The great mid-Atlantic Bitcoin meetup was the gathering of multiple meetups across the region, from New York, to North Carolina, from Jersey Shore to the Shenandoah Valley. They came together to “strengthen grass roots networks driving Bitcoin forward in the real world.” The event was held at a place I’ve wanted to experience myself for a long time, since the early stories of burgers and beers being paid for with sats at Pubkey New York, but this is the new Pubkey in DC. I came close to not attending this event because I had work the day of and early work the day after, with a 1.5 hour commute each way, but WOW, I’m glad I made it. The driving force getting me to the event was my friend Nick speaking at the event. He was attending to represent the meetup he has helped grow over the years in Virginia called the 757BTC community. I know it was now ten days ago, and I'm sorry for the delay in posting, but the event is still posted on Luma here for more info: https://luma.com/tql6d40b The speakers advertised were Gerald Glickman(VA) of Bitcoin Policy Institute/Anchorage Digital, Rick Thomas (West Virginia) of 80-IQ studios, Derek Ross(PA) Soupbox and NOSTR Valley, My buddy nick (VA), and Jack Minnick (WV) the chief technical officer at https://www.sovreign.io/. This event was organized by the Bitcoin District Initiative, a non profit with the goal of building grass roots Bitcoin adoption through education, business onboarding, and community outreach programs. More about them can be found here: https://bitcoindistrictinitiative.org/

Walking the streets of DC for my first time ever, headed to a Bitcoin meetup at a place bustling with past and future Bitcoin activities felt surreal. Heads are turning as I walk the streets of DC in sandals this time a year, but I'm a west coast boy. I'll die in sandals likely. I see the Pubkey sign poking out into view, I've made it. I take a breath, smile to myself, and walk in. This place is big! The first thing I notice is the general western theme throughout the bar: dim lights, wood everywhere, lots of barstools, some cowboy themed pictures and trinkets, two bars back to back separated by a wall, and . . . a full suit of medieval style armor holding a dim candle? Sweet. I feel like wearing a SN cowboy hat would be wildly appropriate in this place. The next thing to capture my attention was a large block clock on the wall of the bar facing the entryway. I’ve never seen one in person before. On it I read the BTC exchange rate of 66k USD, block height 937291, current hashrate, and scrolling information about the difficulty adjustment. I see two familiar faces in the other bar area with the stage, couches, tables and chairs. Nick and his wife Lacy arrived earlier and flagged me down. Catching up felt good. I hadn’t seen either of them for a couple years now, and they’re now happily expecting a baby girl in July. I notice quickly that (baring Lacey) everyone has a beer but me, so I excuse myself to go to the bar and remedy that. Here they have a second, identical block clock hung on the wall. It’s now block height 937293 and I impulse order a guinness on tap. Normally I prefer to ask for local brews in new areas but there was no time for that with Guinness on tap. As the bartender places my chilly guinness and the portable POS device I ask him right away if I can pay with sats. A couple chairs down someone exclaims “fuck yeah!” and gives me a friendly nod before turning back to his drink. He had long hair, a beard, and a shirt that said pubkey on it. Am I sending this guy sats? I have no idea. I’m here for the excitement either way. They’re using the square terminal here and it’s a quick seamless exchange over the lightning network. 21% off everything on the menu if you pay with sats! Equipped with my beer I head back to Nick and Lacey and a couple of their friends. Nick was giving me an update on everything he has been doing in Bitcoin Landia before he was whisked away to do a short podcast with some of the other panelists in the studio room just a few feet away. So I’m left with Lacy, Claude, and his wife. Claude is also a part of the 757BTC group and will be representing it on the unadvertised second panel. He has his own meet up in the same general area as Nick and they have worked together quite a bit over the years. Lacy introduced me to Claude and his wife as the guy who orange pilled Nick, which honestly felt really good. For a while I've been rather disappointed in myself for the way I bitcoin. My lack of self learning, lack of improving my own custodies and securities, and my lack of activity in the space all wash away from my shoulders for a moment with Laceys nice comment. Nick is crushing it, however. He does a tremendous amount for Bitcoin seemingly every day and I’m very proud of him and everything he has done/is doing. He motivates me to improve every time we catch up. And there he is, a few feet away, on a podcast at freaking Pubkey! Spreading the good word. Awesome.

After some more small talk it’s now block height 937294 and I use my empty stomach as an excuse to take a social break and spend more sats. I head to the bar and quickly order the Vienna beef Chicago style hotdog. This time the bartender put a LN invoice in front of me without needing to ask. Shortly after my dog arrives I watch the clock tick over to 937295. Being alone with my beer and delicious dog covered in all sorts of yummy things is comforting and I decide to sit and take my time. I challenge myself to stay put until block 937296. During this time at the bar, I witnessed four different people come to the bar for food or drink or both and they all paid with lightning. One paid from a Strike account, one with Blink wallet, and two paid with wallets I didn’t even recognize. Every payment was quick and frictionless. I’m committed to taking my time before returning to the ever-growing crowd of bitcoiners near the stage. Everyone seems to have accomplished so much and is so involved in this thing or that. On one hand it’s amazing to be lost in a sea of so much Bitcoin conversation and happenings, but I can’t escape the rolling waves of imposter syndrome. I finish my beer and order another--sats flying through the Lightning network and over the counter, which I find very fun. As my new guinness is being poured, block 937296 ticks over. Time’s up. With the block height at its all-time high as well as my liquid encouraged confidence, I head back to socialization.

Everyone is mingling around and the crowd is getting bigger and bigger. I try to count but get distracted around the high 60’s. At block 937300, woah that was fast, I asked Claude rather bluntly if he had any opinions on the OP-Return controversy that seems to have the whole community in a …. knot. I loved his answer. He told me he doesn’t really have strong feelings either way and he’s dwelled on both sides philosophically. Ultimately he doesn’t think it deserves this much in-fighting and will just stay humble and stack sats. After talking to Nick a while I notice it’s now 937304. Our conversation was super cool. I asked him too what he though about OP_Return and he had a similar answer to Claude. We spoke about Mathew Kratter, how we each watched him a lot in the past but he has since become too jaded and pitch-forky lately and has lost both of our views. He told me about this stellar project he did hosting a mining node on AWS where people could donate hashrate to it. The miner got up to nearly 100 PH!!! The node earned 14 million sats which were all donated to operationbitcoin.io . Those guys are awesome and deserve to be checked out. The bitcoin veterans scene is getting HUGE. Nick also wrote a guide on how to use DATUM Gateway to re-create his work. Here it is: https://archive.org/details/7225346512080496562_20260227

At block 937306 Nick and Claude were practicing some predetermined panelist questions with each other and one question was “what has been your biggest mistake as a community builder? Nick said he felt they got too technical too quickly. Which is really great for some, but he felt that for newcomers it could have been a turn off and perhaps a reason for slowed growth. Claude felt that they had been too focused on casting too wide a net. Instead of hyper focusing on putting bitcoin in front of as many people as possible, more focus and attention should have been put on the people they already had. They had some recurring members with really good strengths, and they both felt that they should have leaned into those strengths and helped build up the already-attending crowd, instead of growing their numbers as quickly as possible. People come to Bitcoin when they’re ready, they say. And I agree. I’ve seen too many people hurt or misguided by forceful adoption. I’m even guilty of it myself. When building our bitcoin social networks, it’s important to strengthen the skills and relationships of the people who are here voluntarily instead of aggressively trying to save the world with the Bitcoin life boat. Somewhere in the middle of question practice they brought up a new thing they’re doing they call sat markets. The bitcoin meetups of 757 take turns hosting a market where only sats are accepted as currency and so far it seems like they’ve had some great success. They’re getting real merchants to show up, meetup members are branching out and learning new skills to sell for sats, and even many children are involved. Nicks daughter, only nine, makes 3D printed bitcoin accepted here signs and other trinkets and sells them at these markets. She’s well equipped to send and receive sats and loves collecting bitcoin. They each said the kids are big in numbers and are all generally really excited and capable to collect Satoshis, which is just wonderful. Bitcoiners making Bitcoiners. Not just in social network peers, but biologically too! As the network grows, it grows. Among this conversation and the roaring conversations all around me it’s really hard to give any weight to the doom calls of @denlillaapan or anyone else who shouts bitcoin's current exchange rate is a mark of its failure. How can that be? Bitcoin doesn’t promise to increase in fiat value forever. Bitcoin doesn’t know fiat exists. It promises to allow us to send a transaction over the internet peer to peer with a unit of account that has a finite supply. And that’s about it! It has never failed in those regards, so to call the project a failure among this little dip is just lost on me. I think this rhetoric is even hostile to bitcoin's purpose and is self-defeating. At this point we’re at block 937307 and the panel is about to start. The area in front of the stage is packed and the screen behind the panel highlights the theme for tonight: building community. I throw an ear to this conversation and that and I pick up snippets of growth everywhere I listen. People networking, talks of starting meetups, projects being worked on or started, conversations of successes and failures, there’s nearly 100 people in this room and everywhere I listen I hear growth. Slow, inevitable growth. At block 937308, sandals under my chair, sitting crossed legged and doing my best to not socialize, I look over my shoulder at a bookshelf with many familiar books. Mastering Bitcoin, Grokking Bitcoin, The Bitcoin standard, and Natalie Brunell’s new Bitcoin is for Everyone. I arm myself with the book, nose down, and thumb through. I’ve been curious about the book and have been wanting to vet it so I can perhaps recommend it where I thought appropriate. Overall I was pleased with what I saw, not much deviation from everything we’re used to in these introductory books, but I decided I wouldn’t mind recommending it to certain people.

During block 937311 the panelists finally begin. I didn’t do too much notetaking during the entire panel portion because I wanted to listen and pay attention, so I don’t have as much information as I’d like to share with you. But at 937315 they were each asked what it takes to start and maintain a meetup. They each gave their spiel and it was general consensus that consistency is key whether you have just 2 people or 100. Just keep showing up, learning and practicing, and eventually you will have a solid base for others to stand on and grow with you. It was really cool to see each of these guys, from their own meetups, coming together and creating this big super meetup! It reminds me of big fat lightning nodes with their own established channel connections connecting to each other for the first time. At 937316 the topic was the proliferation of the Mid-Atlantic Bitcoin meetup and what we can do to keep it going. The message was interconnectivity. Grow locally and reach out abroad to learn and connect with each other. The bitcoin way. It was really nice to see everyone come together from multiple cities and states, all around the north east, to form this big hodgepodge of Bitcoiners. It wasn’t just the panellists from all over, mind you, it was the entire crowd. Individuals came from all over to support their own friends who were speaking and intermingle with like-minded people with one common goal. Bitcoin is not dead friends. It hasn’t failed. It’s growing and abundant with life. Nick later told me that someone from this meetup was so pumped and motivated that he started his own meetup the day after! And that one can be found here: https://www.meetup.com/myrtle-beach-bitcoin-meetup-group/?msockid=059fceea45a16db72c7ada6744cb6c36

At block 937321 the panels were done, and the crowd started to wind down. There was an advertised merch room with free bitcoin themed things to take so I went to check that out with Nick and Lacey. There was so much stuff! There were many bitcoin accepted here signs made by NoWastebtcSigns, an awesome project. Here’s a geyser fund for them: https://geyser.fund/project/nowastebtcsigns. There were flyers for a cool website https://www.bitcoinmerchantcommunity.org/ that I think were made by https://www.herecomesbitcoin.org/ because there were images of that hilarious character on them. There were even plushies of that character but only a few were lucky to get one. When you scanned the QR code it brought you to a page that was built for merchants to walk them through accepting their first sats. There were also links to facebook where they could connect to other merchants who have started to accept sats too. They went quick! I gathered a few things for Dana from this post: I got her the flyer, a small plastic bitcoin accepted here sign, and a few stickers with the same message. Some subtle, some not.

Overall, great time. It was really cool and motivating to be among so many bitcoiners in person and it was a great reminder of just how not-dire Bitcoin's health is. A network's value is directly proportional to the number of its participants and it was a deep pleasure to find myself among many of them. Everyone was in high spirits and excited to share and learn and expand. Ever growing. There was no Bitcoin is dead talk, Bitcoin failed us, no nasty opinionated name calling about BIP 110 or OP-Return limits, just a happy growth focused crowd. Ever growing.