the “enemies list” Thiel presented on stage, a roll of old-school financiers who remain wary of bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Their views, Thiel said, is what holds back bitcoin from true mainstream adoption. Put another way: They’re keeping bitcoin from an exponential increase in value, Thiel believes, impeding him and other bitcoin holders from getting exponentially richer.

On a more practical level, Miami provided people like Josip Rupena an opportunity to pitch their new startups and attract the attention of customers and investors. Rupena, a former Goldman Sachs trader and Morgan Stanley private wealth manager, is the founder of Florida-based Milo. The new mortgage-lending business will dispense home loans secured by cryptocurrency—something most ordinary banks absolutely won’t do—for rates around 5.95% on a 30-year loan. (Higher than the nationwide 5.09% average but not a shock given the additional risk posed by the crypto.) Milo recently raised a $17 million Series A and plans to tolerate a substantial amount of the crypto market’s volatility. It won’t require a borrower to replenish the crypto underlying a loan until it loses 65% of its initial value.

Rupena is already thinking ahead. “When we issue a loan, we’re starting a 30-year relationship with our customers. And they’re likely to want other things from us, too, right? It’s not just about houses,” he says. Soon, Rupena says, Milo intends to expand to car loans and credit cards, too.

Really, though, Bitcoin 2022 was one giant, city-sprawling party. The panels and talks were at the Miami Beach Convention Center, blocks from the beach and amid the area’s thriving, miles-long bar scene. Not that anyone needed to leave the site to get a drink. The center featured more than a dozen bars, each with wine, beer, gin, vodka and 12-year-old scotch. Service started as soon as the conference opened around 10. One morning, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez hosted an unveiling of a bull statue resembling a Transformers robot (cost: more than $250,000). The figure was meant both as a maximalist homage to New York City’s bull statue and to poke its horns into the sides of Wall Street traditionalists who remain crypto skeptical.

Of course, there was the day-long Sound Money Fest, too. “I chose to do this because I believe in crypto, and I was honored that they would think of me,” Logic says. The rapper has invested several million in bitcoin and ether, the second most valuable cryptocurrency, and a handful of blockchain startups. He and the other dozen or so performers all received at least partial payment in crypto. Logic considered taking his check fully in virtual currency—before deciding against it. “We’re not in a totally cashless world yet,” he says.

Various startups hosted nightly parties after the conference concluded. To keep up and hopefully get in, attendees circulated Google Spreadsheets tracking the various fetes.

One of the most coveted invites was a Thursday evening soiree at the Versace mansion thrown by Paxos, a New York City-based crypto brokerage. The event must’ve cost upwards of $100,000. It had several open bars, hors devours trays, a three-tiered table with lobster tails, crab legs and shrimp, a large paella vat, towers of macarons, three large coffee urns next to bottles of schnapps and a station featuring nine varieties of Cohiba cigars.

Mid-way through the occasion, four young women in gold-sequin bathing suits climbed into the manse’s elaborately tiled pool—presumably the same one Gianni Versace swam in shortly before his 1997 murder—and performed a series of aquatic dance routines, attracting a steadily growing (and almost entirely male) audience on poolside couches.

“How warm do you think the water is?” one man said to another.

“Yeah—do you think they’re cold?” the other replied, never looking away from the performance.

Despite the week’s apparent expansiveness, Bitcoin 2022 left several important realities unresolved. It paid scant attention to reckoning with the problems within the crypto industry, which remains an unregulated financial frontier populated by companies loath to self-police. Another matter: Bitcoin may be the original cryptocurrency with a $1 trillion market value today, but it is far from the only crypto any longer—and far from the only successful example of a blockchain-based project. Nevertheless, its official programming focused exclusively on bitcoin. It largely ignored the recent boom in projects based on the Ethereum blockchain and NFTs, the digital collectibles that shot to prominence last year and formed a nearly $18 billion market last year.

For all its success, the conference could risk becoming outdated almost as quickly as it became a must-attend thing if it doesn’t recognize attendees likely won’t mind hearing about more than bitcoin from the stage.

Compounding this is an increasing fatigue among the crypto set, who find themselves sorting through a burgeoning number of events. This included last February’s developer-focused ETHDenver and NFT-based conferences in Los Angeles (last month), Miami (days before Bitcoin 2022) and New York (June a few months from now).

“So many events are popping up, and people are getting tired of them,” says CryptoWhale, a pseudonymous investor (and popular Twitter presence) who went to Bitcoin 2022. “People naturally are just not going to want to show up.”

The bitcoin focus did not at all bother the several hundred people who attended another sub-event in Miami last week, Thank God for Bitcoin. That conference lasted a day at a downtown theater, commencing with hymns and Christian ballads led by an acoustic guitarist.

It was assembled by Jordan Bush, a 34-year-old missionary who runs a small Protestant church in Montevideo, Uruguay. He and the other speakers offered only what seemed like the barest connection between God and bitcoin. (Bush says attendees didn’t expect him to offer an extensive one and innately understood it.) Mostly, Thank God for Bitcoin seemed to act as an excuse for devout, crypto-happy investors to network with each other. But one financial point Bush and the others did clearly define: Thou shall not covet a meme coin. Or buy other non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies.

Many such tokens, Bush says, are created with not very Christian-like intentions.“They’re speculative assets,” he says. “Pump and dumps.”