Walking into the San Jose Convention Center this weekend, at first you might mistake the crowd for just another programming conference. Almost all-male attendance, mostly wearing open-collared shirts with jeans or khakis, with the occasional Tshirt. But then, you’d catch the wild glimmer in an eye, or a vintage hat, or a head of wild long hair, and you would realize that while this was a technically sophisticated crowd, this was no mere programming conference. The more than 1,000 Bitcoin enthusiasts who converged on San Jose were an impassioned bunch — some fired with the excitement of getting in on something big the ground floor, others lit up by a more ideological passion for freedom from government or from the existing financial system.

They came, they swapped stories of working for bitcoins and sought advice on getting their first round of venture funding. They learned from the first round of Bitcoin entrepreneurs, who in turn expressed amazement at being surrounded by over a thousand peers, when just a couple years ago they’d felt like they were alone in the wilderness.

A few of the most interesting points that came up over the weekend: