As the escalator whisked me up into Sydney’s ICC, it was hard to know what to expect. At 53, a part of me worried I’d be the oldest person at The Australian Crypto Convention. Already, I was regretting my decision to wear chinos.

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Inside, a large crowd was already gathering. But most of these people weren’t there to learn about technology, they were there to celebrate their involvement in crypto and swap stories with others. And with Bitcoin threatening to break the $100,000 mark on that very day, they were exuberant.

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Even before I entered the auditorium, I’d been welcomed into the family. David (I’ve changed his and other names) told me he was a mechanical engineer who been managing a crypto portfolio for the last 5 years. What Bitcoin’s rise had given him was options—an opportunity to break out of the rut society had carved for him and pursue a different path. The two of us quickly started talking to Jim, a builder, who was now funding some of his projects from his crypto investments. For a few moments, we were united by our dreams for the future of a game-changing digital asset.

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If anything, the atmosphere inside the conference was even more bullish. It was hard not to get caught up in the joy of it all. There was an unavoidable buzz around Bitcoin’s latest all-time high, and its meteoric rise was perfectly illustrated by the manual adjustment that had to be made to the ‘get closest to the price of Bitcoin’ competition at the Binance stand—the booming crypto asset had risen so fast that even the best-laid marketing plans were in need of an update!

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There were a few notable themes at the conference. The first was how AI is going to help us unlock ever-greater benefits from blockchain in the coming years. I learned that the sophistication of AI is growing exponentially. At the time of writing, it currently has an IQ of 120. By this time next year, it will have doubled. Here, among these people who were clearly committed to improving society as a whole, that filled me with promise for the future.

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The second theme lent itself a little to The Matrix, Several keynotes made mention of the unsustainable levels of debt in the world and how traditional solutions like printing more money were just perpetuating a cycle of doom. Raoul Pal, Jamie Coutts, Drew Bradford and Robert Waugh gave expert insight into the truth about such things as money, inflation, debt and banks, and how essential it is that the world stops making the same mistakes it has made for millennia. For the thousands in attendance, however, none of this was new. They wore their knowledge that they had already broken free from the system like a badge of honour.

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Perhaps what surprised me most about Australian CryptoCon was the diversity of the audience. I spoke to Ian, a retired project manager who told me he dabbled in crypto, and to Mel, a mum of two who had brought her children along with her for a day out, while her husband focused on their next moves in crypto. It was a family event—and there was plenty for the kids to do; on a number of occasions I saw them marvelling at the Wayex ‘fish tank’, in which hopeful treasure hunters plunged into the water to try and find the winning chip among thousands of others. Another father was with his teenage sons, taking in the keynote speeches and schooling them in the true world order. Plenty of other kids sat on the floor at some of the stalls, trying out the latest blockchain gaming technology.

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For me, this led to the third—and perhaps most unexpected—theme of the conference: community. For all the talk of web 3 technology and the need to decentralise banking, gaming, social media—and, in the case of Fabel, publishing—what was clear just by looking at the audience was that this was decentralisation in action. It was in the Davids, the Jims, the Mels and the Ians taking control of their lives in a much fairer digital world. If anything, the word community didn’t do it justice. It was more like a movement. And I felt privileged to take my place among them as they took another step collectively towards the mainstream.

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