And there was heat — a humid, sticky South Florida heat; the kind all the Californians and New Yorkers who moved to Miami during the pandemic’s winter doldrums were warned about.
But Friday and Saturday, at least 12,000 people descended on Miami to make up for lost time, flocking to the largest Bitcoin conference in the world and the first major in-person business conference since the pandemic began.
The exuberance of being in person, indoors, in a crowd for the first time in more than a year was electric.
Bitcoin 2021 heralded the receding of the pandemic, with comfortingly familiar and mundane elements of a business conference: the branded plastic sunglasses, brightly colored sponsor booths, lanyards and panels.
It was another sign that the often absurd world of digital currencies was inching its way toward mainstream acceptance, or at least mainstream curiosity.
The line Friday morning to enter the venue, a warehouse and outdoor site called Mana Wynwood, stretched more than a mile.
Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, announced this year that the city would accept tax payments in cryptocurrency, let its employees collect salaries with it and explore holding some on its balance sheet.
Moishe Mana, a real estate mogul who owned the venue, walked around the crowded concourse of booths and crypto art with a small entourage.
Mana was not a big crypto guy, per se, but he recognized its power, comparing the devotion of its followers to a religion.
Onstage, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, entrepreneurs and cryptocurrency billionaires, preached to the choir.
Later, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and payments company Square, offered his own endorsement.
On Saturday, the conference played a video of Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, announcing a bill to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country.
Around half of the group were Miami residents like Stephanie Davis, who left her job at Google in Silicon Valley and moved with her husband, Eric Kami, last year.
The conversation turned to the recent dip in the NFT market.
The conversation moved on to Zed Run, a site for buying, racing and breeding digital horses.
Down the road at the historic Lyric Theater, a crowd sipped wine at a “Wine, Women and Crypto” gathering.
Only 14% of American adults have purchased cryptocurrency, according to a survey by The Ascent, a financial services ratings site.
One attendee, Shownda Pagan, a nonprofit executive, said she bought Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, over a year ago after her nephew and son encouraged her to do so.
I witnessed colleagues who had worked together via Slack and Zoom for a year meet one another in person for the first time, hugging.
Some gossiped about the previous night’s “Whale” party, thrown for attendees who bought a special $19,795 ticket to the conference, and speculated about who would win a boxing match Sunday between Floyd Mayweather Jr., the former boxer and current crypto peddler, and Logan Paul, the YouTuber.