I just spent 4 days at two of the most important conferences in the emerging “blockchain/crypto-currency space.”

One was <a href="http://www.coindesk.com/events/consensus-2017/">Consensus</a>. The other <a href="http://tokensummit.com/">Token Summit.</a>

Honestly, it’s going to take a few weeks or months to totally put my head all around this, but here are a few themes that I personally observed.

I’d estimate that I had about 100 conversations with many of the people who are at the epicenter of this wave.

A case in point…it is my understanding that there are approximately 35 people in the world who make up the Bitcoin Core team, responsible for the protocol upkeep.

I talked with 1 of them for about 15 minutes.

Ok, so what were some of the things that went on?

<strong>Bitcoin-Escape Velocity?</strong>

While the events were going on, Bitcoin itself was having a remarkable run-up. Huge.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of it was that some of the people more toward the edge of the Bitcoin world, but still early adopters drank a ton of “Koolaid”’ and decided they were feeling more confident about it.

Whatever the reason, there was a nunspoken sense that this thing we call Bitcoin or “Decentralization” is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

So, because of that and the sense that the scaling debate pretty much resolved itself, people feel like, “ok, if this is going to $1,000,000 as <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/25/could-the-price-of-bitcoin-go-to-1-million.aspx">Wences suggests</a>, then I should get in there.”

As my <a href="http://www.blockintel.co/">friend Brandon said,</a> “escape velocity.” I thought that was solid.

<strong>Ethereum</strong>

Ethereum was also having a run-up during the conference and people are still bullish on it. I get the sense that, for some of these projects, however, there are many people who think, “hey, I can do an ICO (initial coin offering) and make a ton of money really quickly…and I can do it on Ethereum.”

To be fair, most of the people are not like that.  They are ridiculously passionate developers who are committed in a big way.

So, Ethereum gets props for the way in which it has such a bold vision, but at the same time, there were some legitimate concerns that it can really function at scale and that there are legitimate security concerns.  I had a long talk with <a href="http://www.twitter.com/muneeb">Dr. Muneeb Ali</a> from <a href="http://www.blockstack.org/">Blockstack</a> about this.

<strong>Power of the “Developer-Investor-Speculator”</strong>

Now here’s one thing that I discovered that really surprised me.

In this market of people putting their Ethereum tokens into ICOs for these decentralized start-ups, the funding sources are not your typical suited-up investors. Sure, some of the VCs are in there now, but this is truly crowd-sourced (except that after you own a token you are member of the network versus just entitled to a product or whatever as on Kickstarter).

So, here’s the thing.

Apparently, based on my rough, back of the envelope calculations, there are nearly 1500 computer science students in North America at top-tier schools like MIT, CMU, Berkeley who (if my math is right), probably are sitting on $30-40 million worth of crypto-currency.

And, 75% of it is in Ether versus 25% Bitcoin.

These guys (18-25 ish and 98% male) were too late for Bitcoin, but got in on the Ethereum ground floor.

There are probably another 1000 people globally.

Either way, tell me…when else in human history have people in that age group had that type of investable capital available to them?

To me, that’s a seismic shift in thinking about not just HOW you get your money as a start-up (ICO vs. regular funding), but also from WHOM (angels or VCs w/experience compared to college kids drinking Red Bull in their dorms).

There’s a whole opportunity here to map this network and identify its influencer trigger points.  Don’t worry. I’m already working on it. Should be done in a month.

Granted, that’s only a small (but influential) fraction of the investor market.

I learned also that the rough size of the hard-core cryptographic community that has a lot of pull in technical debates- is probably 24,000 globally at all age groups.  I don’t have a full grasp of that yet, but investigating.

<strong>Enthusiasm and Optimism and Speed</strong>

Almost universally, people were saying just how FAST things seemed to be progressing. The rate of innovation in things like various blockchains and solutions was mindboggling.

I had a long talk with the people like Zooko and Jack of <a href="http://www.z.cash.co/">zCash</a> (which went up by 100% on the day I met them <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/05/22/jpmorgan-chase-to-integrate-zcash-technology-to-its-enterprise-blockchain-platform/#613eefb97a33">due to the Chase announcement</a>, Ed from <a href="http://www.rchain.io/">RChain</a>, Max of <a href="http://www.lisk.io/">Lisk</a> (which was fun because I had the chance to practice German), <a href="http://www.cosmos.network">Jim from Cosmos</a>, and Shawn and Caleb from <a href="http://www.saltlending.com/">SALT</a>, the <a href="http://www.openbazaar.io/">OpenBazaar</a> team, the <a href="http://www.fermat.org/">Fermat</a> team including <a href="https://medium.com/@dan.jeffries">Dan Jeffries,</a> and <a href="http://www.storj.io/">John from Storj</a>,

Here’s what emerged from those chats.

“Game on.”

Everyone felt that this “blockchain thing” was picking up steam.

A few data points that I picked up on.
<ol>
 	<li>The <a href="http://www.coindesk.com/events/consensus-2017/">Consensus Summit</a> was over about 8 floors of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. You don’t do that for small things.</li>
 	<li>The <a href="http://tokensummit.com/">Token Summit</a> was totally overbooked and oversold. More than 600 people. I didn’t even get to hear any panels because they wouldn’t let people in (fire hazard, I suppose).  Of course, that’s a testament to the fact that <a href="http://startupmanagement.org/blog">William</a> and <a href="https://thecontrol.co/">Nick</a> both get the Zeitgeist of the ICO world.</li>
 	<li>The <a href="http://coincenter.org/">Coin Center</a> dinner was packed to the gills. As I said to Neeraj and Jerry after the event, “next year, you’re going to need a bigger room.”They told me they had to turn away a bunch of people for this year’s event.</li>
</ol>
Obviously, though, there’s not a lot of real “there” there and we’re still doing pilots, but you can start seeing the “real” stuff and it’s not so far off.

There’s MUCH more and I’ll put it up as it sinks in.

These will include (I hope):
<ul>
 	<li>How I am looking for “value” in these start-ups</li>
 	<li>Growing use cases and increase in pilots</li>
 	<li>The industrialization of data</li>
</ul>
As for the panels themselves,  I only went to two sessions…one featuring <a href="http://www.twitter.com/naval">Naval Ravikant</a> with <a href="http://www.usv.com/">Albert Wenger</a> and the Content Monetization one with <a href="http://www.21.co/">Lily from 21.co</a> and <a href="http://www.brave.com/">Brendan from Brave</a>

The former is like listening to the high priests of VC investing and the latter is the entree to a different post on blockchain+marketing’s future.

<strong>Trip to Crypto Valley</strong>

I did also mentally commit to the fact that I am going to make a pilgrimage to Crypto-valley this summer in Switzerland. Going to go for 25 meetings over 3 days.  I met some good folks like Guido from the <a href="http://www.zg.ch/economy">Department of Economic Affairs in Zug</a> who offered to assist.

<strong>Conclusion</strong>

I had to pay for this conference, so you better believe I was going to get my ROI. I feel like I did.

For me, it was about getting as broad and deep a picture of this emerging market as I possibly could and, though it’s even bigger than I can imagine at this moment, I definitely have a slightly clearer view.