Meetups on blockchain and crypto currencies usually take place in cities like Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich. Thanks to Pascal Tilgner, a Meetup was initiated this Monday in the tranquil student city of Münster (almost 300,000 inhabitants). On Meetups of this kind short lectures to different topics are held on open basis. Several organizers meet and sign up for corresponding topics.
This was the first time an exchange platform for people interested in crypto currency had been created in Münster - the demand was correspondingly high and BTC-ECHO was of course there.
The first serve on Monday evening was made by organizer Pascal Tilgner, who gave a 15-minute lecture on the role of Bitcoin from an investor's point of view. Pascal himself is a successful entrepreneur and explores the investment opportunities offered by the digital currency.
Why invest in Bitcoin at all?
pascal-tilgnerAt the heart of his presentation was the question of what are the reasons for investing in Bitcoin and what are the similarities and differences to other asset classes. He explained the basic characteristics of the individual asset classes, so that it was clearly shown how Bitcoin can be classified and distinguished from equities, bonds, commodities and the like.
Which quickly became clear: There are good reasons to invest in Bitcoin. After all, many asset classes are already quite highly valued by the expansive central bank policy, so that the risk/reward ratio, especially for bonds, is no longer attractive. Bitcoin, on the other hand, represents an antipole to asset inflation, since its maximum number of units (21 million Bitcoin) provides a kind of inflation protection. Of course, this is not the only reason that makes Bitcoin attractive as an investment. Due to its independence from political institutions, Bitcoin has also been able to prove itself as an escape currency, as demonstrated by the Brexit vote, for example, in the form of a rise in Bitcoin's share price.
This recently published BTC-ECHO article is recommended to anyone wishing to find out what the Bitcoin share price potential for 2017 looks like and what other reasons speak for or against a Bitcoin share price rise.
Monereo - A truly anonymous currency
bastian-blekerThe second lecture was by Bastian Bleker and dealt with the crypto currency Monero, whose core feature is anonymity. After all, Bitcoin is only a pseudoanonymous currency, since the alphanumeric Bitcoin address after each Bitcoin transaction allows a concrete assignment. Exactly this assignment is missing with Monereo. Ring signatures bundle several transactions so that it is no longer possible to identify a single transaction. In a nutshell: Several transactions become a single transaction, which then no longer allows any conclusions to be drawn about their origin.
As you can imagine, this is particularly attractive for Darknet platforms to handle illegal transactions. The deepweb platform Alphabay quickly accepted Monero as a means of payment, which helped Monero to gain popularity. However, Monero also offers the option of removing anonymisation in order to guarantee transparency. However, the currency is not completely mature; for example, there is a lack of practical applications such as graphical interfaces that can be operated by average users without knowledge of command line commands.
