Sam, Edith and I scrambled to get this thing together. It went from silly little drinking endeavor to one day conference in about 2 weeks.
Everyone present loved the venue. Spencer Horsman let us use his bar/theater, Illusions. It's got an incredible art deco 1920's prohibition era motif. The front half is a beautiful bar and the back boasts a huge theater with lights, audio, and a great stage. Spencer is a world class escape artist and magician. I highly recommend that you get a hotel room and make a weekend of his show and the cuisine that federal hill (ugh, that name) has to offer. Thank you so much, homie!
Preston Smith kicked us off with a brilliant talk on how he plans on using blockchain technology in a more trustworthy and transparent voting process. He went on to rally people seeking economic freedom to find it in the Libertarian Party. His Q&A session went really well. There were a lot of good questions some of which even eluded to ideas and solutions as his project advances.
Jason Brown, from komodoplatform.com brought more original content to the table by talking about notary mining, delayed POW proofs, and atomic swaps. I really hope to have him back for a more technical talk if I can figure out how to do this again. Again the Q&A session was incredible.
We decided to take a break for more drinks and some much needed bullshitting. As everyone curiously hung out at the bar and explored the finer points of each others projects I was trying to figure out who was going on stage in what order. I paused and reflected on that first segment and realized that the audience was knowledgeable and hungry to learn and question. The content was varied, high quality, and things were going great!!
Next up were the guys from Windfallmining.com and Black River Crypto Investments. These guy came to the stage and had great charisma and plenty of entertaining anecdotes. They offered honest insight into the hurdles and the expensive trial and error process of growing and scaling a mining facility. These guys are absolute pros and have vision for growth and the know how to handle it! Their Q&A session was also fantastic.
I was then honored to introduce a couple of guys I've gotten to work around quite a bit and that I really admire. Jacob Thompson and Josh Meyers from securityevaluators.com hopped on stage to deliver the most technical talk of the day. They covered a ton of the threats and potential vulnerabilities that people tend not to consider when they think about crypto currencies and blockchain. This talk went over most people's heads, which was evident by how everyone had their faces buried in their phones. Even that talk had several technical questions that elaborated on the importance of security assessments on levels other than just the supporting hashing algorithm or key generator.
Food showed up and it was time for another break! A solid pace had spontaneously erupted from the poorly organized mess I had prepared for these poor suckers! In retrospect, the day's success was 100% the fault of the brilliant bastards that had come to donate their smarts and experiences to my nightmare circus.
We eased back into the shit show with another security talk, this time from Rick Ramgattie also from securityevaluators.com and iotvillage.org He spoke to the concept of security in Blockchain and Crypto Currency and took us a little deeper into the behind the scenes action of some of the most famous hacks. Everything from Mt Gox all the way up to the ledger vuln from earlier in March. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with the Jaxx 12 word mnemonic debacle. That was a big Ah-Ha moment for me!