Imagine IF 2026
I spent Monday and Tuesday at Imagine IF, put on by Bitcoin Park here in Nashville. The theme was AI, Energy, and Bitcoin, all pointed at freedom tech. That’s a different crowd than my usual front-end and data conferences, and I was curious how those three would actually fit together.
Rod Roudi kicked things off by saying his goal was for us to be entertained, inspired, and informed. It delivered on all three. The format helped a lot: mostly 10 minute talks with some longer panels, all in the theater at the Fisher Center. It’s a beautiful venue, and lunch was excellent with no lines and a great day for eating outside.
If I had to boil the two days down to one idea, it’s this: we aren’t in an arms race, we’re in a capabilities race. Energy is an enabler for people, and it’s what nations are truly fighting for right now. The future will belong to the people who deliver it, shared with the people who provide the compute.
The topics didn’t line up much with my day-to-day, but they gave me a lot to think about as we keep teaching AI and machine learning at DataCamp.
Day One
Imagine IF Stories Moved Money
Scott Harrison, charity: water
I’ve seen charity: water presentations before, but it was awesome to hear it from the founder. People don’t trust foundations, they found a great way to solve that, and then they improved on it by adding Bitcoin as a payment option.
Imagine IF Bitcoin and Energy Went Supernova
Rapha Zagury, Twenty One Capital
Money is a memory of work
Energy gives people choices.
Imagine IF AI Worked for Freedom
Rene Angel, The Reynolds Foundation
74% of observed countries have some form of autocracy. The call to action was to own your knowledge and workflows, and to build for freedom fighters.
Imagine IF You Held the Keys to Everything
Jesse Posner, Vora
AI is the most intimate technology ever created
Modern, connected people have a fragmented digital self that’s owned by the social media companies. His argument is that AI should be built more like Bitcoin.
Imagine IF History Could Live Forever
Michael Goldstein, Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
Preserve money, time, and scale. Advance the canon. What we preserve today, people will advance tomorrow.
Imagine IF America Defended Forward
Cathie Wood, ARK Invest
Gen. Paul M. Nakasone (USA Ret.), Vanderbilt University Institute of National Security
The median age of an NSS worker is 47. My favorite question for anyone deploying AI systems: “On your worst day, what will you do?”
Imagine IF Every Home Ran a Data Center
Jonathan Kirkwood, Ten31
He talked about how hard it is to prepare an AI talk right now, so he had to plan for “what will still matter in 72 hours.” The thing that stuck with me: we are all filled with tacit knowledge that we never write down.
Imagine IF It Already Happened
Jeff Booth, Ego Death Capital
Everything you measure, you measure with money that changes. And money is lent into existence.
Imagine IF Every Citizen Believed They Could Change Their Country
Evan Mawarire, #ThisFlag
Inflation hit Zimbabwe so hard that there was a one hundred trillion dollar bank note, and it would buy about half a loaf of bread. Courage is necessary for change.
Imagine IF the Federal Government Set a New Standard
Dr. Art Laffer and Brian Domitrovic, The Laffer Center
Luke Pettit, Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
Dr. Art Laffer is wonderful. He favors Bitcoin as a store of value and Tether as a unit of exchange for digital currencies. The big idea is that we need two different units of money: one to store value and one to exchange it.
Imagine IF Tyranny Had Nowhere to Hide
Javier El-Hage, HRF
Felix Maradiaga, World Liberty Congress
Farida Nabourema, Katutu Civil Rights Center
Money is a lifeline, and Bitcoin can’t easily be taken.
Imagine IF Open Systems Stayed Open
Parker Lewis, Zaprite
Econoalchemist, 256 Foundation
Another trio: mining, nodes, and applications. Mining uses energy to prove work was done. The surprising stat was that 90% of the hardware for Bitcoin comes from one company, and most of the other 10% comes from another.
Imagine IF the U.S. Led the Convergence Decade
Bill Hagerty, U.S. Senate
Brandon Williams, U.S. Department of Energy
Hash Hashemian, AMS Corporation
Data centers have two problems: energy and public relations. Permitting is an inhibitor. This is where the line that framed the whole event for me came from: we aren’t in an arms race, we’re in a capabilities race.
Day Two
Imagine IF They Were Right: Cathie & Laffer, Part 2
Cathie Wood, ARK Invest
Dr. Art Laffer, The Laffer Center
Autonomous taxis are the result of S curves from robotics, AI, and electronics all landing together. They see huge gains in autonomous transportation as it moves onto the grid. Also a good reminder of the difference between risk and uncertainty.
Imagine IF the Model Refused the Mission
Rob Hamilton, AnchorWatch
An excellent example of open models solving a vulnerability while a frontier model refused to. Entropy is the core of cryptography.
Imagine IF Bitcoin Is What Aligns AI
Dhruv Bansal, Unchained
I fear not AI, I fear humans with AI
The Lightning Network has overtaken Tor. Use money and markets to align incentives, and think of a network fungus, not Skynet. My favorite line of the two days: Bitcoin is alive, not intelligent. AI is intelligent, not alive. They need each other.
Imagine IF We Think Small and Win Big
Paul Itoi, Stakwork
Live outside the distribution. The big lie is that AI is LLMs. I left knowing graphmaxxing is something I need to dive into.
Imagine IF Kids Were Limitless
Candice McQueen, Lipscomb University
Joe Liemandt, Alpha School
Redesigning a school from within is really hard. The core belief is simple: kids must love school.
Imagine IF Data Centers Disappeared
Sean James, NVIDIA
The most profound technologies are those that disappear
They found a way to cool chips at 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and DC power is the best for electronics.
Imagine IF I Trust You More Than I Trust Myself
Obi Nwosu, Fedi
Interesting insight into the Bitcoin theft. Everything fails eventually, so plan to fail small.
Imagine IF Time-to-Exploit Hit Zero
Andre Neves, ZBD
Bitcoin is money as code, and the assumption that “attacks need time” is gone. If you’re not following model releases, your Bitcoin is vulnerable.
Imagine IF Speed to Power Decided Everything
Nick Elliot, Innovation Council Action
Harry Sudock, CleanSpark
Adam Sullivan, Core Scientific
There’s an enormous focus on how much one day of downtime affects profitability. Clusters are changing based on software, and builds are following model development. They called it digital reindustrialization, and with investments this high, stability is the goal. Value is delivered, not announced.
Imagine IF It All Got Built Here
Stuart McWhorter, State of Tennessee
Marsha Blackburn, U.S. Senate
No state income tax is in the Tennessee constitution. Oak Ridge has been, and is poised to keep being, the leader in nuclear energy.
Imagine IF the Gigawatts Got Built
Ryan Norris, Abundance Institute
Chuck Fleischmann, U.S. Congress
Matt Schultz, CleanSpark
James P. Danly, U.S. Department of Energy
Delivering certainty with community backing helps mitigate execution risk. Insane-level change is coming. Bitcoin mining set the foundation for compute power: electrons, workforce, and technology.
Imagine IF Freedom Were Built from the Bottom Up
Russ Greene, Prime Mover Institute
Gideon Powell, Cholla Inc.
It’s not what industry you’re in, it’s your capabilities
We’d want a market that rewards curtailment and accuracy. The barrier to entry is so low right now. Find an idea that solves people’s problems and make it happen.
Imagine IF All Activists Had AI Superpowers
Alex Gladstein, HRF
Local AI is vital for freedom fighters. AI will reshape power.
Only the Beginning
Rod closed it out with the news that 2027 will be four days!
Thank you to Bitcoin Park, the speakers, and everyone who made this happen. It was a great two days of being entertained, inspired, and informed.