Bitcoin still has hordes of fans

If any bitcoin investors went broke this week, they weren’t looking for pity in Miami, where hordes of digital-currency enthusiasts converged to (mostly) profess optimism about the future of the technology.

Bitcoin plummeted 23% on Tuesday and went even lower on Wednesday, before regaining some ground, amid a December-toJanuary collapse that erased 53% from peak to trough. But the investors, entrepreneurs and curious outsiders who packed the main hall at the James L Knight Center this week for the North American Bitcoin Conference largely said they still believed in digital money.

Dustin Byington, president of Wanchain, which lets people combine digital assets on one platform, acknowledged “a little pullback in the last couple days” but said he wasn’t concerned, as he posted a graph of the meteoric increase in digital assets worldwide over the years.

“What we believe totally to be true is that this graph will continue dramatically up and to the right — that soon, we will not have a $600billion market cap,” he told a cheering audience. “We will have a $2-trillion market cap! Four, 12, 20!”