The Bitcoin Expo 2014 is set to kick off in Shanghai later this week and the organizers have released the schedule for the upcoming event.

It will kick off with a party on Friday night, September 19th start in earnest on Saturday and finish on Sunday. Saturday and Sunday will feature a full range of speakers and panel participants while Friday will be exactly what it sounds like: a chance to mingle and network with some of the biggest names in Bitcoin.

“It will be the best opportunity for networking, building relations and will also help all attendees to enjoy the whole event more than any other” says main event manager Andrej Sebesta, concluding “it will be a great chance introduce and to get to know the Chinese culture better”. Saturday will start with both conference and expo.The organizers and partners of the Expo have prepared a Bitcoin raffle with many valuable surprises, for example Trezor, a Bitcoin safe made by Hardware wallet sponsor SatoshiLabs.

The confirmed speakers list includes many Bitcoin community members such as Lamar Wilson (Pheeva Bitcoin wallet), and Blake Anderson and many more.

Some of the expo major partners are BUMarket, BitBays, Bitcoinmarketing, BITSTICKERS, Black Arrow, MaCoin BTC ROBOT, Yuanbao, Seoul Bitcoin, ALCHEMINER, Ybex and PRYPTO.

The event

The opening keynote has yet to be announced, but the rest of the days are full with panels and speakers on a great variety of topics.

Panels include: Bitcoin in Asia, Regulation, Investment and Trading. There will also be two workshops: Bitcoin Security and Mining.

Speeches will be headlined by the likes of Sergey Nazarov of NXT, Jacob Henson of Crowdcurity, Rich Teo of itBit, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Bitcoin magazine and Eiger founding partner and Chinese law expert Nathan Kaiser.

In addition to its sponsorship from Cointelegraph, the Bitcoin Expo is also sponsored by dozens of companies and organizations, including the Student Union of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Thirteen exhibitors will be set up during the conference, including, interestingly enough, Shanghai Daily, a local newspaper that doesn't appear to have any direct connection with Bitcoin.

The full agenda can be viewed here.

For those wondering, all conference speeches will be presented in both English and Chinese. Prices start at €179 (0.487 BTC, US $231) and can be purchased with Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin and other altcoins or if you prefer, legacy methods. You might get some of that back, ChinaDoge will be distributing free Dogecoins to ticket holders.

The conference kicks off this Friday 8:00PM local time, and then kicks off on Saturday and Sunday at 8:00AM and 12:30PM respectively.

Directions, tickets and additional details can be found on the expo's official site. We will update you when the keynote speaker is announced.

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