To be brutally honest, it was a waste of time and money for me to attend.  I could have stayed home and caught up on some much needed housework this weekend.  I also would have learned more spending 2 hours reading old messages on this forum than in the 12-14 hours I spent at the expo (not to mention travel time).

First off, hosting it at McCormick Place was total overkill.  The conference organizer clearly had little idea of what they were doing in choosing to go that route.  This is a conference center, the largest in North America and easily one of the largest in the world.  However they only had a tiny section of a hallway for exhibits and two medium sized conference rooms for sessions.  They could have hosted it at a swanky hotel  by the airport and it wouldn't have cost us locals $21/day for parking.  

Second, of the presentations I went to, only the regulation panel and bitcoin 2.0 panel had any tiny bit of insight that made it worth while.  Not nearly enough to justify spending two days to attend.  

Third, I talked to a few people who lived in the area and attended because they wanted to learn more about bitcoin.  Sucks to be them.  There was nothing at the conference that would have been geared towards educating people about what bitcoin is and how it works.  Aside from the ever present "TO THE MOON" bullshit that seemed to have been included in at least 1/3 of the presentations I sat in on.

It was small.  A few hundred people were there.  I understand it's a nascent industry, but I honestly would have thought there would have been more techies and other financial services sector types from the Chicago area just checking it out.  This tells me that people really aren't that interested in the concept.  

Most tech shows do a call for papers, and require presenters to provide a synopsis of their presentation.  The organizer then chooses among the most promising to speak.  I am pretty sure this guy just asked a bunch of start-up guys to come speak about anything, regardless of what they were going to speak about.   The content was so.... blech.