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MIAMI – Crypto lingo and booze flowed freely as thousands of bitcoin enthusiasts descended on South Florida this weekend.At Bitcoin 2021, billed as the biggest bitcoin event in history, legions of faithful fans braved 90-degree days to talk all things crypto. Many of the conference attendees were bitcoin maximalists, a phrase used to describe people who believe that bitcoin, and not necessarily other cryptocurrencies, is the future of finance. Most plan to BTD (buy the dip) and HODL (hold on for dear life).The energy was electric. A maskless, sold-out crowd of 12,000 attendees spent two days glad-handing, hugging, sending crypto from wallet to wallet, and closing business deals in between panels and speeches. The novelty of taking part in a largely indoor event, free of Covid restrictions, contributed to the atmosphere.A standard pass to the event cost $1,499. Some guests paid for a highly coveted orange bracelet, known as the “Whale Pass,” which takes its name from a term used to describe individuals who hold large sums of bitcoin. The pass granted access to an extra day of speakers, exclusive parties, and a private area in the convention hall, replete with a free bar. On the first day of the conference, it was retailing on Eventbrite for $21,000, plus a $529 transaction fee.The crowd look was mixed. Picture conference merch like neon-colored fanny packs, Bitcoin 2021 branded sunglasses, and t-shirts with crypto puns and hashtags. Some appeared ready for a summer rave, wearing bikinis in the media room.However, there was also a strong contingent clad in standard Wall Street business casual, in yet another sign of growing mainstream interest in the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. “Whether they were attendees, or just in Miami for the events, it is more institutional participation than I’ve ever seen at a bitcoin conference,” Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures, told CNBC.Miami lights up for cryptoFor the thousands who didn’t get an official ticket to the event, the parties and tangential gatherings were the real draw. There were yacht parties with a DeFi (decentralized finance) theme, sumo wrestling matches, NFT art gallery openings, and cocktail hours dedicated to talking about Bitclout, a social network built on the blockchain technology that underpins most cryptocurrencies.The after-parties took over rooftops across the city, with at least one featuring fire dancers. The Oasis, one of the biggest nightclubs in Miami, was non-stop crypto.”There isn’t a way to quantify the level that an event like this boosts business,” said Mati Greenspan, portfolio manager and founder of Quantum Economics, who flew in from Israel Wednesday night for the event. “What might take me an hour meeting at home can be done in five or ten minutes at a conference. So every hour is worth five or ten meetings.”Fire dancers entertain crypto enthusiasts at a rooftop party in Miami.A lot of talk centered around moving to Miami. Start-ups, venture firms, and crypto exchanges have been relocating to the city en masse – or at least opening additional offices.Mayor Francis Suarez has portrayed himself as bitcoin-friendly – Suarez announced in February that Miami plans to accept tax payments in bitcoin and let employees draw their salary in the cryptocurrency, though the timing of the rollout is unclear. The city is also exploring holding bitcoin on its balance sheet.Now, the entire city seems to be getting on board. “From waiters to Uber drivers, a bouncer at the nightclub and even a lady selling tchotchkes at the mall, most locals I met on the ground seemed to be somewhat familiar with cryptocurrencies, and many of them are HODLing,” said Greenspan, of the few days he spent in Miami.Carter himself is considering the move. “Virtually everyone I’ve talked to is super bullish on Texas and Florida and pretty bearish on on New York, San Francisco, and Boston,” he said. “I left this thinking that I’m going to make that transition myself.”‘Bitcoin fixes everything’A common refrain from some of the biggest names on stage was that “bitcoin fixes everything,” which pretty much sums up the general sentiment at the conference.”We say bitcoin is hope; bitcoin fixes everything,” said Saylor. “That certainly was the case with our stock.”Dorsey also doubled down on his commitment to the cryptocurrency. “If I were not at Square or Twitter, I’d be working on bitcoin. If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for bitcoin,” said Dorsey.The undertone of widespread support for bitcoin carried with it a spirit of rebellion against the existing financial system.”We don’t need the banks anymore,” continued Dorsey. “We don’t need the financial institutions that we have today.”Cameron Winklevoss wore a T-shirt with a picture of the Federal Reserve building with a caption reading, “Rage against the machine,” a reference to how bitcoin is not controlled by a central bank. As one panel MC put it, “We are going to put the Fed out of business,” which speaks to how people at Bitcoin 2021 generally regarded the monetary system and fiat money, with bitcoin seen as the solution.Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss (L-R), creators of crypto exchange Gemini Trust Co. on stage at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a crypto-currency conference held at the Mana Convention Center in Wynwood on June 04, 2021 in Miami, Florida.Joe Raedle | Getty ImagesBut a repudiation of the status quo doesn’t mean anarchy. In many of my conversations with attendees, the narrative was far from an advocation of societal collapse or dissolution.”The whole point of bitcoin is that it’s a…peaceful protest against a monetary system that people want no part of,” said Carter. “I don’t think the Fed has a lot to fear from bitcoin. You don’t have to take to the streets to promote bitcoin.”The conference drew participants from countries with high inflation or other currency troubles – places like Venezuela, Cuba, Turkey, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Iran – who perhaps best understand the use case for a cryptocurrency like bitcoin.”There are hundreds of people in these places and you don’t have to explain bitcoin to them; they understand it intuitively,” explained Carter. “That was one of the best parts of the conference for me: meeting people who felt the real-world impact of currency collapse and seeing how they use bitcoin.”One consistent theme of the conference was the maturity of the Lightning Network, a payments platform built on bitcoin, which enables instant transactions.Virtually every booth at the conference was accepting Lightning transactions. Even Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey completed one during his main stage talk with Alex Gladstein, of the Human Rights Foundation.”That’s a real success story,” said Carter. “It’s taken four or five years for Lightning to be built on top of bitcoin, but it’s working now.”The shadow of ElonElon Musk wasn’t physically in Miami but his presence was definitely felt. Right at the start of the conference, the price of bitcoin dropped following a tweet by the Tesla CEO that implied he was breaking up with the currency.Max Keiser, a high-profile bitcoin holder, began his fireside chat by cursing Musk’s name, shouting, “F— Elon!” several times.On the main stage, Dorsey took what seemed to be a veiled shot at Musk’s critique of the environmental impact of bitcoin mining, saying that it actually “incentivizes more renewable energy.””You just look at the economics of it and ultimately miners have to make a profit and getting cheap renewable energy maximizes their potential for profit. It’s really that simple,” continued Dorsey. “I thought I had an agreement with some notable figures out there, and that seemed to change in a matter of weeks and now it’s in a weird kind of place.”Michael Saylor, a high-profile crypto advocate and the CEO of MicroStrategy – a company that bought bitcoin for its balance sheet last year, before both Square and Tesla – took Dorsey’s comments one step further.”It’s the highest value use of intermittent energy. It’s the highest value use of renewable energy. It’s the highest value use of wasted or stranded energy. And it’s just the highest value use of energy, period,” said Saylor.NFL player and bitcoin fan Russell Okung launched a billboard campaign Friday with the tagline “Stick to space, Elon,” a reference to the fact that Musk should stay in his lane, and leave crypto opining to those in the industry.Most conference attendees said they were ignoring his comments regardless. Many said they don’t think Musk, or anyone else – not even governments – can stop bitcoin. One person in the bathroom line called him a clown, referring to his promotion of a new, pornographically named cryptocurrency over the weekend.

Clear principals Ken Cornick and Caryn Seidman-Becker.ClearCLEAR, the company best known for helping travelers zip through airport security lines, filed its IPO prospectus on Monday, and indicated that business is picking up as vaccinations increase.Revenue at the New York-based company rose 20% last year to $230.8 million. Net loss narrowed to $9.3 million from $54.2 million. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol “YOU.”Launched in 2010, CLEAR’s biometric security service is popular among frequent fliers, who purchase subscriptions for $179 a year. Along with gaining the ability to speed through airport lines, subscribers can also use the service at sports stadiums and entertainment venues.In the first quarter of 2021, revenue dropped 17% from the same period a year earlier, which included two months of normal business before the pandemic. Volumes among U.S. domestic airline passengers plunged 60% in 2020 and total bookings dropped 11%, the company said.”We expect that Covid-19 will continue to adversely impact our airport enrollments and business in 2021 and possibly beyond,” CLEAR said in its prospectus.Still, as more people get vaccinated and concerts, sporting events, and conferences return, CLEAR’s business is poised to rebound. And for some activities, patrons will have to digitally convey their Covid vaccination or testing status to get admitted.In May, after airport travel plummeted, CLEAR launched Health Pass, a major new feature in the company’s iOS and Android app that securely stores Covid information, such as test results or vaccination records. Verifying that all attendees have tested negative should reduce the risk of spreading the virus.Since Health Pass launched, it’s gained traction in stadiums for sporting events that need to check the status of many people quickly. In February, 100 vaccinated health-care workers were able to attend the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida, by verifying their status through Health Pass. One-third of NBA teams are using the app to enforce their Covid protocols for fans, and people attending National Hockey League games in Arizona also use Health Pass.CLEAR is poised to be the latest New York company to hit the public markets, joining a growing roster that includes names like Etsy, MongoDB and Peloton. While the biggest offerings have typically come from Silicon Valley and San Francisco, 2021 is turning out to be a blockbuster year for New York, with DigitalOcean, UiPath and Compass all having gone public already.In February, CLEAR announced a $100 million funding round, with backers including investment firms connected to Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer, the NFL and the Partnership Fund for New York City.CLEAR ranked No. 19 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list. The company hired Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo to lead the offering.SIGN UP for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the list, offering a closer look at CNBC Disruptor 50 companies, and the founders who continue to innovate across every sector of the economy.WATCH: Clear CEO on the push to verify Covid records

In this articleAAPLTim CookSource: AppleApple unveiled new versions of its operating systems on Monday which showed that the company’s focus on privacy has taken a new turn. It’s not just a corporate ideal or a marketing point anymore. It’s now a major initiative across Apple distinguishing its products from Android and Windows competition.Apple has positioned itself as the most privacy-sensitive big technology company since Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an open letter on the topic in 2014. Since then, Apple has introduced new iPhone features that restrict app access to personal data and advertised privacy heavily in television ads.But Monday’s announcements showed that Apple’s privacy strategy is now part of its products: Privacy was mentioned as part of nearly every new feature, and got stage time of its own.Privacy-focused features and apps announced by Apple on Monday for forthcoming operating systems iOS 15 or MacOS Monterey included:No tracking pixels. The Mail app will now run images through proxy servers to defeat tracking pixels that tell email marketers when and where messages were opened.Private Relay. Subscribers to Apple’s iCloud storage service will get a feature called iCloud+ which includes Private Relay, a service that hides user IP addresses, which are often used to infer location. An Apple representative said it’s not a virtual private network, a type of service often used by privacy-sensitive people to access web content in areas where it’s restricted. Instead, Apple will pass web traffic through both an Apple server and a proxy server run by a third party to strip identifying information.Hide My Email. iCloud subscribers will be able to create and use temporary, anonymous email addresses, sometimes called burner addresses, inside the Mail app.App Privacy Report. Inside the iPhones settings, Apple will tell you which servers apps connect to, shining light on apps that collect data and send it to third parties the user doesn’t recognize. It will also tell users how often the apps use the microphone and camera.Leveraging Apple’s chip chopsWith its focus on privacy, Apple is leaning on one of its core strengths. Increasingly, data is being processed on local devices, like a computer or phone, instead of being sent back to big servers to analyze. This is both more private, because the data doesn’t live on a server, and potentially faster from an engineering standpoint.Because Apple designs both the iPhone and processors that offer heavy-duty processing power at low energy usage, it’s best poised to offer an alternative vision to Android developer Google which has essentially built its business around internet services.This engineering distinction has resulted in several new apps and features that do significantly more processing on the phone instead of in the cloud, including:Local Siri. Apple said on Monday that that Siri now doesn’t need to send audio recordings to a server to understand what they say. Instead, Apple’s own voice recognition and processors are powerful enough to do them on the phone. This is a major difference from other assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, which uses serversto decipher speech. It could also make Siri faster.Automatically organizing photos. Apple’s photos app can now use AI software to identify things inside your photo library, like pets, or vacation spots, or friends and family, and automatically organize them into galleries and animations, sometimes with musical accompaniment. Many of these features are available in Google Photos, but Google’s software requires all photos to be uploaded to the cloud. Apple’s technology can do the analysis on the device and even search the contents of the photos with text.Apple’s privacy infrastructure also allows it to expand into big new markets like online payments, identity, and health, both from a product and marketing perspective.It can build new products while being sure that it’s following best practices for not collecting unnecessary data or violating policies like Europe’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).In addition, users may feel more comfortable about features that deal with sensitive data or topics — like finance or health — because they trust Apple and its approach to data.Features introduced by Apple on Monday show how the company is using its user data position to break into these lucrative markets.Monitoring walking health and sharing medical records. Apple’s health app can now use readings from an iPhone, such movement when the user is walking, to warn them that they might be at risk for a harmful fall because they’re walking unsteadily. Apple will also enable users who connect their iPhone to the health records system to share those records with a doctor, friends, or family. Health data is among the most heavily regulated types of data, and it’s hard to see Apple introducing these features unless it was sure that it had a good reputation among customers and internal competence with handling sensitive data. “Privacy is fundamental in the design and development across all of our health features,” an Apple engineer said while introducing the feature.Government IDs, keycards and car keys in the Wallet app. Apple used the trust it’s built in privacy and security when it launched Apple Card, its credit card with Goldman Sachs, in which users sign up for a line of credit almost entirely inside the app. Now, Apple has introduced several new features for the Wallet app that are most attractive for users who believe Apple’s security and privacy are up to the task. In iOS 15, Apple will enable users to put in car or home keys in their wallet app, which means all someone needs to get inside is their phone. Apple also said, without a lot of details, that it is working with the Transportation Security Administration to put American ID cards, like a driver’s license, inside the Wallet app, too.Cook has said “privacy is a fundamental human right” and that the company’s policies and his personal stance doesn’t have to do with commerce or Apple’s products.But being the big technology company that takes data issues seriously could end up being lucrative and allow Apple more freedom to launch new services and products. Facebook, Apple’s Silicon Valley neighbor and vocal Apple critic, has increasingly dealt with challenges launching new products because of the company’s poor reputation on how it handles user data.Americans also say that privacy is factoring into buying decisions. A Pew study from 2020 said that 52% of Americans decided not to use a product or service because of concerns over data protection.

In this articleTSLAUS electric car maker Tesla Vice President Jerome Guillen poses at the Paris Auto Show on the last press day on October 3, 2014. The Paris Auto show opens to the public on Saturday. Eric Piermont | AFP | Getty ImagesTesla executive Jerome Guillen has left the company after only three months as the president of its Heavy Trucking unit, according to an SEC filing released Monday.”We thank him for his many contributions and wish him well in his future career,” the company said in the filing. His last day was June 3.Before his appointment to that role in March, Guillen had led the company’s entire vehicles business since 2018. During his time as president of Automotive, Tesla opened its first plant overseas, in Shanghai, and expanded its battery cell supply partnerships. Guillen has worked at the company in roles reporting directly to CEO Elon Musk since November 2010.In its fourth-quarter 2020 shareholder deck, Tesla said the Semi program was still “in development” but promised Tesla Semi deliveries would begin in 2021. In its annual financial filing with the SEC for 2020, Tesla did not reiterate that Semi delivery deadline.Guillen is the second high-level exec to leave in recent months, following former vice president of legal Al Prescott, who left in April.— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.