Doing shots with true believers at Ethereum’s biggest party

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I knew I was in the right place when I saw the fliers on the streetlamp.

It was 35 degrees at the annual ethereum event in Denver, and people were waiting in line to take the COVID tests. More than 12,000 people from 100 countries came to Denver for the conference.

The conference is five years old, but it has a very local feel. First of all, it is free. It is transitioning to being run by SporkDAO as a way of making sure the community gets to put on a show. The Spork is the most used instrument in the world. It can be used to eat, dig, attack, defend, and, most notably, the mascot, the bufficorn. There is a community venture fund that supports what gets built at the conference.

There is a mix of both developer conference and all-out party. Teams of developers were competing for a million dollars in prizes, influential people in the space were giving talks, and there was a general work-hard-play-hard ethos. I missed Deadmau5 and Major Lazer while I was here.

$350 billion is a lot of money and it can have real-world effects. If you count the VC money, there is even more.

I've become curious about the community as the popularity of cryptocurrencies and Web3 has grown. The online world of digital currency is often dominated by people who are loud.

The priorities of the people who build things are often reflected in the products they build. I was not sure what to expect. The history of internet money was mostly libertarians and anarchists, but as cryptocurrencies has gone mainstream, more conventionally-minded people have flooded into it.

I went to Denver because developers are more interesting than investors and I like parties.

One attendee I spoke to said she was in line for three and a half hours before she was tested. I was ushered over to a table with about 10 other people after standing in the shorter line for press and speakers. We followed the instructions to get a sample from our noses. We were all negative. I was given a wristband and told not to take it off; at the door of every event space there was security that asked to see the wristband.

On Saturday, a rumor went around the press room that Andrew was bounced from the main event space because he did not have a wristband, because security was so inflexible. A spokesman didn't respond to an email requesting comment, either.

He was going to give a speech about his DAO, Lobby 3, but I saw him later, with someone in a Bored Ape Yacht Club hoodie. A DAO is like a hacker version of a co-op, where rules are written in code and members vote on outcomes. Lobby 3 is a political lobby and it is supposed to allow ordinary users to push for friendlier policies. The headline was inspired by an Onion headline.

Few people wore masks indoors in Denver. A lot of people came down with COVID after the conference.

A lot of the story is going to sound silly because of the goofiness. On Friday, a number of inflatable swans with codes popped up on the sidewalks. Several people wore onesies that appeared to be unicorns, and one of them may have been a Pikachu, but it was hard to tell. BUIDL is a play on the HODL meme. The sponsored booth section was called the Shill Zone. The plumbing system was weak and the toilets were out of order.

Chet Strange/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Thursday night, I went to the party hosted by bacon coin. The temperature had dropped since the afternoon, but the would-be partygoers seemed determined. When I entered, a warm-up act was spinning in front of a crowd that was barely dancing. I felt the bass hit my ribs. Between five and 10 men were for each woman in the crowd.

The area near the front was labeled a bacon holders area. I was sitting in it and was told that Peter was here to meet his online friends, some of whom he'd known for seven years in person.

Harrison Leggio, who worked on bacon, was in the lounge and told me he was celebrating. He said he had a lot of fun putting faces to names he knew well and was enjoying meeting many of his online friends for the first time. It was a good real-world application of the block chain. The name is about bringing home the bacon.

The lounge was packed when Tiësto took the stage. A person wearing a T-shirt that said STAFF showed up to guard the entrance. The fog cannons shot into the crowd and they began to dance.

Hana, 36, and Rhett, 36, refused to give their last names and wanted to know why I was asking people's ages. She told me she worked in privacy and that it was a common journalistic convention to note people's ages. A friend of Hana's had a ticket.

I'm interested to know how this is different from a mortgage-backed security. He noted that the valuation mechanism was not proven. A reveler told me that he thought it was mortgaged-backed crypto. I thought he was referring to the 2008 financial crisis, which was caused by mortgage-backed securities. He thought it was too soon to tie it to real-world assets.

He was curious about social impact DAOs because they are a leaderless, egalitarian model. I asked how he liked the party.

I didn't think the crowd was horny enough for a bar mitzvah. It was one of the least horny clubs I have ever been to. The peak of the party was when Ti'sto did his own mix of Darude's Sandstorm. The cameras were extended in the air for videos.

The smell of weed smoke was strong in the air when I went to the Degen Ball after a few more songs. I didn't see anyone get caught when a bouncer came through with a flashlight. At this party, people seemed a little frightened of talking to a reporter, and one guy who called himself Loki immediately made himself scarce when I explained what I was doing. I asked him questions and he seemed uncomfortable.

The Degen Ball had more women in attendance than the bacon party, but a few people didn't want me to mention it. One person said it was too depressing. It was feared that it might discourage women from getting involved. A third person said the gender ratio didn't matter.

There were more female recruiters than there were job candidates at the Women in Blockchain event that the organizers had to turn away because of the fire code.

There were other politicians at the event. The founder and executive steward of ETHDenver introduced the Colorado Governor who founded the Blockchain Caucus.

It was around 5:30PM Mountain Standard Time, but it was more of a state of mind for most. The most fun thing I will do this month is take the stage, wearing bright blue-and-black sneakers and a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Polis made fun of cash and racked up points. Cash has no memory, which is ideal for illegal transactions. His speech was focused on promoting Colorado as a good place to live. He bragged about the time he hired an architect for the state. Colorado will begin accepting cryptocurrencies to pay for taxes and licenses this summer.

The people I talked to said that NFTs and DAOs would be the big trends in the year 2022. Colorado's history with the cooperative was promoted by Polis to the crowd. Colorado law may allow DAOs to own things and take actions in the real world without having to use an existing corporate structure.

It's no secret that a lot of energy is needed to run a computer, but how bad it is for the environment is up for debate. Many of the speakers seemed at pains to assure the crowd that they weren't just out for the quick buck and that they wanted to solve the environmental concerns.

Kevin Owocki, founder of Gitcoin, told the audience to take the green pill and get into environmentalism. He started with an old meme and got the crowd to sing it back. He was excited about public goods. In the last year, Gitcoin has funded over 50 million dollars in public goods.

"We need to collectively take the green pill to create a more solar punk world," Owocki said. Owocki began his talk around 7:30PM.

After Owocki, Kimbal Musk and his cowboy hat took the stage to discuss Big Green DAO. I am on Web3. The bufficorn mascot came onstage to join him as he went on.

Musk said that he and his brother were ignorant about the environmental impact when they invested in the virtual currency. The transition to proof of stake from proof of work doesn't happen in a disappointing way.

Musk said that he looked young, but he was old. He told a story about Zip2, the first company he and Elon worked on, which was an internet replacement for the Yellow Pages. One guy they met threw a phone book at him and asked if his tech could do all this.

The keynote speaker at the end of the night was Vitalik Buterin, who is often referred to by his first name, like Cher. When the stream crashed, people began chatting with the name "rug", which is a reference to the fact that a project's owners run away with investor money.

Buterin was in the public eye. The possibility of decentralization is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century, according to Buterin. He showed how people with different values can work together on shared projects. He took questions after that.

Buterin's first question was whether she believed in God.

Buterin looked tired. I wondered what it would be like to be a guru while still a teenager after he gave a philosophy major's answer. The questioner tried to ask how to avoid one-world government after Buterin dodged.

The Q&A calmed down after one questioner said that he changed his life when he read the white paper in ninth grade.

The fire marshal was concerned about how people would exit the building and provided directions to two exits, according to an organizers step on stage.

Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

The existence of Buterin highlights one of the differences between the two coins: Buterin is still present, wrote his whitepaper under his own name, and is a guiding force for the developers. The person who wrote the original code for the digital currency is not known. Even though Buterin doesn't exercise direct control over much, his endorsement is important for everyone who works in ether. Even if they don't win, Buterin's presence on the judging panel for BUIDL serves as validation for anyone creating a project.

Different ideologies are offered by the two different companies, that is why they are distinct from each other. It was designed to allow apps to be built on top. The difference was highlighted throughout the conference. The HODL meme is based on a drunk post on a Bitcoin forum and is about investment. BUIDL is about making things.

It's possible that Ethereum is more utopian than Bitcoins. Price talk was banned from r/Ethereum because the community wanted to focus on more interesting topics of discussion. The idea that a different, better version of the web is possible is connected to the idea that true Bitcoins are against internet money.

The people I talked to were aware of their surroundings. There is a problem with the amount of energy used by the block chain. There are challenges in moving from proof of work to proof of stake. They know there are a lot of scam in the space, and they are horrified that a lot of people will write off cryptocurrencies altogether. They talked about the issues of newbies on the main stages.

The CTO of OpenSea was on stage with a panel to discuss where NFTs were headed when about 1.7 million in NFTs were stolen.

Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

There was a party called Into the Dark Forest on Saturday. There was an artist doing the face paint in another room when I stepped into the party. I didn't have to scream at the loud music at the previous parties because the music was at a more tolerable level. There was a line at the women's room, and it had the best ratio of men to women.

One woman told me she jumped from traditional finance because it was an old boys club, and she felt taken more seriously incryptocurrencies. She didn't feel like an alien here.

Several people I spoke to didn't want to be on the record because they were drunk or had privacy concerns. I don't own cryptocurrencies because of The Verge's ethics policy, but I can get approved to buy them if I need to report a story. Gains are discarded or donated. When I mentioned this, the reactions ranged from disbelief to "how can I evaluate UX on these products if I don't use them?" It's fair to be concerned about what will happen when the dollar goes to zero. I was surprised by the concern, but I don't think the dollar will go to zero, I suppose. It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong if it goes to zero.

There were women dressed up in ballerina costumes with glowing lights on their tutus. He was excited to see a lot of people he only knew from online, like the people I met at the conference.

Jackovitch told me that his grandfather got him into cryptocurrencies. Jackovitch said that his grandfather was a serial entrepreneur. Jackovitch liked the camaraderie he felt was a major draw for him, like many other people I spoke to.

There were two people nearby, one of whom told me that she would be 28 on Monday. Green once called Frankie from jail. She was the third person at MetaMask and wore an oversized T-shirt. She ended up in Hawaii, where she met people who were interested in cryptocurrencies. She said they gave her a mission and saved her.

She said that she was here to make her name bigger and 888-269-5556 888-269-5556 888-269-5556.

Green told me that he left banks in 2008 and kept his money in gold and silver. He traded his gold and silver for coins because he was a crazy hippie. He spent time studying Thai massage and lived an nomadic lifestyle.

He was one of the people who was involved in cleaning up after a hacker stole $50 million from The DAO. Green was still enthusiastic about the possibility of public goods even after the hack. He believes that the space will create competing alternatives for what governments and non-profit organizations do now.

What do you think about the growth in the space? The number of people at ETHDenver is more than it used to be. He smiled and said the parties are the same.

The last party I attended was full of a bunch of weird people, and it reminded me of a time when the web was full of weird people. It feels like a lot of society has been fixed into being exactly the same, but it is also boring.

The new internet is not good for creators, said Pete Mathias, 35, who got into cryptocurrencies. He was clued in by a friend on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He is in a band called Filligar. He put up a website where people could buy his band's album with the digital currency of their choice. Artists have a long history of patrons, and right now, many use Patreon and Kickstarter to make ends meet.

We have a scar on the history of music. It became harder for artists to make a living when music went online to mp3s. He said that NFTs are cool because of scarcity for value.

One thing NFTs purport to solve is how hard it has been for creators to get paid. A lot of these products are different from the same thing. For dollars, he could have sold his album using the payment service. The dollar has not had the same kind of run-up in value. That's one reason that internet money isn't used as much as it used to be. Or, if you are committed to a stable coin?

The way the web currently makes money has killed off a lot of small blogs I used to read. The scale is important for survival because of the decline in ad rates. This one is one of the sites that is blocked with ads and trackers. It's why you can see people chasing something. Web3 is fueled by dissatisfaction with Big Tech, while cryptocurrencies are fueled by unhappiness with the existing financial system.

I came to Denver because I wanted to understand why so many people were attracted to it. I think the community's diagnosis of what's wrong with the web is correct. I'm not sure about their solutions.

The internet deviated from what many of us had hoped for, according to Robert Ross. When the internet was young, Ross watched the rise of Big Tech and revenue models that monetized personal data. Web3 could be different.

The most exciting part for me is providing a mechanism for tech to empower individuals versus offering a technology that feeds into the economic order we have always had, with the haves and the have nots. He thought that the economy in personal data could be subverted. I was excited to hear more but was interrupted by a fire twirlers show.

Three of the fire twirlers were wearing costumes that did little to protect them from the cold. One of them no longer held the fire batons and passed me to get to her coat. People were dancing. The DJ was behind a sign that said "Fuck yeah" in cursive. I almost got out of the party without having a drink, but one of the people I was talking to at the bar ordered a shot of tequila. He wanted the community to have a good time, and he was in a generous mood.