Bitcoin Forum

First, nobody I've spoken with has been able to confirm that the San Antonio conference is actually happening.

I realize it's short notice for 2012 but a bunch of guys were already planning on meeting in San Francisco early March so we figured why not make a conference out of it.  Who knows if we can put anything legit together in a matter of 2 weeks but at least we'll set some precedent for next year.

Here's why March 3rd-4th:

Nice weather.
Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco happens March 5th-9th.
SXSW happens in Austin, Texas Marth 9th-18th, which many people we'd like to have attend our SF conference will be at.
This puts it 5-6 months apart from the NYC conference, if that is to happen again.

So, in doing in the weekend of March 3rd-4th, we potentially grab some GDC early birds, and we can catch local guys before they take off for SXSW.  And, if you want to stay a few days beyond the Bitcoin conference, you can stand around outside the Moscone Center and drop Bitcoin propaganda on the GDC attendees.

Thoughts?

I might be able to make this actually.

Any ideas where it would be held? Who would be speaking? What can we expect out of the conference?

Good questions.  This idea just came up within the last hour so we don't have much of a plan yet.  The last Silicon Valley Meetup had quite a few people at it, a lot working on interesting stuff.  It's now 12:20am Saturday morning in California so we may not have anything concrete to offer for a few days.  I'll spend the weekend getting in touch with local academics, venture capitalists, attorneys, entrepreneurs, all the Bitcoiner engineers at Google, Facebook, etc who might have anything to share.  Hopefully, by Wednesday we can have at least a rough idea of what things will look like.

There was also some talk of chartering a giant bus to drive a brigade of Bitcoiners from SF to SXSW sometime March 7th-9th.

http://bitcoin.travel/

I don't see anything near San Francisco on this map.

The closest thing is Memory Dealers at the following address:
3350 Scott Blvd Bldg #32 Santa Clara CA 95054
+1–408–486–5650

Make that part of your pitch! If you can get people to come and they are looking for a place to stay, try to get the hotel on this map!

Trying to put together a conference in 2 weeks is foolishly optimistic. A meetup with a minimal agenda, sure. But a conference? I think you underestimate how loaded a word like conference is.

If this is to be a conference, give yourself time and nail down a small venue first and figure out what it would cost for attendees.

Awesome!

As we were discussing in the email thread, 'conférence' is a big word to use.

This will be an awesome weekend, and I plan to be in Salt Lake City on the 1-3 of March (Any Bitcoiners in SLC please PM me!) and then in SF 3-5th of March.

If this event turns out to big a large one, I would like to get a smaller group of business owners together to discuss strategy, latest regulatory updates and other business related things.

Im super excited to meet all the people I talk to every day!

Charlie

Bump.

Any update on this?

I'd been keen to attend anything bitcoin related- I'm here in San Francisco for ~4 more weeks (until ~21st March).

I notice there are some meetup.com groups for San Francisco (e.g. http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Meetup-Group/). Perhaps if there is not enough interest for a conference, then a organizing a meetup would be still be good.

Either way, I would love to meet other bitcoin developers, as there are not many in Australia unfortunately!
   
~Mat

Just got laid off... high likelihood of attending. What's the itinerary?

The San Antonio conference is happening.  See it's thread.

I think a SF convention would be quite successful.  Three months of notice is good, but not always possible.  I am on the east coast and I would consider attending if the dates were good. 

I would be happy to do that some day,  but I spend most of my time in Tokyo.

He means literally lol

MemoryDealers has a few locations around the world. Roger lives and runs the company out of Tokyo  :)

fyi- I always get really hungry when I read your username

I sort of have a truncated thirst when I read your sig.

I always get sleepy when I read your Bitcoin donation address--Zzz.