Vitalik Buterin outright boycotted the 2018 NYC Consensus conference weeks ago citing Coindesk’s commitment to advertising over good information. A top reddit post recaps the event as the “worst conference,” lacking depth, but several major announcements were made… and there were several Lambos.

“Worst Conference”

The Reddit post in r/Cryptocurrency summarizes the event poking at lack of depth and “how disorganized everything was.”

“Talks were superficial…”
“The whole presentation vibe was, ‘let’s bend over backward for bankers and discuss how we’re going to do it.’”
“Presenters rehashed cliche after cliche… Instead of delving into the fundamental problems facing crypto (real world usage by the average joe, scalability, centralization).”

Who Lambo?

About 8500 people attended conference. CoinDesk sold each ticket for $2000 and “last minute” admission was fixed at $3000. This means over $17 million in revenue from ticket sales. Money was certainly around – someone snapped a picture of a trail of Lamborghinis outside the conference entrance.

Parody Protesters

There were a number of actual protestors to the event, as well as one man claiming NEM developers owe him millions of dollars. But one group staged an entire protest parody.

They identified themselves as members of the movement “Bankers Against Bitcoin.” They held placards and banners against the conference, cryptocurrencies and blockchain to create awareness of the dominance of Blockchain in the future.

Other Highlights

Gemini to support more cryptos – The Winklevoss twins announced that Gemini would support Zcash, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. This makes them the first first licensed crypto exchange in the world to trade Zcash – a privacy coin.

New York City Economic Development Corporation bullish on blockchain – “We’re a global leader in finance, real estate, media, and tech – all industries seeing incredible innovation from this new technology. The city is putting a big focus into blockchain to find out how we can grow the industry and make sure it’s creating great opportunities for New Yorkers.” – James Patchett, CEO of the (NYCEDC)

Jimmy Song vs. Joe Lubin? – Jimmy Song, an investor at Blockchain Capital and Joe Lubin, the founder of Ethereum based startup, ConsenSys had a heated debate about blockchain technology. The two ended up actually making a bet on blockchain implementation. Song wasn’t convinced by many potential benefits of the blockchain tech presented at the event. He likened them to “magical blockchain dust.”

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