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
