I have been to two other Bitcoin conferences in the past. In 2024, I attended Bitcoin++ in Austin because @niftynei graciously asked if I wanted to sell my posters there, and I went to Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas to meet up with someone I was working with.

They were wildly different experiences. Bitcoin++ was wonderful: first time I met @ek, I got to hang out with @plebpoet and a few other stackers, and my kids came along. Bitcoin 2025 was unpleasant: really huge, felt like a casino (perhaps because it was located in one), hard to meet people.

Never having been to Tabconf before, I was very pleasantly surprised! The conference took place in a small exhibition hall. There was one large room with lots of tables where people could hang out, and then two rooms for talks.

Tabvonf7 had a very chill vibe. The main room with the tables usually had a good number of people milling about -- so much so that I was only reminded about the various talks next door by the applause when they ended. It never felt lonely. It certainly didn't feel like people were there trying to sell anything.

The Bitcoiners I met impressed me with their curiosity, friendliness, and thoughtfulness. I learned a lot about Bitcoin and met people who were interested in doing the same. There wasn't really any discussion of Michael Saylor, the ETFs, or even the Knots v Core thing...or most of the other things that seem such a big part of Bitcoin discourse on X and reddit. Turns out the Bitcoiners in real life are concerned with learning about Bitcoin and trying to use it.

@BlokchainB's idea to have a place for Stackers to meet up in real life (#1220292) was brilliant.

It may seem obvious, but before this last week, I would have said meeting up in real life isn't that important: I like meetups, but I have always assumed conferences were a kind of frivolous extra.

But hanging out with stackers at Tabconf was one of the highlights of this whole year. A stacker's presence on SN is like a little window into who they are, but meeting a stacker in person is like walking up to their house and seeing where the window fits in the whole abode.

Bitcoin already selects for a unique group of people. Lightning users are a subset, and perhaps a concentrated version of this and stackers are subset of that -- while this does mean there isn't stackers aren't a huge group of people, it also means if you are a stacker you are pretty likely to have A LOT in common with any other stacker. It makes it easy to start a friendship.

I am very thankful to @BlokchainB, @k00b, and all the stackers who showed up! Stackers are very cool people and I'm grateful to be able to count a number of them as my friends. I'm also pretty impressed with @tidwell -- that's one heck of a great conference you put on! Definitely plan on coming back next year.

I'd say 60% of the people had heard of Stacker News, but most of those had either stopped using their account or never created one in the first place. It's also possible there's a little bias in this because nobody likes to say "I've never heard of this thing."

In my efforts to onboard new users, I ran in to a new dynamic that I hadn't previously considered: there were a number of very serious and knowledgeable bitcoiners who were not lightning users. They don't have a problem with lightning, but just hadn't had an occasion to set up a node or use a lightning wallet.

In talking through the easiest way for them to onboard to SN, I often ended up proposing custodial solutions like CoinOS or ecash wallets like Minibits. It was pointed out to me on several occasions that this wasn't good.

Of course, I could have suggested they set up a node and open channels, but this is not the sort of thing one does in five minutes while chatting with each other. I suspect that some very interesting Bitcoiners who would enjoy SN are still being kept away by the setup cost of lightning (or by the icky feeling they get from custody). I don't think this is a problem SN needs to solve, it is inherent to lightning -- but it is a real obstacle to a number of people who would have otherwise been ideal stackers.

I have been completely convinced by @DarthCoin that pay to post is the major innovation of SN. But despite my commitment to the idea, I found it usually came second or third in my pitch to the people who came by our table.

Most often my pitch was something like: "It's a forum like reddit or hacker news but everything is done with sats -- you pay to post, you pay to like, you earn sats when people like what you write."

Sometimes I would say things like "It is one of the places on the internet where you are most likely to be zapped."

In most cases I felt like my pitch wasn't very compelling. I'm not sure if I was failing to articulate the problem SN solves or if I was getting bogged down too much in the details ("No mods...well, actually there are mods, but only on some territories...territories are like sub-reddits or topic-based little mini forums" or "you have to use lightning to use SN, unless you don't want to earn sats -- then you can just get cowboy credits, which are like points that you can buy with sats, but you can't withdraw them, but mostly people use sats and that's why you need to connect a wallet -- you can connect lots of different lightning wallets, but not Phoenix, well you can connect Phoenixd..."). I really need to refine my pitch.