Joshua Henslee: My experience at the London Blockchain Conference 2023

The last time I traveled from the US was for the previous CoinGeek conference held in London in March 2020. Three long years later, I traveled abroad again to the UK for the renamed London Blockchain Conference.

Going into the event, I intended to evaluate two metrics – firstly, the number of attendees in a post-COVID world (now that the world is largely “open”) would exceed those of the last London conference which found place in a pre-covid world? And second, how many attendees were aware of Ordinals and their significant impact on the digital currency space?

Largely due to the shift to being more generic rather than just focusing on the BSV blockchain, unique attendees on Day 1 were actually around 1,600, surpassing the total for CoinGeek London 2020 by roughly double. As a result, the energy of this conference more than matched the previous one, as attendees were genuinely interested in what could actually be achieved with blockchain technology, which unfortunately remains quite unclear due to its use (and lack thereof) 14 years after Bitcoin’s creation .

The conference content of course still had a bias towards BSV blockchain as the blockchain of choice, which I have been more bearish on in the first half of 2023 due to the Ordinals craze spurring the adoption of other Proof of Work, UTXO-based blockchains such as BTC, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Litecoin (LTC).

With BSV blockchain bias was also a focus on corporate and government adoption, which remains mostly coming forever soon. Meanwhile, the market insists on trading JPEGs, meme coins, and anything anyone can create that wasn’t tradable before. Failure of those in the BSV blockchain community to accept this fact frustrates me in 2023, where some businesses continue to double down on pitching to non-existent target customers outside of “crypto”, including large enterprises and governments. Governments and businesses will eventually adopt blockchain; they just want to be last.

The metaphor I gave during the How and When to Integrate Blockchain Tech panel on Day 1 was a child dragging his reluctant parent to the sandbox to play. In this example, the child willingly entered the room and earned money. Watch above where a 5 year old has made over $1600 selling eight of his drawings on BTC. The parents join in only after seeing this happen many times, and eventually they realize they have no choice but to join in on the fun – but they would never join if it didn’t happen first, or if they weren’t forced . Large entities such as enterprises and authorities will follow a similar path.

Aside from catching up with old friends I hadn’t seen in three long years (or really thought I’d never see again), much of my time was spent discussing this new paradigm with people one-on-one. I have become more confident in this path of adoption after witnessing the large amounts of liquidity flowing into Ordinal’s assets on top of BTC in just 120 days. This independent market has been completely decoupled from the traditional stock markets, while digital currencies have correlated with the Nasdaq in the past. As expected, many were unaware of the activity going on or pushed back that the craze was a bubble. Those who had heard of Ordinals were not aware of the details.

This personal incident has convinced me that we are somehow still so early adopters of this technology, despite most people walking around with a hyper-connected supercomputer in their pocket. When we understand this paradox, we cannot understand how quickly this entire market and sentiment can and will change.

See: London Blockchain Conference 2023

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