Hello, and welcome to Mind of Micah.

Today on the program is the return of Micah's Read of the Week.

Today's piece is called Welcome to the Church of Bitcoin.

Thousands gathered in Miami to talk about the OG cryptocurrency, but instead of your typical

finance conference, it had the feeling of a fringe, religious event.

Ooh, sounds delicious. This piece comes to us from Rolling Stone and was written by someone

named Zoe Bernard. Before we get to the piece, though, a couple of promotional moments here.

One, check out Micah's Read of the Week, the newsletter. Volume 52 was out Monday.

That's right. We've made it a whole year. 52 weeks. We haven't missed one.

We won't miss one. It hits your mailbox every Monday around lunchtime.

It's free and will forever be free. Also, check out BackdoorCover Sports Podcast.

We will be back later this week talking some of the sports, maybe in some Olympic talk,

and football seasons shockingly close. And once we start gearing up for that,

BackdoorCover will gear up. It's, excuse me, recording schedule, and you'll be hearing more.

So get on board. Backdoor cover. And subscribe to the newsletter. There's always the

subscription link is in the description of this podcast. Okay. Let's get to it. Part one.

From Rolling Stone, welcome to the Church of Bitcoin.

It's morning in Miami. An restless crowd. Many thousands strong has assembled outside the gates

of the Monowenwood Conference Center. It's early June.

And they're here to attend Bitcoin 2021, a two-day conference in Miami's swiftly gentrifying

winwood neighborhood. It's attracted 12,000 attendees in what is being advertised as not only the

largest Bitcoin conference in history, but one of the biggest public gatherings in America since

...