‘It Seems Like Family’: Bitcoiners Gather for Security Conference in Amsterdam

The website CoinDesk.com published news about a meeting with bitcoiners in an Amsterdam pub. I’m not sure if it’ll generate the new big crypto coin, but we need admit it should be some kind of fun, no? Now, let’s check what is happening:

A quick breeze taken over the canal and right into a small Amsterdam pub, where about 30 bitcoiners sitting consuming beers and subscribing to Breaking Bitcoin 2019. It smelled like rain.


From the British mother who works at home like a “bitcoin hobbyist,” to some ripped Kiwi technologist having a thick beard, individuals who use bitcoin collected to joke about Crypto, Twitter and nodes.


These were in Amsterdam for probably the most esteemed security conferences within the blockchain industry. But about this wet Friday, they’d are available for some thing.


“It seems like family,” the hobbyist trader stated.


Most of them compensated for beers and snacks with bitcoin, utilizing a lighting-friendly wallet along with a point-of-purchase device produced by the Amsterdam-based startup Bitonic, founded this year.


“We might have lost a few of the market,” Bitonic’s mind of strategy, Daan Kleiman, told CoinDesk about the choice to focus purely on bitcoin, “but we cost nothing to create our very own decisions with no pressure from investment capital. This will make our growth very natural and healthy within this complex market with many different scams and impractical promises.”


But growth wasn’t the primary focus the next weekend in the conference itself. Rather, the panels and presentations at Breaking Bitcoin 2019 explored the premier cryptocurrency’s vulnerabilities, from political attack vectors to security holes.


In the operational finish from the spectrum, there is bitcoin advocate Udi Wertheimer, who revealed Wasabi Wallet’s privacy features could really be leveraged to de-anonymize users. (The wallet’s creator quickly responded on Twitter to go over issues in the presentation.)


There were the greater-level challenges, like the social and economic perils of bitcoin. On the panel going through the subject, vagabond bitcoin consultant Felix Weis stated if nearly all bitcoin users still trust custodians and exchanges to carry the non-public secrets of their assets, then such companies could gain disproportionate sway within the technology’s evolution.


Each talk left the crowd feeling that addressing this unique issue could bring bitcoin a measure nearer to lengthy-lasting value. And even though creating a sustainable-yet-decentralized type of cash is still an ambitious goal, at the best, nothing excites bitcoiners that can compare with a apparently impossible challenge.

Users and limitations

Despite how couple of people spend bitcoin today, with Chainalysis estimating merchant activity represents only one.3 % of bitcoin activity, many developers in the conference in Amsterdam use bitcoin for freelance focus on free projects.


Such was the situation with Weis and Lightning Labs co-founder Olaoluwa Osuntokun, who compensated contributors to his startup’s implementation from the bitcoin scaling solution lightning. From Osuntokun’s perspective, regulation presents a bigger barrier to bitcoin adoption compared to small pool of users.


“The greatest risk likely originates from condition-level actors trying to stifle the introduction of software associated with bitcoin,” Osuntokun told CoinDesk. “Network-level partitioning attacks, and tries to control the import/export of mining equipment.”


Throughout the social risks panel with Weis, Bitcoin Magazine editor Aaron van Wirdum agreed that new rules such as the approaching requirement through the Financial Action Task Pressure (FATF) – that could pressure companies to talk about customer data across jurisdictions whenever users send money in one exchange or custodian to a different – presents a salient risk to bitcoin users’ privacy and ale companies to uphold a cypherpunk ethos.


The vibe at Breaking Bitcoin was positive, even exuberant. Along individuals lines, several conference attendees were independent researchers presenting prospective methods to small, specific issues with using bitcoin.


“I’ve progressed from somebody that was looking forward to [bitcoin],” Seoul Bitcoin Meetup founder Ruben Somen told CoinDesk, “to somebody that explains it at meetups, to now potentially adding something.”


Somen was there presenting his idea for a bitcoin-related protocol for immediate off-chain transactions without the headache of lightning channels.


To summarize his presentation, in a manner that epitomized the conference’s gamification of critique, Somen clarified audience questions poking holes in the proposal. In the end, as Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo stated throughout a panel about lightning:



“Bitcoin continues to be in beta … decentralization is definitely an experiment.”

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