Origins

Back in March of 2022, I was inspired to start a Bitcoin meetup local to my city of Bellingham, Washington. We had a great run, and I wouldn't necessarily say that it's over per se. Near the end of Cascadia Bitcoin's run, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and after his birth we had to suspend our meetups for the forseeable future. We were overwhelmed as new parents, and we weren't quite sure what to do with ourselves. I'm a long time bitcoiner, and I love orange pilling people. There's something really appealing about watching people have the a-ha moment and seeing the hope and excitement Bitcoin inspires once you get past the initial confusion.

The city in which I live is small and predominantly hostile to Bitcoin for whatever reason. There's a large collectivist mentality in the urban areas of Western Washington and I believe it's fundamentally incompatible with the value proposition of Bitcoin. That being said, I knew we would probably face some resistance in marketing ourselves as a meetup group and drawing in people who didn't already have very strong pro-Bitcoin views.

Oh man was I wrong.

We initially started by creating a Meetup.com group and doing some simple advertising on my personal X / Twitter account, and got a few attendees confirming for our first meetup. We chose Kulshan Brewing as our venue as they had a great space and are a local favorite brewery.

Our first meetup was a great success, and we saw an even greater turnout with each subsequent meetup. Eventually we developed several regular attendees, and we consistently had attendees who were entirely new to Bitcoin.

We even had US Senate candidate Bryan Solstin stop by for a visit who delivered a talk on his Senatorial campaign as a Bitcoin advocate.

@cascadiabitcoin Meetup in Bellingham, Washington. pic.twitter.com/zMN5KlEFOW

— Solstin (@BryanBSolstin) July 22, 2022

During the peak of our meetup attendance, I was invited to speak on the Hard Money Hard Knox podcast. Shane is a really great person and fellow Bitcoiner. I really enjoyed our conversation and I'm looking forward to seeing what else he does in the space.

Lessons Learned

1. A negative in-person reaction to Bitcoin is usually not the end of the story

During the course of the meetup, it was not uncommon for critics of Bitcoin to come just to provoke an argument or a debate. I've seen this happen a few times, and it's not the end of the world. It's just a part of the process. A few of these people returned and are now actively involved in the Bitcoin community.

2. The best intentions can lead to negative outcomes

We had a local artist attend one of our first meetups and she was interested in selling her paintings online and exposing the busines to the Bitcoin economy. She was convinced that these "NFT" things she'd heard about had something to do with Bitcoin. We did our best to educate, but it was clear she'd made her mind up that Bitcoin wasn't the path forward in this space and she became a devout shitcoiner, still selling her art for ETH and SOL to this day.

3. The diversity of thought in the Bitcoin community is off the charts

Many of the people Cascadia Bitcoin led us to meet were your typical Bitcoiners, very self selective, freedom-minded, distrusting of institutions of power, and self-sovereign. Aside from this cohort, we had attendees who worked with EDM festivals to help merchants accept Bitcoin at festival events. We even had an accountant attend who was interested in expanding his business to market specifically to Bitcoin users.

4. Bitcoin meetups are hard. There's no way around it.

The commitment is hard if you have a regular meetup cadence. It can be difficult to convince people that your meetup is worth attending. It can be difficult to find the right venue. It's entirely possible that you show up to your meetup spot just to find that they're at capacity, putting you in a difficult situation when attendees start arriving. Thankfully we had several venues near Kulshan Brewing that could function as overflows.

5. Be prepared to feel like a cruise director

There's not always some interesting current event to talk about. At times, it might be necessary to simply convert your meetup topic into a lesson on some technical subject that you're confident most attendees could value in some way. Either way, it's incumbent upon the organizer to ensure that there's always something compelling to talk about, even if it isn't appealing to all of your attendees.

Conclusion

Again, Cascadia Bitcoin is not gone, we're just on an extended hiatus because the organizers became parents! I'm looking forward to booting it up again in the future as it was really rewarding. My biggest takeaway from the entire experience is that increasing your life's surface area for contact with other Bitcoiners will lead you to strange, amazing, and insightful places, and I highly recommend giving it a try.