When we imagine a networking event for a professional conference, Miami's most famous and exciting striptease club is probably not the one that comes to mind.

Yet, that's exactly where the North American Bitcoin Conference decided to host it. "Join us at E11even for a little networking and R & R or dancing," the description read.

There was a lot of dancing.

Not the crypto of your friend nerd

During the year 2017, cryptocurrency has experienced an unprecedented explosion.

After years of quiet languor below $ 1,000, the price of a bitcoin began to rise rapidly and public attention increased. But it was not alone. At the same time, the bitcoin dominance index, the size of the market capitalization of bitcoin compared to all other cryptocurrency, has declined.

The cause? Other established crypto-currencies like Ethereum and Litecoin were making their own explosive gains, while dozens of entirely new chips and tokens were being created en masse with shocking overnight evaluations.

An influx of new investors wanted to participate in this rush to digital gold, buying these new initial offerings or "ICO" as quickly as they could be created. Suddenly everyone was doing great. Investors and self-proclaimed blockchain traders popped up overnight.

Crypto-currency was no longer the domain of cypherpunks, anarchists and radical libertarians. In fact, these first groups have almost all disappeared from the spotlight in favor of this newer crypt culture, brighter and richer in wealth.

Fortunes have been made after all, and overnight success stories are far better than those of the current and arcane technical debates on the actual cases of use, limitations and challenges of technology blockchain.

Gently balance the flow and decentralization of the network? It's annoying. Make scandalous money quickly, and show it with Lamborghinis ("Lambos" for short) and extravagant strip club parties? Now it's exciting.

As projectors developed, the influx of buyers grew, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of irrational exuberance and the ultimate race of bulls. The problem? Nobody had a real idea of ​​what they were buying exactly.

Blockchain was simply the newest and coolest buzzword. The biggest takeaway seemed to be that everything he was attached to could make you rich, even if it was iced tea.

F.O.M.O.

But there was a problematic fact: in cryptocurrency, you are much more likely to buy an effective scam than "the next bitcoin".

Anyone can create and market a generic token based on a chain of blocks with little or no added unique functionality. The barrier to entry for the creation of a new coin is almost non-existent, and new investors suffering from FOMO (fear of missing) do not have the expertise to approve them .

By leaning on pseudo-scientific buzzwords and exploiting these new low-information investors, projects whose fundamentals and scams are totally wrong can quickly reach dizzying heights.

A notable example is that of tron, which at its peak had a higher valuation than Twitter, placing it in the top 10 cryptocurrency market capitalization. What is tron? A standard Etherum token with no special feature and a white paper with more questions than answers. Not only is there no infrastructure deployed or technology uniquely developed behind tron, but the white paper, in the end, was at best unoriginal, or totally plagiarized at worst.

Even more alarming than a mere lack of education or due diligence, however, is the fact that perhaps many new cryptocurrency investors do not really care.

Take Ponzicoin, the self-proclaimed scam launched at the joke as a ponzi plan outright. He has raised more than $ 25,000 on the ethereal platform in eight hours, before his developer gets the better of him, given the irreversible nature of blockchain smart deals. The same similar open-ended Ponzi scheme sold for $ 1 million worth of coins in three days before being hacked later, perfectly encapsulating all that sour around ethereal smart contracts.

These events show us that many new crypto investors seem perfectly happy to invest in fraud and spraying, as long as they think that they will not be the ones who will get the bag.

Because in the end, who cares? Fortunes were being made, which attracted even more money to keep the party going. It is therefore not surprising that the North American Bitcoin Conference has introduced so many ICOs and new pieces that this could easily be considered a "bitcoin conference" for marketing purposes only.

It turns out that Miami was the perfect outlet for this newer, more flashy and carefree crypto.

The signal in the noise

While the spirit of hackers and hackers of bitcoin and cryptocurrency received less attention at the end of last year, this is not because that he's gone.

This is actually this group that has turned out to be the most consistent aspect of crypto-currency communities in general and Bitcoin in particular. Regardless of media attention or short-term market performance, their mantra remains the same: cypherpunks write code.

Douglas Oscar and Drew Carey are the founders of Bitstop, a Bitcoin ATM provider based in South Florida. The same week as the North American Bitcoin Conference, they held their annual Miami Bitcoin Hackathon.

Their motivation?

"All the change and progress will come from the developers, not the Lambos and the marketing fluff … Everything that happens at the conference is only possible thanks to the work that people do here" says Douglas .

You probably will not find a "Lambo" at the hackathon, and for the Douglas it's a good thing.

But beyond the presence of Lambos, there were other differences noted by participants in both events.

Software developer and co-founder of the Bushido Labs development shop Sam Abassi commented on his impression of the different ICOs and projects exhibited at the North American Bitcoin conference:

"There is a lot of nonsense, too much hype and nobody is deliberating whether or not what they do makes sense: over the next six months, many of these companies will fail they realize that they can not deliver … I felt like the most intelligent person at the conference, I was here the most stupid. "

Participants' contempt for wild speculation in the wider cryptocurrency ecosystem was clearly reflected in Hackathon's second-place winner: an app called Pump and Dump.

Using the Binance API, Pump and Dump allows you to choose to diversify into a large basket of alternative cryptocurrencies, or rebuild it into bitcoin with a simple interface that cuts off all the rhetoric.

Team member Nathan Milian simply explained: "You press a" Pump "button if you just want to buy a bunch of shitcoins, and" dump "to resell everything for bitcoin. "

Losing ground

So, if participants were in agreement on the pervasive nature of distractions in space, were they in agreement on areas where research and development efforts were best concentrated ? Not quite.

For their part, Abassi and Bushido Labs are embarking for the first time in the development of cryptocurrencies with Kim-Jung Coin, a token based on the Ethereum in the vein of the popular CryptoKitties game.

"Bitcoin is the OG, but Ethereum is just very user-friendly for the developers, we just jumped in and started looking at those other contracts out there and were able to start writing ours," he said. he said.

Unlike the North American Bitcoin Conference, however, the rules of Bitcoin Hackathon strictly limit participation in projects related to Bitcoin. "All you can do on ethereum, you can do it with bitcoin," says Drew Carey, co-founder of Bitstop.

Indeed, several developers have taken it literally, with several teams experimenting with the ethereum virtual machine, the component that compiles smart contracts, in addition to bitcoin using the Rootstock and Counterparty platforms. These technologies allow developers to write intelligent contract features with the help of Solidity, while leveraging the network and enhanced bitcoin security.

Others, like SetOcean developer Bernie Garcia, have decided to jump into the water in the still emerging two layer technology, the Lightning Network.

"I could not go very far because I had configuration problems … I had problems with the documentation of the package but the LND documentation (Lightning Network Daemon) is really good, "he explains. ]

"It's obviously still very early, there are still a lot of tweaks to do manually, but it looks good and I'm looking forward to going deeper, the next step will be to familiar with the software on testnet and create a small network of payment channels with colleagues and family, "he said.

A general consensus

There was one thing on which the Hackathon participants agreed in addition to their anger for the speculative frenzy represented by the nearby conference, that is the need for A solid education to fix it.

"Speculation kills education," said Jesus Najera of SetOcean, a sentiment shared by the Bushido Abassi. "If we were spoiling a bottleneck, there is all this interest, but there are simply not enough people who are doing the development," he said. "Education is the key".

It is therefore no wonder that the first prize of the Hackathon was awarded to Evan Martinez and his online learning portal, the Bitcoin Institute of Technology.

Created from scratch, the homepage encourages learning courses for categories of daily use, finance and development. Due to the limited time of the Hackathon, Martinez chose to focus on the development category, an area of ​​explosive demand in the space. It included a code editor in the browser where students could write code to pass tests that are essential to learning how the blockchain works at the software level.

Speaking of the cryptocurrency ecosystem at large and explaining why he chose to focus his efforts on Bitcoin, Evan explained:

"Bitcoin, I think, is the purest piece in terms of technology, it harmonises perfectly with my ideals of open source programmer, it's simple and decentralized, it makes a and it's really good … I want to help people learn and understand that. "

While the opinions of developers in space differ with respect to the future, there is a consensus on one thing. Ignore the prices and do not succumb to the fear of missing out.

"It's still incredibly early," Douglas says. "People just need to take the time to stop and really learn."

Image of the car with the kind permission of Chris Tsiolis / Twitter

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