TL;DR
In the second week of October, several thousand people gathered in Amsterdam to talk about Bitcoin. This year no ‘tourists’ at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023, only people that are in it for the … technology. Let’s look at a cross-section of speakers, including some Dutch ones.
Yours truly (green arrow in the image below) has photographic evidence that he was in the crowd of a Bitcoin conference in the depression stage of the market cycle. It was interesting to see that the levels of attendance were lower than the first time the event was organized, in 2022. Even though the Bitcoin price is higher than a year ago (it was mostly below 20k in October 2022), public sentiment and interest are currently lower.
This is to be expected if you look at the market cycle cheat sheet. It’s darkest before dawn.
If that’s true, then the crowd and speakers of Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 can be called early risers. There was great breadth and depth in the topics. The hall of the main stage, which can hold around 3000 seats, was never full. But the smaller conference rooms were often bulging.
Two Blondes and a Cowboy
Hugh Hendry is the quirky and well-spoken ‘acid capitalist’: a former hedge fund manager. With an ever-present grin, he has a charming way of voicing inconvenient truths to traditional media outlets. In his view, the current financial system is untenable in the way everyone is on the leash of the American Central Bank. He talked to the audience about different economic depressions of the past 200 years and reminded them that innovation ended those depressions. In this case, the innovation could be a new model of trust.
Self-described as someone who ‘doesn’t have the Bitcoin bug’, Hendry reminded the audience teasingly that the market cap of Bitcoin is smaller than Facebook’s. And that’s precisely why he’s invested in BTC, as there’s so much room to the upside. Hendry has bought shares of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. It seems to have been a good bet, as the discount has been getting smaller (meaning GBTC has risen faster than Bitcoin itself). Why? Because the expectation is that GBTC will be allowed to convert to a Bitcoin spot ETF, in which case the discount will disappear.
Host Jimmy Song, an OG Bitcoiner, must have bitten his tongue when he heard Hendry’s statement that there is a ‘centralized bogeyman’ in crypto too, referring to Sam Bankman-Fried and Tether. Not realizing he was preaching to the choir – Bitcoiners are no fan of custodial exchanges in general and don’t like Tether precisely because they know they pose centralization risk – was probably forgiven, as he is such a charismatic speaker. And his general point about Bitcoin as an innovative way out of an economic depression, was well taken.
He shared the stage with Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a young Dutch right-wing politician who has been very critical of the Dutch government when it comes to covid policy and, more recently, the intention to curtail the Dutch agrarian sector. She has also been very critical of central bank digital currencies, and thus was a perfect candidate to be orange-pilled by the community. In fact, no other than Saifedean Ammous sent her a copy of The Bitcoin Standard. Eva repeated the danger of…
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
