This post first appeared on my medium page here
I started getting closer to bitcoin early this spring thanks to a course held by Ferdinando M. Ametrano - the Chairman of the workshop committee - and since them it has been a crescendo of knowledge and astonishment.
Frankly speaking when I discovered that my city had been chosen to host the most important bitcoin event of the year I took it like a sign of destiny: I started retrieving the presentations from the previous editions and deepen the topics announced in the current edition.
So without taking it too long these are my first impressions:
(Very) Different views of the subject are what make great this (any) community
It’s far harder to choose the best solution among the many proposed than to propose one (also not easy at all anyway)
We totally need a second layer to scale (and Seg Wit, LN, etc.), but it’s absolutely necessary to focus also on the end-user perspective: about this I found really interesting and complete the presentation by Jonas Schnelli and, borrowing a few words (completely out of context) from Adlai Chandrasekhar:
if it’s not usable, then it’s not useful
Timestamping is an incredible use of the blockchain and I really hope opentimestamps will be the standard
Academia interest about scaling bitcoin is fundamental (even if quite hard to follow after lunch)
(Again) Community is crucial and, what is more, a committed community is a very important scaling factor. I know it may sound quite pointless, but I think that scaling is also about connecting with each other during breaks…never mind if someone noticed that, this time, there were just a few lone wolves or if debating caused a couple of minutes (maybe seconds) of delay in starting a couple of presentations.
I think the organization of this kind of events is more than extra-complicated so I really wanna express all my appreciation to all the staff: thank you!!!
If you missed something (or everything) this is the link to follow: https://scalingbitcoin.org/presentations