Tootfinder

A panel on bitcoin treasury companies.
Because investment law makes it hard for institutions to buy bitcoin in their funds. You can't own BTC in you tax free ISA. So some companies that do hold bitcoin, notably microstrategy, became proxy investments. If you can't hold BTC you could maybe own a company that owns BTC instead.
Microstrategy started because it's ceo realized it's dollar treasury was being debased by dollar printing. So tried buying BTC instead, with fantastic success.
Copycat companies proliferated. They boomed and then busted. One panelist calls that a grift. A way to memeticly pump share price.
A line can be drawn between profitable companies just storing their profit in bitcoin Vs those raising debt to buy without having a profitable business.
Imagine a world transiting from using seashells for money to using gold coins. A company gathers seashells from investors to buy gold coins, which will do better than sea shells. Trouble is the next step where the company pays back it's investors with... More seashells.
If you own shares in the company, you do not own bitcoin. You'll just get more old fashioned bank money.
Still. It's worked as marketing, more people being convinced BTC has value.
If you do buy a treasury company, check it's bitcoin not "digital assets" including shitcoins.
#bitfest #bitcoin #bitcoinTreasuryCompanies

The conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.
Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.
Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.
I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.
There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.
Can it work?
I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.
I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.
Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.
And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system.
I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it.
#bitfest #bitcoin

Kitchen Mishap takes us through some bitcoin visualisations.
Max keiser promoted KM to buy, and he learned from antonopolis book. So he started trying to graph it since software for money is scary if there's bugs you can lose lots of other people's money.
He spirals blocks around the years, rendering views of the whole chain.
#bitfest #bitcoin #dataVis