Bitcoin Might Make 2024 My New Favorite Year
The future isn't evenly distributed. A growing slice is in Nashville.
I’ve been away from writing for two weeks. I didn’t plan it that way, but my day job intervened, and I found myself in Tennessee from January 16-20 for the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit 2024 (NEMS). The event was held at Bitcoin Park (BP), a short walk from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the city’s downtown section.
The two buildings that comprise BP once housed studio space for the defunct country duo, Florida-Georgia Line. There's a cafe, co-working space, and podcast studios. Bitcoin miners, developers and energy pros are coming and going all day long. Tennesseans have taken notice, and want to do what they can to encourage Bitcoiners to move to Nashville instead of Miami, Austin or New York.
It seems to be working.
NEMS is the premier Bitcoin event in the USA thanks to the favorable ratio of signal to noise. I went to Bitcoin 2022 in Miami, and it felt a lot like my trip to Comdex Fall ‘97 in Las Vegas. It was very easy to get lost in the Miami Convention Center. There wasn’t any chance of that happening on BP’s snug campus. All of the big names in Bitcoin were in attendance last week, and you literally couldn’t help but rub elbows with them in between sessions. There were panel discussions for two full days, but the real business got done in the hallways and offices away from the main stage.
As for the details of what happened, the conference was conducted under the Chatham House Rule — all designed so the participants could speak freely — and I was flattered to be asked to participate after only being in the Bitcoin space for a few years. If you know where to look, you can find a number of summaries, but I’d suggest one account by Marty Bent as being a good place to start.
Many find Bitcoin and the community around it to be off putting. Warren Buffet calls Bitcoin "rat poison." In an interview from Davos last week, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon referred to Bitcoin as a "pet rock.” Nassim Taleb calls it a “cult,” but it’s a technology, a commodity, and a social movement all wrapped up in one.
If any of them would visit BP, they might change their minds. On the lawn in front of BP someone erected an inflatable hot tub that was bubbling thanks to the waste heat from a mining rig. With temperatures in the 20s and the town still reeling from a snowstorm early last week, watching folks climb in and out of the tub was a riot.
The conference was full of happy warriors. There was plenty of passion and camaraderie and you couldn’t help but be caught up in it. I headed home on Saturday feeling energized. Sometimes I think this is what it must have felt like in Silicon Valley in the 1970s when “Phreaking” with Captain Crunch whistles gave way to “home brewed computing” and the birth of Apple Computer.
While all of that was coming together in Northern California in the 1970s, it was easy to feel like the world was flying apart. There was rampant inflation, foreign policy debacles and nasty political polarization. I’m sure it sounds familiar. In the middle of all of that tumult, a group of hackers who were only looking to pull off pranks and have some fun wound up changing our world and ushering in a new era of prosperity.
Will we get lucky again? When I consider the question, I think back to one of the great films of the 1980s, My Favorite Year, a thinly veiled fictionalization of the early career of Mel Brooks. In the film, set in 1954, Brooks, called Benjy Stone, is working as a junior comedy writer for Stan “King” Kaiser on Comedy Cavalcade, a Saturday night variety show airing during the golden age of television. At that time, Brooks was actually working as a writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows on NBC.
In his spare time, Brooks was wooing his future wife, Anne Bancroft.
How could 1954 be anything but his favorite year?
As I watched the film later in the decade, I thought about my father’s career. One time, he was at a conference in Hawaii a few weeks before the Super Bowl as Steve Jobs previewed a commercial for Apple’s sales force that changed advertising forever.
Apple had already mainstreamed personal computing with the Apple II, and just a few years later, they would completely transform it with the introduction of the Mac. When it came to my father’s career, how could 1984 not have been his favorite year?
As I was finishing high school, I often wondered whether or not I would experience a favorite year of my own. Less than 10 years later, I got my answer when I landed at MCI and became part of a gaggle of professionals who got to work with the 20th century’s answer to Alexander Graham Bell. What a ride. It was the height of the Internet craze and it was glorious. And that’s why 1996 became my favorite year.
Despite the chaos, we will get “lucky” again. Be of good cheer, the best is yet to come.