I appreciate the invitation. I'd love to go to Finland. One day I will make it. I can't make it on such short notice.
The immodest emphasis on conspicuous luxury is something I find alienating and leads me to question the premise of the gathering. If I'm going to be invited to spend a $7,000 fee to attend a meeting, I'm accustomed to high-quality well-thought-out appeals for me to attend, which concentrate on the business development case for attendance more so than the exclusivity of the gathering and the luxurious luxuries that will be enjoyed there, the blackness of the German car I'll be picked up in, and the hotness of the 30 girls that will be passing out bitcoins. The way that this is presented, I feel like by going I'd be starring in a Bitcoin version of "Oppan Gang-nam Style" and that has a negative appeal to me. THis is not why I am involved in Bitcoin. This sort of meeting Should Not Take Place at a venue that requires an outlay like that per participant, with one exception: if the money were going to fund some well-defined and well-planned project to fund the common good.
Thank you for your reply, I appreciate it.
I realize that astute bitcoin people are
very busy, and therefore
cannot easily read the fine print, which in this case says that the tickets will be sold at progressively higher prices. The first one was
BTC1, and currently you would be able to reserve yours at
BTC8, which, despite the fact that it is $1000+, will still net me a loss and cannot be considered excessive.
The level of people, targeted with this summit, is so high, that their opportunity cost of time easily runs in $thousands per day, so this is why I care about their physical well-being (and not so much care how much it will cost to me or them). It is realistically a $5-$10k investment for you or anyone from the U.S. to attend this (ticket+flight+time), so you don't want to have substandard living conditions. There is already another conference targeting a wider audience, and there is no point for me to reinvent the wheel.
As for the workshops, I have currently outlined
three most critical developments in the bitcoinworld, which do need to be accomplished with the utmost speed and determination, namely:
- The Dealer Network, to stabilize the price
during its appreciation phase and remove the single point of failure (Mt.Gox)
- The Supernode, to strengthen the socio-economic network, develop local power centers, and tie Bitcoin to the real world existing networks
- The Real Bill, to enable such a
stable price in the long run that bitcoin can be used as a unit of account in production of goods and services
If you think there is anything more urgent and important to be done in this world than these, please post it here. Since I am pretty serious with this conference and consider it the culmination of my short career in bitcoin.
If you just see the blackness of the cars and hotness of the girls, you are myopic. This all needs to be there but the real content is in the workshops.
Thank you for the Casascius coins, they are beautiful, and a lasting testimony to your foresight.