The $300 fee was worth it.
Earlier this year I was bashing the conference on this. I
apologize as the conference had exceeded my expectations and changed my outlook on the community as a whole.
It is a lot bigger than you can imagine.
Glad to hear it was so awesome.
Not only is it good to hear it was worth it, a conference being worth $300 (and apparently abundantly so) is telling about the value of Bitcoin itself!
When I heard that registration was going to cost $300 or the BTC equivalent, I agonized over it before finally deciding not to go. For me, the cost of travelling there was going to double the expense, not to mention food, lodging, taking time off my "day job", time away from my family, etc.
Then I received an email from Lindsay inviting me to speak as part of the "lightning sessions." I mentioned it to my wife and she encouraged me to go. That was the tipping point. I was confident there would be plenty of individuals I had only met online and that ideas and optimistic energy would saturate the place. The contacts alone would be well worth the $300.
When I was finally in the middle of it, I knew that I had made the right decision. Every person I met had interesting ideas or stories, had either business plans or money to invest, was either already contributing to the betterment of the Bitcoin community or was using the underlying ideas behind it to attack some other issue in new and exciting ways. I also can't stress how much
positive energy there was. I heard debates but no shouting matches; constructive criticisms but no outright attacks; honest, penetrating questions but no avoidance tactics. I may have just been lucky in the people I interacted with but it seemed that even the most skeptical had open minds and even the most fervent had well-considered arguments and facts to back them up.
And I was right: The business cards I gathered are worth the price of admission in and of themselves.
