First of all, what was Money2020 (http://money2020.com/)? It was a conference for all sort of things related to money - payment processors, prepaid cards, online payments, POS, payment hardware and software, as well as things like identity verification, compliance, investors, Bitcoin and Ripple. The conference consisted of a lot of keynote speakers and discussions, as well as about 2.5 days of exhibit hall running for various booth. There were over 4000 people registered for the event, among them some big players like PayPal, eBay, Amazon and so forth. If you want to know more, go to their website.
As for panels, there were 2 Bitcoin-focused panels, "Bitcoin 101" and "Bitcoin & Beyond: Math-Based & Virtual Currencies". First was a general talk about Bitcoin and its future, not much new there asides Roger from Blockchain being as usual a strong proponent of Bitcoin, and Tony from BitPay asking the audience how many of them know of or have bitcoins - the answer was a big majority of the participants (I think the panel had well over 200 guests there, I'm bad at estimating really). So overall, Bitcoin was really hip during the conference.
The second panel featured 2 people from the Bitcoin community, as well as a representant of Canadian Mint - the guys behind the MintChip challenge from 2012. Since I was very interested in MintChip, I was listening very closely to what the person had to say - one funny statement was "Canadian Mint is a for-profit organization, we make money literally and figuratively"
(meaning that Canadian Mint not only prints the currency, but also mints precious metal collectible coins and sells them at a profit). However, a very important point that the speaker mentioned, that the Mint would be holding 1-to-1 the currency to back any dollar on MintChips. I knew that that was a big thing, so I did ask about it during the Q&A portion of the panel.I had 3 question for the person from Canadian Mint. 1 - "when will we see some new development for MintChip?", he answered that the Mint will be testing it internally for its employees next month, and in 2014 will launch it to the public with partners. 2 - "What is the algorithm behind MintChip, is it like Bitcoin, Ripple, or Open Transactions?", the response was that that information is above his pay grade. Generally the algorithm in MintChip was developed by some professor as far as I remember and it is a secret. No new information there then. 3 - "If the Mint will be holding the currency to back the MintChip deposit in a 1-to-1 ratio, does that mean the banks will not be able to do fractional reserve banking with MintChip?" - surprising to me, the answer was yes - the banks would need to deposit the currency to back any MintChip balance, meaning they can't lend out money against that balance. Personally, I think this will be a really big deal once the MintChip launches - if the system will be widely adopted it will bleed the money from the banking system and credit cards into the MintChip. Can't wait to see how this will play out!
So, lets talk about the exhibit hall now. It was fairly large and there were a lot of booth for a number of different companies. When one would enter the hall from probably one of the most popular entrences, there would be the Kraken booth right there an then. On one of the far sides of the hall, right of Kraken, Blockchain and BitPay booth were one next to another. Back to back with BitPay, was Coinbase. Right still of that was a small elevated space with small stands - Ripple Labs had one in there. Around the centre of the hall, CoinX had one of the big booth, about the size of all other 4 Bitcoin booth put together.
Briefly about each booth. I visited them all and talked with the people there for a longer or shorter period of time. Kraken was giving away chocolates (although they ended up having too many - a box or two were still left for Ripple conference), promoting their business and debiuting their Ven integration as far as I remember. They were also signing up members for their Digital Asset Transfer Authority - a self-regulating body for digital currencies I believe. Blockchain was giving away stickers, buttons, t-shirts and Bitcoin Magazines. They were signing up people for their platform and explaining a lot about Bitcoin. BitPay was presenting a Lamassu ATM. Also at their booth was Tuxavant with his BitcoinBriefcase (although he was technically with Blockchain). Every time I came by this guy was explaining Bitcoin to a new group of people with a lot of passion
. This was probably the most crowded Bitcoin-related spot right there. I did play around with the Lamassu a bit, but I think the WiFi there was not very friendly so the machine hanged a few times. Coinbase booth was rather minimalistic, they were generally promoting their platform and that was about it. Ripple stand was also about promoting the platform, as well as their new integration with ZipZap. Finally CoinX where I was manning the booth most of the time along with a big portion of the team. The booth was all about the platform debut - people could go on, see how the system was operating on a test network and learn more about future plans for the exchange. On Tuesday there were a number of interviews shot there with people both from the Bitcoin community and outside of it.What were my impressions from being at the exhibit hall? A lot of people know about Bitcoin, and a lot of big players are interested in it. We had someone from Coinstar talk with us saying that he would like to integrate Bitcoin (and that a ton of people ask about it), but since they are dealing with the Federal Reserve, there is a lot of FUD. Someone from Mastercard came over talking about their plans for their system that starts to resemble Bitcoin more and more (push rather than pull transactions, initiated by customer and so forth). There were also a lot of smaller people interested in Bitcoin - people doing some small prepaid cards, people doing remittance, and a variety of others. Generally, the financial people are looking into Bitcoin and probably we will be able to see more and more adoption soon.
On Wednesday evening the Bitcoin enthusiasts organized a dinner together. Tuxavant was the brain of the operation - ordering a big Party Bus (they take Bitcoin
) for the 10-15 of us, and we went to Cafe Berlin. It was a family restaurant that not only accepts bitcoins, but also saves some of their money in that currency - true believers in our cause. There we met with local Bitcoin enthusiasts and ate some nice German food.Last day was the Ripple Developer Conference - all booths were already closed, there was only one other set of talks taking place at the same time, so it was officially a tail-end of the Money2020 conference. However, there were a number of people that came to Vegas just for this conference. I met a few people from Canada that did that. The conference itself was very interesting, at least in my opinion. I was interested in the Ripple technology for awhile, but haven't really looked into it for a few months. The presentations covered both the high view of how Ripple works, as well as went into some interesting technical details (at least interesting for a programmer
).So that's about it for the conference. My reflections so far are that Bitcoin will be seeing a number of bigger players look into using Bitcoin in the near future. Also, some advice for people that wish to be representing their Bitcoin companies at conferences - it really helps if the Bitcoin booths are close together. A lot of the times during this conference when explaining Bitcoin to people and telling them what would be the best for their business we had to reference them to other companies present at the conference. If we were all closer to one another that would be a lot easier. We could capture the attention of a lot more people than being separate.
I hope you enjoyed my overview of Money2020
.