Attending the Bitcoin Nashville conference last week hosted by BTC Inc. was an exercise in sensory-overload management: Try to stay in the moment, follow the thread, and hopefully don’t lose your mind or your wits.
A couple of us CoinDesk journalists were lucky enough to attend in person, and rather than write some hackneyed conference-wrap article that nobody would read, we thought we’d spare you the windy prose and just give you a glimpse of our journey.
While trying to take it all in, we had to simultaneously plan our strategy for how exactly we were going to cover former President Donald Trump’s keynote scheduled for Saturday, the last day of the conference. The security around this particular speech was unrivaled in the history of Bitcoin and crypto conferences; it wasn’t totally clear how or if we would be able to take laptops or good camera equipment inside, or if we would have the wireless connectivity to send headlines and file stories.
The conference didn’t start till Thursday, but the side events and parties were already in full swing on Wednesday. We went to the BIT GALA at the Nashville Parthenon, a 127-year-old replica of the ancient Greek temple. The carpet leading to the entrance was orange – the color of bitcoin – and the interior of the classical architecture was swathed in orange light, casting a glow on the 42-foot-tall (12.8-meter) meticulously reconstructed statue of the goddess Athena.
Just to be fair to the hosts of this party, the following image was taken before it really got going, but here’s what the inside looked like. Later in the evening we had a 97-percent-confirmed sighting of Heather Morgan aka the rapper “Razzlekhan,” who pleaded guilty along with her husband in July 2023 to charges connected to the $3.5 billion Bitfinex hack. (On Sunday, Jameson Lopp, a contributor to open-source Bitcoin projects who now serves as CTO of Casa, tweeted that he also crossed paths with her in Nashville, and separately we heard from a source that she was describing herself as a “Web3 advisor.”)
We don’t shy away from the clichéd people-taking-photos-in-front-of-conference-sign image that’s so de riguer at these events:
Below is a view of the main Nakamoto Stage, where many of the biggest names spoke. Later in the week, this is the specific room that the U.S. Secret Service would lock down with its own separate security check, in advance of the scheduled appearances on Friday of the independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Trump on Saturday.
We headed over to the Bitcoin Builders conference, sponsored by the Bitcoin smart-contracts layer project Stacks, held on the upper floors of an enormous bar called Acme Feed & Seed. They had an omelette station and offered hummus-and-vegetable cups. We chatted briefly with David Tse, the Stanford University engineering professor who co-founded Babylon, a Bitcoin staking protocol, and afterward I moderated a panel on Bitcoin DeFi, featuring projects working on stablecoins, swaps and staking.
We headed back to the main conference venue and took a spin through the expo hall. There were all sorts of solutions being offered.
Bitcoin artists displayed their works bazaar-style, and as part of a gallery.
We just randomly walked past this seminar being taught by Bitcoin Lightning protocol engineer Lisa Neigut, who is also co-founder of the Bitcoin++ developer conference. We had no idea what was going on at the time, and had to scurry away for another appointment, but Neigut explained afterward in a Telegram message that this was an instructional game she invented called “Bitcoin LARP.”
Here are two completely different ways of pulling off a pink suit:
This guy went Dogecoin on the bottom, Bitcoin on the top:
We had a one-on-one with RootstockLabs co-founder Adrián Eidelman. The team, working with Fairgate, had just announced that they succeeded in the technological breakthrough of interactively verifying a SNARK proof – a powerful type of cryptography in many blockchain systems – on the main Bitcoin network.
We bumped into Marathon Digital Holdings CEO Fred Thiel and spoke with him briefly about the challenges of funding open-source Bitcoin developers.
The Tron blockchain held a side party at a movie-studio-turned-venue called Vu Nashville, with a country music singer providing the entertainment against a wraparound electronic screen depicting what looked like a red-hued scene from Blade Runner. Incidentally we were told by the bartender there that the prior night’s closing party of the Ordinals-focused Inscribing Nashville side event, held at the same venue, was so packed that they ran through their entire supply of about 4,000 cups.
The panel below was probably the most technologically fascinating we witnessed all week at the main conference – on the developer Robin Linus’s last-mile efforts to refine his breakthrough BitVM design for practical application, alongside OP_CTV creator Jeremy Rubin, Alpen Labs’ Liam Eagan and L2 Iterative research partner Weikeng Chen.
On the sidelines of the Open Source Stage, Blockstream Director of Research Andrew Poelstra, who probably understands the inner workings of Bitcoin programming as well as anyone, chatted freely with attendees about technical questions:
We bumped into Ordinals and Runes creator Casey Rodarmor and his Hell Money podcast co-host, Inscribing Atlantis CEO Erin Redwing, taking in an exhibit just minutes before their scheduled panel discussion.
Ark Investment Management CEO Cathie Wood entered through a side entrance to the Music City Center, the main conference venue.
It’s very much not-Bitcoin, but this camouflage baseball cap from Polymarket – a prediction market built atop the Polygon blockchain, which has suddenly become the go-to venue for betting on U.S. elections-related scenarios – was the most in-the-moment swag item we spotted at the conference.
The architectural visuals of the Music City Center were stunning when viewed from a mezzanine balcony one had to pass by on the way to the invitation-only Galaxy Digital happy hour.
All week long my CoinDesk colleague Danny Nelson and I had been scheming out the best way of covering Trump’s speech, sussing out all the angles. We had learned there would be a special-access area reserved for the press, but it was way in the back of the room. Danny calculated that our best chances for covering the event would be to just get in the line with everybody else and try to find the best seat we could in the general seating area. We continually reassessed our options throughout the day.
The venue doors didn’t open until 8 a.m., but I snagged us a spot in line around 7:20 a.m. Within about 20 minutes after that it was snaking all the way around the block.
Once past the inner security checkpoint for the Nakamoto Stage, there was no easily obtainable water or food, and you had the option of leaving, but anyone who left the room would have to get on the end of the line, and that line wasn’t moving at all, since the room was already filled to capacity, and they weren’t really letting anyone else in.
So along with everyone else who had come this far, we were committed to sitting in our seats for the next six hours or so waiting for Trump to come on. Danny managed to get his laptop in, along with a decent camera.
There was plenty of programming to take in, including a panel with pro-Bitcoin Republican political candidates. Democratic Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina provided what was billed as the “progressive vision for Bitcoin” but got booed heavily when he went out of his way to point out that Trump had tweeted back in 2019 that Bitcoin “seems like a scam.”
A brief moment of entertainment came when MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, credited with the idea of corporates putting bitcoin on their balance sheets, walked through the general seating area and was quickly surrounded by selfie-takers.
Here was the gaggle of video cameras and photographers waiting for Trump to come on, an indication of the mainstream news interest.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of the crypto exchange Gemini were spotted walking near the roped-off VIP section in the front. There were rumors that Elon Musk might be coming to make a special guest apperance, and people in the crowd handed around social-media posts appearing to track his private jet on its way toward Nashville. (Some confusion ensued when Musk never showed, and it wasn’t really ever explained who this special guest was.)
Conference officials beamed in an interview with the retired U.S. congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul – known for his mantra, “End the Fed” – from a pop-up news studio set up elsewhere in the Music City Center.
When Trump finally came on, he initially stood there without speaking while the entire song “God Bless the U.S.A.,” by Lee Greenwood, also known as “Proud to Be an American,” played. There was a standing ovation for the duration of the tune.
We wrote about Trump’s speech here.
The camera angle from where we were sitting wasn’t great; Trump’s teleprompter blocked the view. But it still turned out to be a decent call to sit with the regular people – if not for the camera angle, then to get a true feel for the vibes in the crowd. Which one might describe as boffo.
Below is the view from a smartphone camera lens, taken from the seats you got if you didn’t get in line until 7:20 a.m.
