We were thrilled to sponsor TABConf Atlanta this year! Unlike the Miami Bitcoin conference, where it is easy to lose the technical signal in the hype noise (admittedly, half the fun of Miami!), TABConf was all signal. Overall many of the discussions were centered around the growing pains of a growing and healthy ecosystem.

Discussions on scaling challenges ranged across technical, regulatory, and organizational topics. I always leave these things wishing I could’ve caught more sessions, but below are a few of the takeaways from the ones I attended:

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Lots of attention on the liquidity and pathfinding limitations that are still holding back the Lightning Network. As the ecosystem matures, everyone is arriving at the same conclusion: LN cannot reach Visa scale until payment routing becomes reliable enough to support enterprise-grade service levels

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Awesome panel discussion on the legalities of Bitcoin and running a Bitcoin company. Some of my biggest takeaways

• Feature flag everything in your product! This is a good practice that we always to follow with our clients but it’s especially important in a space where regulation is always in flux
• Bitcoin is the only digital asset that SEC views as a commodity (for now). That’s beneficial for the sake of less regulation
• KYC and AML are some of the most restrictive regulations BTC companies must contend with. Much more than just being technically arduous, these requirements fly in the face of the trustless money ethos at the core of BTC
  

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During the Offchain Panel, Paul Itoi, CEO of the Sphinx team, drove an interesting discussion about the challenges of running a SOC2-compliant BTC/LN company. The crux of the problem is that, if you’re a company running a custodial solution, without a proper signing solution in place, your IT will have far more access to the funds of your business (and your customers!) than they should.

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Last but certainly not least, one of my favorite sessions was the Bitcoin LARP. Reminiscent of a vacation bible school type of experience, attendees situated themselves at one of five tables — each of which represented a miner node on the Bitcoin blockchain. Each table had baskets and envelopes representing transactions, mined blocks, mempool, etc. We used yarn to establish connections to our other table node peers and worked feverishly to solve hashes so we could show proof of work and be the first to mine blocks! This was a really fun and valuable educational exercise. Thanks to @niftynei for leading such a great workshop (and for helping us sus out all those janky invalid blocks coming from the sketch node to the right of us)