I parked myself for the most part at the Open Source stage. It was lovely, I got to hear from a wide variety of people with thoughts and perspectives somewhat new to me on topics that I am familiar with. The notes I share here will first state what I heard and follow up with my interpretation of what it means and further questions. I can be pretty open-minded, but it does take work to be so generous to each presenter, so I do find that I will slip into inhabiting a scornful position that I have not earned. That might be fun for you to read, so I include such commentary.

I sat down in the middle of this one and didn’t catch the proper title. In the report, the presenters pointed out key differences in sponsored funding. The headline was that funding is centralized. It’s source? Jack Dorsey. They explained “this is not to say that Jack has influence” but instead to highlight the need for diversification, for other rich people to step in and fund open source development.

I’m a big Dorsey fan. No notes on that point really. I think he could exercise influence in a nasty way if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. I wouldn’t know much in the domain of funding and it’s state of transparency or vulnerability. It’s always good to have a report, right? So look into the reports at 1a1z.com, that’s all I’ve got on that.

Opening statement: Bitcoin needs economic diversity to resist coption We find ourselves at a point in time where nations are moving to hold bitcoin reserves. It is therefore necessary to remain steadfast as a nation of individual users to combat any influence the great poweful state may exercise over the network. This is why the goal is bitcoin to a billion users. There are limits to growth, computational limits of bandwidth, compute, storage There are two things at odds: As an individual I should be able to validate the data, yet I can’t possibly validate everything within my limits as an individual.

One solution, the lightning network, optimizes for coordination and liquidity. Neha doubts that lightning is able to scale to a billion users because it’s difficult to fund channels as a brand new user and remain online if your use case is small payments.

Her recommendation is that you read into the proposed solutions if you are certain that bitcoin should scale. Finally, she says, “a soft fork is needed.”

Well, I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t clocked any time running a node, however, I appreciate and often use wallets integrated with lightning to send and receive instant payments, and it is a beautiful thing. My feeling and reaction was that she was bearish on lightning. So I found her afterwards and asked her about it further. I asked, isn’t lightning’s growth comparable to bitcoin’s growth and we can expect a community of contributors to improve the user experience, and therefore we can expect growth gradually? I wanted to poke at the sentiment against lightning. She expressed, of course lightning works and much time has been invested in it, we should not abandon it. That was basically the conversation. I am not sure why I have a reaction against the other proposed solutions. I guess it’s as simple as I want lightning because it works.

Opening statement: we can’t ignore the numbers of people using stablecoins. Lightning network does scale. Tether issues usdt on bitcoin as a taproot asset. Given all this - Joltz is a platform for stablecoins, swaps, and no KYC Joltz aims to prove that these tools can be properly built.

He won me over during his talk. He mentioned with Joltz you can “issue your own stablecoin” and I wonder what that means. He appealed to alignment with bitcoin principles, and I appreciate seeing that. The look of Joltz was, you know, another sleek, modern dashboard.

Consensus from this group of panelists was that the lightning network has matured from hobbyist to enterprise. I don’t have any direct quotes, and a panel discussion doesn’t follow an argumentative structure, so I’ll begin and end with my thoughts and interpretations. This group felt a bit out of touch, I’m sorry, but that’s probably me. They said the use cases for lighting are in gaming and remittances. The moderator asked the room who had used lightning in the last month, then in the last week, and was surprised by how many hands he saw in response (and that’s a bit out of touch, yeah? Like, we’re using it, obvi). They reported that what they are seeing in the health of the network is explained by bigger players entering and smaller players leaving to go play with ecash.

Finally, it was said that lightning is becoming corporate and this is a good thing. I cannot deny the truth of that statement, but I can affirm my distaste for the idea of corporatizing it. While at the same time, I gotta recognize that I use it through a corporate entity… so…. yeah I guess I suck and my commentary is useless, huh?

They shared some love, light and positivity on two things I love: lightning and cashapp. Bitdevs was high vibes. I didn’t take many notes though.

Here’s one graphic Vegas anecdote: Strolling along the Vegas strip where many men and women are stripped to their underclothes or less, I witnessed a casual interaction between a minnie mouse and a street performer. Minnie mouse’s giant costumed head lifted off the support of her body and was held there by the man inside it, his face revealed in the hollowed carcass of costume. His companion, the dancer, addressed him as one would do when sharing a working shift, saying something banal probably, I couldn’t hear. But as I passed, the dancer ceased communicating with words and instead pulled down her top and flashed headless man-face minnie mouse. Then in the same instant, she readjusted and was back to work. And I don’t know, I think that meant they were great friends and that’s beautiful.