This post is a summary of my notes from Bitcoin conference in Miami, just in case it’s helpful for others.

Scaling Bitcoin

I used to think that Lightning was enough but the overflowing mempool and high adoption of custodial Lightning wallets is convincing me that it won’t be enough, at least not in its current state. There was a lot of discussions about how to scale the network further:

  • Ark seems like a very interesting idea that could solve the inbound liquidy problem and would be huge improvement for privacy. Here is a good discussion that helped me understand it better.
  • TAP and RGB seems primarily focused on stable coins, but could also take some of the jpegs off of the main chain.
  • ZeroSync is proposing to take even more data off of the main chain, basically use the main chain only for ordering blocks and moving most of the validation to the full nodes. I don’t understand this enough to have an opinion, but will keep an eye on it.
  • FediMint seems similar to Ark in some way, but there is something to play with already, so much closer to production.

Other interesting projects

  • Bitcoin Library: A browser extension to annotate websites, especially focusing on education content. Then Nostr-powered front-end for navigating these websites using the annotated metadata. It’s like turning the entire web into a wikipedia.
  • CelebrityEscrow: another cool project from supertestnet. I see the need for escrow, for instance when buying stuff online, and this is approach is definitely hard to censor.
  • Habla.news: Nostr-powered news.
  • Yakihonne: Nostr-powered blog.
  • LNVPN: pay as you go for VPN using Lightning
  • LNSMS: pay for SMS confirmation codes
  • Zapddit: Nostr-powered Reddit. Instead of following specific users and browsing their posts by timeline, you follow specific topics/tags. I see big opportunity in different ways to browse Nostr content, so this is interesting.
  • Confstr: an app for conferences, but of course build on Nostr. I like that there is a specific customer to test it (Nostrasia).
  • Yakihonne censorship-resistant content

Nostr momentum

A lot of the discussions in front of the open source stage were centered around nostr. The nostr panel was by far the most popular session: people were standing on the sides, and some people couldn’t even get in. The 3D-printed NFC badges for quickly scanning your nostr pub key were big hit. The nostr hackathon side event had great attendance and cool projects, and the nostr meetup on the beach was the best – every night. It’s really incredible how many people are building in this space, and thanks to the open protocol, it’s all building on top of each other, growing the same network. Just like tech companies are worried about getting disrupted by large language models, Bitcoin companies are worried about not getting on nostr fast enough.

Less shitcoints

Compared to last year, there was significantly less shitcoin projects and companies. Either the organizers tried to focus more on Bitcoin this year, or maybe people realized they can put jpegs into Bitcoin chain too and switched. I’m not sure.

More politicians

There were some politicians last year as well, but my impression was that there was more of it this year. I’m not gonna put much hope in any specific politicians, but I think it is a positive sign of Bitcoin gaining more traction in the mainstream, when presidential candidates think it’s worth investment to spend their time to go to Bitcoin conference and research what to say to not look stupid.