This is my obligatory (brief) review of an awesome weekend at the Baltic Honeybadger 2017 Bitcoin conference in Riga, Latvia. While i assumed that the conference would be interesting, the actual event completely blew my expectations in many different ways.

Recordings are already available

First things first. If you missed the event, don’t be sad and visit the HODLHODL youtube channel to watch the recorded talks and panels. Better versions of the videos are currently being prepared. Hat tip to the organisers!

The Honeybadger?

The If you are curious why the bitcoin community talks so often about this animal and writes how he doesn’t care — this is why. A couple of years ago, someone (i don’t know who it was) watched this famous wildlife video:

He decided that Bitcoin is like a Honeybadger and a new popular meme was born.

My favorite talks on day one

Seriously, watch all of them. There were so many interesting speakers and i learned something new in each talk!

In the morning, Giacomo woke us up with a great talk where he explored the blockchain business models & ideas that actually make sense to implement in a distributed ledger architecture and where not. Guess what? ;-) The talk was also very entertaining.

Andreas Antonopoulos on the other side, made very clear how we need more talent in Bitcoin and i realized how much he already contributes today to make that a reality in the future. If you are a technical person, have a look at his book “Mastering Bitcoin”, it’s available for free on github.

Elizabeth Stark from Lightning labs giving an overview of the current state of things and an invitation to the greater community to take part in this important open source project that will be one of the key components to Blockchain scaling.

Adam Back gave a primer about the importance of decentralization for Bitcoin and a short update Blockstream’s satellite project. I especially like the fact that the work will be made available as open source. That’s how new businesses in a thriving, new ecosystem can evolve.

Pamela Morgan made some great points about how difficult it is to plan for crypto related heritage. If you are not familiar with her work, start with some of the templates she provides eg the letter to loved ones.

Pavol Rusnak gave a sneak peak on the new trezor firmware. I am absolutely sure SatoshiLabs will (again) show how the new premium hardware wallet standard looks like and can’t wait for my devices.

That’s about it for day one. There was much more to see of course and i will surely watch the recordings later.

Day 2, the trading panel incident

After a more formal first day with lots of presentations, the second day took place in another place that was smaller and a bit cozy for some people. The organisers did a great job to address that by providing live streaming on another floor.
For me as part of the trading panel it was great to be close to the audience and see their reactions to our discussions and jokes. Oh boy, how much fun we had!

Attention please: There were a lot of great panels with hours of great discussions. It would take far too long to write about all of them, so i take the obvious shortcut and only write about the trading panel i was part of. Do yourself a favour and watch all of them, they were brilliant.

The participants of the panel were (in no specific order):

• A weird dog name “Corgi” https://twitter.com/anambroid
• A giant but friendly panda bear https://twitter.com/WhalePanda
• Roman Snitko, the brilliant CTO of HODLHODL https://twitter.com/romansnitko & https://hodlhodl.com/
• Tuur Demeester, economist & investor https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester
• Konstantin Gladych (CEO, Changelly) https://twitter.com/gladkos
• Some CEO shilling, something irrelevant briefly (nevermind)
• A german guy with questionable trading skills (me) https://twitter.com/Marsmensch

One of the best moments was when Sam Wouters “Buy Bitcoin”-bombed the trader panel. He also wrote an excellent review of the conference.

The audience also enjoyed hearing about our trading mistakes. Yes, it happens to everyone!
You can see the first recording here, but it’s missing Anambroid’s intro.

Shortest possible summary

Great minds everywhere. Awesome atmosphere. Open discussions everywhere. No ICO-talking. Cheap tickets. Fantastic organisation. Count me in for next year! #BH2018

See you there!

Disclaimer: As part of the trading panel i was invited for the conference. Writing this blogpost was my own decision and i don’t get anything for doing it.

Initially posted to https://medium.com/@Marsmensch/baltic-honeybadger-2017-cares-lessons-from-one-of-the-best-conferences-ever-c40f250cc71e, also by me ;-)