Tampa Bay Privacy Meetup - Bitcoin Bay
Event Date: February 20th, 2026
Location: 1101 4th St S, St. Petersburg, FL 33701, USA
Overview:
On February 20th, 2026, WebWipe hosted a Privacy meetup event at the Bitcoin Bay offices in St. Petersburg, Florida. This is the 2nd privacy event we’ve done in 2026. ~20 attendees showed up for the event. Zano and Edge Wallet sponsored the event
Event Highlights
The event went from 6-9 pm. The Bitcoin Bay Foundation is a non-profit focused on building the Bitcoin community in the Tampa Bay area. They have a co-working space and let us use one of their workshop/classrooms. People started arriving around 5:45 pm and presentations began at 6:15 pm. There were Nym stickers and 1-month NymVPN promos for interested attendees. About 60% of attendees walked away with Nym free trials. I recently updated the NymVPN presentation slides to discuss the zk-credentials more (As we had questions from previous meetups around this topic). Along with the presentation, we played the Noise Generating Mixnet video. We also played the Nym video on metadata surveillance. There were questions regarding the specs for running a mixnode & a gateway, as well as a question around where to view the routing scores for mixnodes. The Edge Wallet presentation that followed discussed the latest update from Edge that includes support for NymVPN. You can now submit transactions over Nym using Edge Wallet.
There were tables with a bunch of merch, & swag available for all attendees. There were other guest presentations as well including Edge Wallet , Zano and Confidential Layer. After the event, a few of us hung around chatting while we cleaned up.
Speaker Presentations:
- Monerotopia Discussion & video
- NymVPN and Nym Network
- Edge Wallet presentation
- Zano & Confidential assets video
- EigenWallet demo
- Deflock.org walkthrough
- Pegasus Swap demo
- Trocador.app demo
- Retoswap demo
- XMRBazaar demo
- Ashigaru and Ashigaru terminal walkthrough
- RoninDojo and Boltzmann Calculator Demo
- Monerujo demo
- Gupax demo
- goodies from Passphrase magazine
topics covered in the Nym presentation
- NymVPN Noise Generating Mixnet video
- How the internet works
- Nym vs. Tor vs. VPNs
- What is a mixnet(deeper dive)
- Nym’s Architecture - Gateways and Mix Nodes
- NymVPN Features
- Private payments for NymVPN
- Downloading NymVPN and Early Bird Special
- Wireguard versus Mixnet mode
- ZK-nym credentials
- Applying promo code
- Routing score dashboard
Impacts and Outcomes
- 90% of the crowd knew what a VPN was
- 30% of the crowd have used Tor
- 80% have used a VPN or Tor
Questions from the crowd:
- How simple is it to run a node for mixing traffic?
- Where can we view the dashboard to view the routing scores of the different mixnodes?
We didn’t get any real good pics of the crowd, there wasn’t much space to get behind everyone for a picture, and chose not to take a pic facing everyone directly.
Looking forward to the next privacy meetup.
