🧘‍♂️Miami Highlights

2 days of crypto insights. Summarised in 5 minutes.

Dear Meditators

? 50,000 members of the crypto community were able to make it to the Miami Conference last week. 

From presentations to networking events and afterparties, we imagine most people felt a return to a sense of ‘normal’. Compared to this time last year, the world is almost unrecognisable. There was even a ‘Whale’ party thrown for attendees who bought a special $19,795 ticket to the conference. If you felt some FOMO because you weren’t able to attend, you’re not alone. 

? Today, we share a full summary of the Miami Conference: we will share all the relevant news and showcase our favourite tweets and statements from your favourite twitter personalities. 

Read, enjoy and share with your network. Let’s all build wealth together.

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? Welcome to Miami

The Miami conference happened over 2 days from 4th-5th June at the Mana Wynwood. Bitcoin A.T.M.s decorate the Wynwood neighborhood and cryptocurrency exchange FTX recently bought the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena. For those who couldn’t attend in person, there was a Livestream of the main stage. The appropriately named Nakamoto Stage. The hosts on the Nakamoto Stage:

Day 1: What Bitcoin Did’s Peter McCormack
Day 2: John Vallis from the Bitcoin Rapid-Fire podcast and Charlie Shrem from BitInstant

The Livestream on Day 1 included a chat. A chat which was soon to be overpowered by bots pumping projects and later disabled on Day 2. At the conference itself, there was also a stunning art gallery, pictures found here.

Some were more impressed by the conference than others. Our goal today is simply to summarise the event.

? Miami’s Mayor Francis Suarez Kick Off

The conference began with some assuring words from Mayor Francis Suarez. Some of our favourite quotes: “The days of a currency being tethered to a central bank are coming to an end”. “The U.S. will become a powerhouse for clean energy Bitcoin mining”.

Suarez’s track record is filled with various forms of involvement in the crypto and blockchain space. Suarez announced this year that the city would accept tax payments in cryptocurrency, let its employees collect salaries with it and explore holding some on its balance sheet. 

His powerful statements got the conference off to a good start. Particularly given his passion for a more sustainable crypto future. As we all know, the energy consumption of Bitcoin is what Elon Musk claims to have made him turn away from Bitcoin. 

Steve Lee echoed a similar sentiment: “Bitcoin mining is a for-profit business and their number one cost is electricity. They want to maximize their profit.” The way to do that is to move where the energy is cheap and thereby the incentives for green mining are built into the system, “It will tend to 100% renewable before any other industry”.

? Jack Dorsey: Positive Statements, Less Positive Reception 

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was quick to emphasise his passion for Bitcoin: “All of the other coins, for me, don’t factor in at all”. His focus is to make Bitcoin the native currency of the internet. He also went on to confirm Square’s plans to produce a hardware wallet of some kind. Adding to the theme of renewable energy, Dorsey explained that: “Miners have to make a profit and get cheap renewable energy to maximise their profit”.

It seemed however, that a particular member of the audience was more keen to talk about censorship. Activist Laura Loomer confronted Dorsey for talking about freedom given he shut her Twitter account. She caused a bit of a scene and was escorted off stage. Video clippage of the scene is trending on Twitter.

Dorsey did have a response for her. He referenced Twitter’s Blue Sky project and explained: “It will have none of the restrictions that you see on Twitter. Inspired entirely by Bitcoin, we want to do the same thing for social media”.

Censorship on social media and Twitter is a sensitive topic indeed.

• On the one hand, some advocate censorship, they believe certain material should not be allowed to circulate and go viral.

• On the other hand, some people believe that any type of censorship is a violation of one of the most basic human rights: freedom of speech.

• At least for now, we seem to operate in a sort of middle ground: limited censorship or a small restriction of freedom, to allow most speech to be free, or to protect the majority of our freedom.

• More Dorsey quotes here.

? Floyd Mayweather: Stick To Boxing? 

Receiving a similar reception to Jack Dorsey, Floyd Mayweather was booed for his statements. Perhaps members of the audience thought his time would be better spent preparing to fight. Some of his remarks:

• “Everybody in the crypto world is competing with one another”, he went on to suggest that they should work together instead.

• “I think another crypto is going to be as big as Bitcoin.” This statement did not go down so well.

? Ron Paul and Nick Szabo: A New World Order 

Ex-presidential candidate Ron Paul was quick to comment on his views regarding legal tender laws: “If you don’t like the Dollar, you ought to have the absolute right to use whatever you want for money.”

Paul was completely disillusioned by conventional monetary policy. He said the Federal Reserve is losing ideological support and that they have no idea what they are doing with the economy which is leading to chaos. He fears politicians and the Fed will continue to print money without due regard for debt or deficits. In fact, he went on to say that people at the conference are much better informed than people in Washington!

Nick Szabo also had positive things to say about the new world order but drew our attention to a different variable: “The biggest shortcoming of monetary metals is the cost to validate.“ “The cost and risks of validating gold caused people to outsource validation in forms such as coins and paper notes.” “Trust based validation is the most important improvement Bitcoin is bringing”.

For all the benefits of Bitcoin, we don’t see trust based validation quoted or referenced so frequently; making this presentation particularly refreshing.

The cherry on top of the New World Order theme came on Saturday, when the conference played a video of Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, announcing a bill to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country. The audience leapt to a roaring standing ovation.

? Ross Ulbricht: Those Aren’t Tears, It’s Hay Fever

The first day ended with the Dread Pirate Robert’s dispatch from jail. Ulbricht spoke about freedom and what it means to lose your freedom. He drew an emotional analogy and said that “Bitcoin is the embodiment of freedom.”

Robert Breedlove’s talk also adhered to the freedom Bitcoin creates: “The most important game in the world, which is money, is corrupt. The rules of that game are twisted to favor a few and disfavor millions.” He went on to say: “Bitcoin being the first man-made incorruptible money and social institution we’ve ever had, is potentially the most important invention in human history.”

This type of freedom transcends social status and ethnicity. Najah Roberts, a cryptocurrency executive, and Hill Harper, the actor who created an app called The Black Wall Street, explained that investing in cryptocurrency was a key step toward financial freedom and wealth for the Black community. “They can’t colonize Bitcoin,” said Mr. Hill, who wore a T-shirt referencing the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, which said “Satoshi is Black.”

? Putting It All Together

Attendees of the Miami conference appeared to have enjoyed themselves. According to some people, perhaps a bit too much. With one panel titled Toxic Maximalism: A Feature, Not A Bug standing out to many as damaging to the goals of the crypto community. Our purpose today was to focus on the presentations at the conference.

Through these, we were able to remind ourselves of some of the important benefits of this community and market: freedom, liberty, value, wealth, redistribution, technology, art and so much more.

It’s a community we are delighted to work in and will continue to strive to bring value to. During the good times and the bad ?

? Tomorrow we share the first of a 2 part series on a powerful indicator that many believe has been driving price action these last few weeks. If you’d like to find out what that is, be sure to join our Free Market Meditations community. 

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Locking Alpha Away

Which previously free site with thousands of Telegram followers with a bot that scours Twitter for young and hypable cryptocurrencies to invest in, has put up a hefty $2500/month paywall for users to still access it?

1. NewAndHotCrypto

2. NewHotCrypto

3. HotNewCrypto

Polkadot To Begin Auctioning Off Its Parachain Slots 

Polkadot is a blockchain protocol designed to bring together multiple blockchains to operate seamlessly. Polkadot refers to these parallel blockchains as “parachains” and they can connect to the network via a limited number of “parachain slots”. According to The Block, auctioning off more parachain slots will allow more blockchains to deploy onto the Polkadot network and interact with other blockchains that are already integrated.

According to a blog post written by Gavin Wood, Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot creator, projects that receive confidence from members of the Kusama community will be prioritized. 

Wood recommends that the first parachain slot auction should begin on June 15 to allow members of the Kusama staking community ample time to unstake KSM so they can use the tokens for their auction bids. After this, auctions will be held back-to-back with a two-day period of bids, followed by a five-day ending period. In total, five auctions will take place over five weeks.

3. HotNewCrypto

The use of this bot has dropped from over 4,000 users to less than 100. To justify this price tag one of the founding members E.S said “We’re in the business of secrets basically and the problem with secrets is, the more they propagate the less value they have”. 

Their goal was to find 20 customers willing and happy to pay the premium, so they can have access to these early stage projects. They managed to exceed this goal and claim that these customers are more than happy to pay the price as they get suitable value from it. Those who were a fan of the free version may be content as the free leaderboard has since become active again, albeit with limited functionality. 

If you’d like a guide on what bots are, popular crypto bots and how to use them, let us know in the comments below. 

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