The very first Bitcoin 2 Business Congress kicked off on October 16 at a very nice looking location in Brussels: the B19 Business Club.
Registration started at 9:00 am and the Agenda was full the whole two days. Twitter and other social media were filled with news and current information from the presentations and speeches.
The atmosphere was casual from the beginning and people were very interested in meeting potential business partners and in the networking.
Day 1
The first day began with Stan Wolf and Benjamin Bommhardt who were discussing the Crossing of the Chasm of Cryptocurrencies. The day continued with one interesting session after another. Among the Bitcoiners well-known Niels Kerstholt from BitPay discussed the Merchant adoption of Bitcoin.
- Matej Michalko
One of the most interesting sessions of the first day was also the Mining workshop. Some of the attendees never truly understood the Mining for which this session was very beneficial. Not only could they see the “old-school“ GPU miner, well known to people who started mining earlier, but they also learned about merged mining.
This was explained in depth because while mining you can also mine a Transactioncoin – TxC, which supports two hashing algorithms: SHA256 and SCRYPT.
“Txcoin can be merged mined with either sha256 or scrypt based altcoins, such as Bitcoin or Dogecoin” explained Matej Michalko from BitcoinMarketing and DexQ during the workshop.
Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum had a speech on Thursday as well as Sergij Foski representing the Bitcoin Foundation along with John Michell who presented a closer description of Decentralization and DAOZ.
- Vitalik Buterin
Day 2
The second day of the Congress taking place on Friday focused on a broad range of topics. It was opened by a great presentation of BitcoinMarketing’s Boris Stankovic.
One of the most tweeted was the presentation by Richard Caetano who advised Bitcoin businesses to “Target Early Adopters but Prepare for Mainstream.“
Another noteworthy presentation was given by Cointellect.
Next, Jeremy Gardner invited more Universities to join the College Cryptocurrency Network.
A great panel discussion was held on the subject of Altcoins with Adam Vaziri, Matej Michalko, Stanislav Wolf, Marc Warne, Matej Boda and Vitalik Buterin.
Right after the lunch break, Max Wang from btctrade.com delivered an interesting speech titled “Cross-border B2B Payments and Digital Assets Investment Based on the Large Trading Volume in China.”
The latter part of the afternoon was dedicated to a start-up show that included10 start-up projects. Every startup got the chance to present their project. The list of participating companies included:
- Bokk
- Online Bank Transfer
- Cryptodomainer
- BitNPlay
- Coinoutlet
- GEMS
- JungleCoin
- MasterXchange
- DexQ
- Internet of Coins
More information about the participating Start-ups can be found here.
Some controversy was stirred up by the last presentation from Nicolas Courtois of UCL. “Flipping the coin 100x would be better randomness than current random generator in some wallets,” said Courtois, in addition to other brow raising comments such as Bitcoin “has failed in being a decentralized P2P.” His speech led to many discussions at the subsequent social event in the city that included many Start-ups representatives, investors and attendees.
The event was a great success that galvanized the formation of new business partnerships and connections between Bitcoiners in Europe as well as the other parts of the world.
Also, special thanks should also go out to the guys from Belgian Bitcoin Association who helped with the organization.
For more information about the event, go to the official website.