On the same day SteemFest Amsterdam was announced, I booked my flight to Buenos Aires. So although I am sorry to miss the first real life gathering of Steemians worldwide, I am not too sad, as I will spend the whole month of November in the Argentine capital, one of my favourite cities in the world.
The main reason for my trip is the Latin American Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference (in shorthand: LaBitConf), which will take place on November 4 and 5 in this theatre in downtown Buenos Aires, which normally hosts Tango shows:
The first edition of LaBitConf took place in December 2013 in Buenos Aires, at the peak of the 2013 Bitcoin price rallye, and you might imagine how excited everybody was at that time. The concept is to rotate through big cities in Latin America, so the 2014 edition took place in Rio de Janeiro, the 2015 edition in Mexico City. In 2016, the organisers chose their home town Buenos Aires as the conference city again, so they do not have to travel so much. That's a good decision for travellers, as Buenos Aires is a beautiful and interesting city, that is definitely worth the long flight. And by the way, November is spring time there, with average temperatures around 25 degrees Celsius.
Buenos Aires has an extremely vivid and multifaceted Bitcoin and Blockchain scene. I will write about it soon in more detail. But as today is the last day to get a 50% discount on the conference ticket, I want to dedicate my post to LaBitConf, which I consider to be the best Bitcoin and Blockchain conference in the world - and I have seen many.
The organisers of all three editions I visited made a really good job in inviting top notch speakers such as Andreas Antonopoulos, Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, Charlie Shrem, Trace Meyer, Tony Gallippi, Michael Terpin or Anthony Di Iorio and to create an entertaining and informative conference programme with them.
The level of the talks and panels was extremely high, people from many countries of Latin America plus guests from the US, Europe and Asia attended, and you always had the feeling to belong to a global family of idealists.
Unlike the stereotype you might have of Latin America, everything was smoothly organised. Argentinians are sometimes called the "Germans of South America", and there is something to it. They might not play football as well as we, but they do get stuff done...
But as you would expect from an event in Latin America, it was fun, fun, fun. There was always a cool side programme like tango shows and barbecues in Buenos Aires, beach football in Rio and free style wrestling in Mexico. These off-conference activities offered the best opportunities to get to know each other.
This time you can even book a V.I.P. ticket, which entitles you to hang out with the Crypto celebrities on a ranch in the country side and have some huge, juicy steaks and Malbec red whine with them, while discussing the right block size.
Or the business model of Steem, as it will surely be a topic in Buenos Aires.