The annual Bilderberg meetings, which since 1954 bring together the European and North American political elite, members of the royalty, leading financial entrepreneurs, senior members of the academia and the who-is-who in media, has never stopped spurring controversy.

The primary reason that is the case is their secretive nature. While the media is always well represented at these meetings by its management, no media coverage is allowed. Therefore, whatever happens, or is discussed there remains only known to those who are privileged enough to receive the invitation to attend.

To add salt to injury, the attendees are also not allowed to discuss the going-ons at the meeting in other forums. As a matter of fact, they hardly confirm their presence at the meeting, let alone disclosing the agenda.

The meetings have given conspiracy theories a lot of fodder. The mere search of the word Bilderberg on the internet yields tons of ideas as to what is supposedly discussed when about 150 of the world’s most influential men and women meet.

The ideas range from it being a mere talk shop for the richest and most powerful, to very outlandish ones like the political elite, the corporate and financial institutions are using this forum to plan on how to depopulate the world and enslave humanity.

Satoshi Nakamoto does not support

Whatever the case, this sounds like the kind of meeting that Satoshi Nakamoto scoffs at. It not only seems to be a closed centralized power, but it is also a non-representative organization that determines the lives of the rest of the world’s population.

It is quite the opposite of the open and decentralized nature of the blockchain technology.

It is, therefore, interesting when leading CEOs, developers and miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem go to a meeting that ticks almost every box of the Bilderberg template.

The Satoshi Roundtable meeting that Bruce Fenton, the chief executive officer of Bitcoin Foundation, hosted over the weekend of Feb 26-28 2016 was invite-only, was held in a secret location, those in attendance are barred from attaching comments and ideas discussed to names and faces when talking about it to the rest of us.

“All of that discussion happened under the ‘Chatham House Rule’”, Gavin Andresen, one of the first adopters of Bitcoin and core developer, explained in a follow-up article, “‘…participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.’”

Where is the line?

Apparently, no media coverage was allowed too. Joshua Unseth has written a blog post on how he and his colleague Chris DeRose were asked to leave the event because they had not been invited and, most importantly, because they wanted to film and interview a few of those in the attendance.

“Bruce Fenton and his wife came to the table. Bruce was shaking,” Joshua Unseth has written in his article, “He said timidly to Chris, ‘sir, this is a private event.’……..he threatened to go and get security, to have us kicked off the grounds. ……. we acquiesced and retreated to one of the non-roundtable rooms.”

Brian Armstrong, CEO and Co-founder of Coinbase, has indicated that nothing much was achieved at the meeting, though. “I think the organizers of the conference were hoping for some sort of consensus,” he has stated in a blog post, “however it became clear by the end that the divide was too great.”

Stephen Pair, the CEO and co-founder of Bitpay, has described the whole exercise as “a very productive waste of time.”

Nevertheless, the community is divided on the issue of a secretive invite-only Bitcoin meeting. There are those who think a closed session for developers, entrepreneurs and miners was a good initiative by Fenton.

For those of this school of thought, the meeting could help cultivate consensus amongst those who hold the most power within the technology, especially at the time when the community is really struggling to agree on how to scale the block size and thus open up the technology for more adoption, away from the crowd.

However, voices agreeing with Joshua Unseth that ‘Bitcoin should be open to participation by everyone,’-ironically, a line attributed to Bruce Fenton-are also very loud.

I would like to hear what your take on this is.