Bitcoin faithful plan 2013 conferences

As bitcoin continues to gather steam, the burgeoning conference circuit surrounding it continues to grow. This year sees at least two important conferences scheduled, each on either side of the Atlantic.

The Bitcoin Foundation is to run a conference from May 17-19 in San Jose, California. Scheduled sessions at Bitcoin 2013 will cover subjects including using bitcoin for business, improving the virtual currency's ease of use, and preventing fraud. Integrating the currency with existing financial systems, regulatory compliance, and legal classification are also on the agenda (which is downloadable as a PDF). There will also be a hackathon for lightning project development.

The Bitcoin Foundation was founded in September 2012 by Peter Vessenes, the founder of the CoinLab incubator for bitcoin projects in Seattle. The Foundation's goals including publishing a set of best practices around bitcoin use. It also hopes to create an opt-in certification programme for bitcoin-related businesses.

While Bitcoin 2013 promises to be purely bitcoin- and business-focused, another conference called unSystem will take a different approach. Scheduled for November 1-3 in Vienna, it promises to be more aligned with alternative culture, involving Occupy London, a "privacy extremist", the Anonymous hacktivist group and open-source guru Richard Stallman, among others. This conference is likely to span many non-bitcoin topics, too, based on last year's event. The 2012 unSystem conference, organised by activist bitcoin developer Amir Taaki, hosted several talks, which are viewable here.