Topic: EUROPEAN BITCOIN CONFERENCE 2011, PRAGUE NOV 25-27 - page 4. (Read 94469 times)

I would have gone with my girlfriend but it was a bit too expensive to fly out from Korea.

I guess I'll head to out to the Texas one. At least then Atlas and I can have a real pissing contest. I hear he has a piss fetish anyway.

How are you going to have a fruitfull discussion if everyone is of the same opinion. We didn't meet to pad ourselves on the back and look at our shiny casascius coins (well, not only, that is).

One of the organizers told me they tried to get 6 speakers "against" bitcoin. Most of the people they contacted refused for lack of balls, which I can understand.

I think it's great Birch came and he offered interesting facts and opinions and he's correct about one thing: We must be on the phone in order to succeed in gaining wider adoption.

My take, don't remember every talk that well since I was coding at the same time.

Sergey Kurtsev: Not really about decentralized exchange, but potential concept nonetheless.

Amir Taaki: His first speech on friday was interesting (and a little funny), but overall he wasn't a good choice for as a moderator. Too much ideological/political stuff to my tastes, too little concrete stuff.

Jim Burton: I would have liked more about technical stuff about multibit client, such as watch advantages does it offer over the traditional client (speed?). The swatches do not inspire me. The bitcoin merchant wasn't either too interesting, for example I don't support using openid/etc login methods on web shop, I think they lower the conversion rate and with bitcoin much more efficient checkout process is possible.

David Birch: I didn't get this guys "criticism" (as I understood it was meant as such). For example, he was talking long about how computers are only for nerds and mobile is going to be the stuff in the future. How is this relevant? Bitcoin is not technology tied to specific platform, and there are lots of bitcoin-related mobile software already. Interesting stories, but not related much to bitcoin.

Simon Dixon: mostly boring pro-banking stuff.

Jason Chia: This guy was definitely in the wrong place. Goverments buying all the bitcoins?

Peter Kleissner: Interesting stuff, but not that in-depth.

Cameron Garnham: Open transactions project has a marketing problem. I don't get what it is useful for, and I didn't understand that after the presentation. I unfedstood that with their technology you can currently issue centralized "tokens". The vision is de-centralized, however I don't understand how that could be achieved. And generally I don't really understand what the open-transactions project is practically useful for. More practical examples, please!

Clemens Cap: Some ideas how to promote the bitcoin project etc, not that interesting/new to me.

Rick Falkvinge: Somewhat inspiring talk, however nothing new to me since I'm a fan and read his blog pretty regularly (the only political blog I read).

Max Keiser: boring.

Overall I was a little disappointed, too much speech about economics/politics/etc and too little about technology/businesses.  Of course it is about personal tastes, though.

Thanks for the conference, it was great meeting some bitcoin people.

I like this guy already.

I enjoyed his skepticism because he's watching on bitcoin from the view of "normal people". We have to leave our bitcoin cave if we want to make it successful - this was his message to us as I understood it.

By my mind both of them were 'must not have'. David B. didn't say a word about bitcoin and he acknowledged of being bitcoin 'sceptic' (not to say 'against' bitcoin). Simon D.'s presentation was all about making traditional banks stronger. And, 'accidentally' both guys supported each other during panel.

16 second takeout: Rick Falkvinge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw85GURiS58

I wanted a second opinion.

Now I see there is a whole new scary double herpes world out there.  Just when you thought you were safe...

Just to add my voice to the growing list of appreciation for this conference

Thanks most of all to Mitch for organising everything. The organisation was very good, and the whole show was very professionally run. It must've taken alot of effort to bring everything together for that final day and I'm sure everyone attending appreciated it. It is good that Europe is holding its own against the rest of the world in supporting Bitcoin. Congrats to Amir as well for hosting.

It was the content and the speakers that really made this talk so good. I'd like to pass on thanks to all of the speakers for their talks, all of which were very well delivered and insightful. I and I'm sure everyone else present enjoyed everything that was said, and the effort that was put into creating every presentation.

Highlights for me were the less technical talks, as I'm not too heavily involved in the development side at the moment: David Birch, Rick Falkvinge, Detlev Schlichter.

One thing which I thought very special about the conference was the mix of older and younger speakers - older and wiser talks from the likes of David Birch, Max Keiser, Rick Falkvinge, Clemens Cap along with those actually creating the new technologies like Cameron Garnham, Amir Taaki, Stefan Thomas, Peter Kleissner, etc.

I really hope that we can continue to hold the interest of all these very knowledgeable and clever people.

I think important to listen to the more experienced speakers. Whilst its exciting to hear about the new technologies and ideas from the likes of Amir and Stefan, it is fundamental to listen to those who understand how the 'real world' works.

Also interesting to hear from Detlev Schlichter, Max Keiser and Rick Falkvinge, particularly good to have them along given what's going on in the economy. I thought they added a very interesting additional dimension to the conference that would have otherwise been missing. Congrats again to Mitch/Amir for working hard to get these people along.

All in all, I thought it was a very thoughtful and insightful event. My only thoughts are that the venue itself was a little far out from the rest of Prague and in particular the Hacker Space where a lot of people went afterwards. It was excellently positioned vis a vis the hotel however. Prague was a great location for it aswell.

Well done guys for organising everything. Once again , an amazing conference with some great talks. Hopefully the next one can be bigger and better

Xavier

i find it funny, when - i think it was Simon Dixon - stated (cited from my memory):

"I do not think it is a good idea to give away all kinds of software for free, as this kills employment" - nobody even bothered to argue against it. heard lots of people chuckle..

  I see, but what does this cost; http://www.ustream.tv/production-services/conference-package

For future reference see http://livestream.com/ or http://ustream.tv/ to realize how not difficult at all it is.

Sounds great! Let Max Keiser be the new Bruce! 

Here's a clip of the venue, Friday Night Cocktail party.  For a restaurant like this to accept bitcoin, even just for a few hours was great.  Next time we will get them to provide decent internet too .  This is after the party had finished, there were a few bitcoin people mingling around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZs4WtzdLE

I wonder, is Max also gonna report about this event during one of his keiser reports or on his website?

Max Keiser announced his crowdfunding film productions project (http://piratemyfilm.com) will be accepting payment of shares in bitcoin and also pay dividends in bitcoin. He bashed paypal rightfully. Max is now officially a bitcoin supporter, he loves it for its "disruptive qualities".

Also: Stacey Herbert now actually has a bitcoin wallet

giszmo: Great summary! :-)

The conference was super interesting! I enjoyed it a lot!

Here is my honest and direct summary. I hope for honest and direct answers

Paying in BitCoin at Hardrock? Not really. Those 5 that I saw trying failed. Still I love BitPay as a service! Being in a location where I don't have internet for my smart phone is not the default use case. I'm only afraid we could not convince the Hardrock Cafe staff


Sergey Kurtsev's talk about decentralizing exchange was ... not quite what I had in mind when reading the announcement. I thought it would be some way to like use some peer to peer ripple pay system to calculate exchange rates and trade partners ... but in the end that's what it sounded to me: "I did a trade platform and now I want to borrow liquidity from other exchanges. Hey, it's a win win for all of us!"

Stefan Thomas ... his emphasis on splitting secrets across two independent hosts with different security measures was inspiring. When I tried to talk to him about the basic idea he left a narrow minded impression to me as my interpretation of his response was something like "you can do it your way. my software does it this way." Kind of a downer but maybe it was a misunderstanding.

Amir Taaki's speak was ... ok but he did a soso job as a moderator until the last question round on Saturday where he really spoiled it. We got sooo far off topic and he enjoyed talking sooo much it really was a pain. At least for me. I only wanted to know where the party will be so I can head off and eat something. When he was finally done with it, he announced that there is no central party. He did not even mention the hacker space party.

In Jim Burton's talk I most liked Multibit Merchant. I like multibit in that it allows to conveniently handle multiple wallets but in my opinion he's too dogmatic withmuch focusing on these swatches. Wonder if multibit merchant also has some weird dogma inside. Else I will look into it if I ever plan to add some payment functionality to a product.

David Birch was a must have! Although he does not believe in Bitcoin like 90% of his audience I have no doubt that 90% enjoyed his refreshing style and insights.

Simon Dixon did speak well. Inspiring but somehow there were no buzz concepts I found worthy to note down. Edit: He was the guy who said that Open Source and free services cause unemployment? I don't remember the exact quote but as my mind set is rather along ideas like the venus project than this slavery-like full employment goal with people working for virtually nothing.

Jason Chia did not convince me at all. Ok, he's young so maybe speaking is not what he did much before but also content-wise it was wird. He's a lawyer. We all laughed at his disclaimer of not giving legal advise. He listed some of the most obvious points valid in Europe to conclude all is fine with bitcoin - until some court rules otherwise. Kind of knew that before didn't you? His proposed attack against the bitcoin of buying all the coins was so well known that people yawned and didn't even bother to protest. Long way to go I would say.

Detlev Schlichter's talk was definitely inspiring to me as he put the fiat money crisis into a broader historical, political and geographical context. Change happened before!

Peter Kleissner's talk was too much on the surface and had no real news to me but that might be different for others although I guess the security literacy in the audience was very high in general. I was fine with the Windows focus of his talk as that's the audience we are targetting so I did not like the "why not talk about Linux" bashing from ... not sure ... was it Amir again?

Cameron Garnham presented open transaction. A real life demo would have helped. Unfortunately the project is in a state where he could not even present a special case demo something. Ok, cool, a framework to sign that I assign one gram of gold to you. How do I get the gold into the system? How about doublespending? I did not get the concept, sorry.

Clemens Cap: I'm happy to see yet another university professor working with bitcoin both theoretically and on an actual device that holds private keys to be integrated in the payment process.

Rick Falkvinge was good as always. Lets see if his forecast holds true that crypto currency success will take till 2019. I somehow doubt it will take that long His focus on the gate keepers was a good one. Keep that in mind! Fuck the gate keepers! (Disclaimer: I'm a pirate)

Max Keiser is a good speaker. Somehow he had little to contribute to the subject of bitcoin though. He's an important player in the bitcoin eco system trying to push bitcoin to 1 million users by end of next year but to me it was not insightful.



Overall thanx for the conference! It really felt special to be part of it