The Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, the country’s oldest and largest Bitcoin advocacy organization, founded by Anthony Di Iorio in April 2013, has announced a host of new updates related to the Bitcoin Expo, an upcoming event that starts April 11th Toronto will be held on the 13th. Although there have already been two smaller Bitcoin-related meetings in Canada, with the Bitcoin Summit in Toronto last October and Coinfest in Vancouver in February, the Bitcoin Expo will be the first big event, the big one Make a marketing effort and will attract attendees and speakers from Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. The event has been in the works for several months and was officially announced in November 2013; Now the Bitcoin Alliance has released a new website for the expo, including the full list of speakers, sponsorship packages and tickets for sale.
The expo takes place at the Metro Toronto Convention Center, the largest conference and convention center in the country. The conference area will comprise at least four large rooms, including two conference rooms with 500 seats each, a smaller conference room and a media room as well as smaller rooms for events such as fireside chats. The exact schedule is not yet known, but it is publicly known that the main event with presentations on Saturday and Sunday will be $ 100 for a higher value ticket on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday morning there will also be a free event “Learn More About Bitcoin” with 200 available places as well as a hackathon on cryptocurrency technologies. Ticket costs are among the lowest of any Bitcoin event in the past year, with basic tickets at $ 200 (reduced to $ 180 if you become a free member of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada) compared to $ 300 for the Bitcoin Foundation official conference 2013 in San Jose, € 350 for their upcoming 2014 event in Amsterdam, $ 200-250 for Miami and $ 500 for the Inside Bitcoins conference in New York. The expo will also be non-profit and rely heavily on volunteers to organize the event, and all proceeds will go directly to the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada.
The list of speakers now contains well over 40 speakers from different areas of Bitcoin life; Bitcoin business owners and venture capitalists, members of the libertarian communities in Canada and the US, nonprofits, community organizers, a range of different “Cryptocurrency 2.0” projects (and other more humble altcoins), bitcoin media outlets, and developers are all represented. Some of the speakers are:
- Anthony Di Iorio, Founder of the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup, the Bitcoin Coworking Space and Community Center Bitcoin Decentral, Kryptokit and the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada. After a long career in geothermal drilling technology and later in real estate, Anthony first joined the Bitcoin community in late 2012 and immediately started the first Toronto Bitcoin Meetup in November 2012, making Toronto the third city in the country to host a meetup after Vancouver and Montreal. He is now full-time on several Bitcoin projects, including KryptoKit, Bitcoin Decentral, Ethereum and the Bitcoin Alliance.
- Andreas Antonopoulos, a well-known expert on bitcoin technology and public speaker at bitcoin events. Andreas also regularly participates in the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast and has recently also been Chief Technology Officer of blockchain.info.
- Charles Hoskinson, a Colorado-based mathematician and cryptographer who studied analytical number theory and worked on the Goldbach conjecture in graduate school before moving to cryptography and later to bitcoin. Charles is best known as the founder of the Bitcoin Education Project and the creator of Bitcoin, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Crypto, a Udemy-based online course that introduces Bitcoin and how it works internally.
- Cody Wilson, a Texan crypto anarchist and founder and director of Defense Distributed, the organization that made the first 3D printed weapon. Since then, Cody has become increasingly interested in Bitcoin and is also a founding member of the Dark Wallet project.
- Joseph David, founder of the Calgary-based exchange CAVirtex, the oldest running Canadian bitcoin exchange and the first to start trading Litecoin. CAVirtex is also developing a platform for merchant services and is increasingly becoming a major player in the Canadian Bitcoin merchant ecosystem.
- Jason King, Founder of Sean’s Outpost, a homeless shelter that serves hundreds of people in Pensacola, Florida. Sean’s Outpost was originally launched in 2012 but started accepting bitcoin donations in March 2013 when the price of a bitcoin first shot above $ 50. Jason posted a post on Reddit asking everyone to donate Bitcoin and feed 40 homeless people at a cost of $ 1.25 per person. Four days later, Sean’s Outpost had raised over $ 600, and Sean’s Outpost has since become a regular presence in the Bitcoin community. More recently, Jason has also started Satoshi Forest, a nine-acre “homeless sanctuary” in Pensacola, and he’s now running across America to raise awareness of homelessness and Bitcoin.
- Jonathan Mohan, the founder of BitcoinNYC, a professional association of Bitcoin users in New York, and the founder of the New York Bitcoin Meetup, which is now one of the largest in the country.
- * Charlie Lee is the creator of Litecoin, the second largest cryptocurrency and one of the oldest still around today. Litecoin is best known for the use of the Scrypt mining algorithm, which requires a large amount of RAM for the calculation, in order to make it difficult to manufacture special hardware for it. Charlie also works for Coinbase, one of the most popular ways to buy Bitcoin in the US.
- Ron Gross is co-founder of the Israeli Bitcoin Community, one of the most concentrated Bitcoin communities in the world with several thousand members in their Facebook group out of a total population of 500,000 in Tel Aviv and 8 million in Israel. He is also now the Executive Director of the Mastercoin Foundation and a founding member of the Global Bitcoin Alliance.
Tickets are available for sale on the Bitcoin Expo website, and sponsorship packages between $ 5,000 and $ 35,000 have also been released. The bitcoin community in Canada has grown rapidly over the past year, with burgeoning local communities in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, each with a large meetup group, dedicated community center, and a bitcoin ATM; Bitcoin Expo is developing into a major opening of the Canadian Bitcoin community to the whole world. I look forward to seeing you there!
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