Thread by @AlamedaTrabucco

I'll be honest -- I was dreading this conference. I'm not great at meeting strangers, I dislike much of networking, I was vaguely concerned that crypto culture might be toxic in person, and I'm not wild about public speaking. Also, Miami is so hot.

How wrong I was! I enjoyed basically the entire trip -- it managed to be productive, invigorating, sentimental, and super fun all at once.

I was pretty sure the perfect timing + chance to speak meant this was the only conference I'd ever attend, but now I doubt it.

A thread about being wrong and not really making money but "generating personal value" or something.

WORK

Honestly, I didn't do that much work. @rsalame7926 asked me to sound like a nerd to some people a few times to lend credibility, but mostly I tried to meet a bunch of our OTC/etc. counterparties without a specific agenda.

And this still felt productive to me!

The counterparties we have strong relationships with tend to
- make both sides more $
- involve way less of a settlement headache
- be more fun to participate in
So strengthening those relationships is really great, and I'm not *totally* useless at this.

And our panel went well! And spurred a bunch of people to come up to me throughout the rest of the weekend to ask stuff, which I always enjoy.

VIGOR

It's a little hard to explain this, but I'm more excited about crypto than I have been in a long time. Seeing so many people working on things:
- passionately
- skillfully
- which I'm also passionate about
Had a stronger effect on me than I expected.

This was true for people outside of Alameda and FTX and BlockFolio and Solana and the other projects/teams I already cared a ton about, but I found meeting the people from those teams the most fun.

https://twitter.com/SBF_Alameda/status/1401568493154279432?s=20

To single out just one such interaction, Brett (FTX US's new-ish president) posted some thoughts on the conference here, too -- meeting and learning about his plans for the future was a definite highlight, he's super smart and has great ideas.

https://twitter.com/Brett_FTXUS/status/1401658019109392389?s=20

There's nothing like seeing capable and hard-working people working hard at what they care about, and it inspires me to keep trying to do the same thing.

FEELINGS

When @SBF_Alameda and co. started working basically full-time on FTX a few years ago, it was honestly rough going for a while for Alameda. Our trading team was small, our dev team was smaller, and we had the new giant challenge of market making on FTX.

This was WAY more intense than any of our other market making obligations -- we wanted to provide amazing liquidity from day one, and it turns out that doing that without knowing you have the fastest data and best models for EVERYTHING is a recipe for disaster.

It took Alameda a lot of work to both do this and fill in the gaps left by our team shrinking so much -- we're still playing catch-up, in some ways. And of course the FTX team has worked extraordinarily hard for the past few years, as well.

These efforts have led to incredible results -- Alameda has managed to be WAY more profitable than we ever were pre-FTX on a substantially larger capital base all while no longer really having bad problems with MMing, and I don't need to explain FTX's success.

Getting to share in all that has been amazing, and this weekend we got to see one of the biggest tangible signs of this success -- which gave us a rare opportunity to take pause and think about how amazing this all is.

https://twitter.com/AlamedaTrabucco/status/1400959589655457793?s=20

More generally I kept having opportunities to reflect on how much my life has changed since I started trading crypto, and the ways in which all of this stuff can be directly tied to like, a few important decisions and pieces of great luck.

https://twitter.com/AlamedaTrabucco/status/1401263294971797507?s=20

(Which isn't an especially useful thought honestly :P given that it's true for everything ever, the magnitude of late have just made it feel weighty or something.)

And being around so many people who were feeling similar things has a magnifying effect -- and also highlighted just impactful this might actually be.

PLAY

Mostly, the whole trip was just really fun. Getting to meet great people I'd never met + see lots of friends I'd not seen in ages (+ @rsalame7926 which was decidedly meh) was a blast, and the nonstop action (outside the conference itself) has been much-needed lately.

Tons of parties, spending time outside, witnessing a historic boxing anti-climax live, and chilling with lots of awesome people for 4 days straight is always gonna be great -- that they were also generally people sharing in the same sort of euphoria I was made it even better.

This is specific to me, but crypto's bro-y culture can feel alienating -- or at least feel like it's going to be, which sort of pre-alienates. That barely happened, I've actually never felt more like "one of the guys" than I did at points this weekend (with a few sets of people).

(Which isn't to say elements of this culture aren't toxic for some people, just that an axis along which I guessed there would be toxicity pleasantly surprised me.)

I literally missed two flights (one intentionally, one less so) out of here to extend hanging out with some people, and ended up having a weirdly great night as a result. Sitting in the airport right now writing this on no sleep isn't awesome but that's the price you pay.

Also, yesterday @ledgerstatus (who I had just met) gave me a pair of pants from his suitcase because I was wearing shorts and needed pants.

Overall I was just having fun the entire time and also achieving a lot (work- and catharsis-wise), which is something I was worried wouldn't happen. And I feel like if I enjoyed this, probably many other people will enjoy stuff like it in the future.

Hope to see you there!