looking at ticket prices of upcoming conferences this year I got a little bit frustrated:
Bitcoin in the Beltway Washington: €294
Inside Bitcoins Hong Kong: €294
WIRED Money London: €1248
Bitcoin Finance 2014 Dublin: €599
Inside Bitcoins Conference & Expo Melbourne: €276
CoinSummit London: €677
Annual North American Bitcoin Conference Chicago: €202
Coin Congress San Francisco: €331
Cryptocon Sydney: €913
Cryptocon Singapore: €883
Inside Bitcoins Tel Aviv: €368
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies St. Petersburg: €37 (or donation)
Cryptolina Bitcoin Conference Raleigh: €202
Camp Bitcoin Black Rock City: ? (probably donation)
World Bitcoin Forum Bonn: €300
Bitcoinference Summer 2014 Amsterdam: ?
Bitcoin Central & Eastern European Conference Ljubljana: €300
Inside Bitcoins London: €495
Bitcoin Conference Kiev: €75
Bitcoin World at Money2020 Las Vegas: €2171 (yeah, baby!)
Dubai Bitcoin Conference: ?
With the notable exception of the St. Petersberg conference and the Burning Man camp the events are obviously not targeted at free software developers or mainstream users. So I propose to organise an event that is accessible to a broader audience, similar to the open source conference FOSDEM (https://fosdem.org/):
- Free entrance / donation
- Location at non-profit or academic venue
- Possibility to volunteer
- Free booths for free/libre open source projects
- Lightning talks
- Hackathon/dev rooms
- Workshops for beginners
- Possibility to trade/withdraw/spend cryptocurrency
- Family-friendly
- Colourful start-up fair
- Friendly security staff (if any)
Let's make cryptocurrency conferences less about suits, but more about community and fun (hello shibes)! Ideas, comments, pointers to similar proposals welcome.
Cheers, Meinhard.
Edit: Added Coin Congress