Bitcoin Brunch 101
So, you want to start a bitcoin brunch? No, you don't have to do it every week. And you don't have to write an essay. Though if you want to you should. And if you feel like you want to host a bitcoin brunch, you also definitely should!
I returned to bitcoin culture after a hiatus of a few years and felt disappointment at what looked like similar trends and patterns of entrepreneurship that had bored me before. In changing the world economy bitcoin shall certainly make many people rich, but a marketplace of self-satisfied fortune seekers will barely change the world. We change the world in knowing the fortune's location and bringing that knowledge to others so that the community might more generally bathe in the splendors of prosperity. I host Bitcoin Brunch as an investment in the future of bitcoin culture by consciously sharing the scarcest resources I have, my time; to allow the free flow of ideas and interests and opportunity--not just for me, not just for you, but for us. The idea of we.
To quote a movie I haven't yet seen, "If you build it, they will come." Most of the bitcoin or crypto culture concerns itself with ways of maximizing their amount of fiat currency. While I understand that people need livelihoods, I often emphasize that we derive our wealth from communities. Rather than a focus of extracting wealth from the community, bitcoin brunch allows us to grow the value in the community by simply growing the community. With every new person with whom we connect, the skills and knowledge and wisdom in our community grows. We are each of us nodes in a social network, and the more connections we make, the stronger those connections, the more our prosperity grows, without ever needing to diminish anyone's wealth.
To that end, I have built my bitcoin community by inviting those in my virtual bitcoin social networks to come here, where I sit for five hours, every Sunday, and talk about Bitcoin, the future of money, and whatever is on our minds. I don't know how much longer I can sustain this, but the longer I do the more life it seems to have in it. Since deciding to host bitcoin brunch, I met hundreds of people, participated in the formation of a physical Bitcoin hacker space, (Bitcoin Grove) and began forming the Timechain Foundation, a non-profit organization meant to promote Bitcoin education and community building. I could not have expected nearly three years ago how things would have turned out today, and I feel the same kind of wonder and hope about all the future in front of us. I know that so much of what is to come for me is a result of what I started here and so I say to anyone feeling the need to start their own bitcoin meetup: do it! Make it happen! Find a way because tomorrow is calling out to you, and we're going to need friends where we're going.