Photo Gallery: House of Blockchain’s First Birthday Party
I had a lot of fun during the HoB birthday in Liechtenstein, took some nice photos, and even helped with a trivia game. Here is a photo-focused blog post that will help you feel the “mood” during he party.
On May 24th the House of Blockchain (HoB) turned 1 year old and Mattia Martinez, the House of Blockchain’s Manager, invited friends, fans, and followers to celebrate the anniversary at Liechtenstein’s beautiful Kunstmuseum. There were many guests from Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany, and even a far away place called Bulgaria. ;)
Mattia, the the honorable host of the event, was welcoming the guests and was kind enough to allow me to document the process.
He held a short a speech after all guests arrived and mentioned that he was proud of how quickly the HoB co-working space grew in the last 365 days despite the challenging phase which the blockchain industry went through.
Yanislav Malahov, æternity’s Founder, officially opened the event with a few words dedicated to æternity, the state of the blockchain industry in the past months, and his experiences with this year’s Consensus Conference in New York.
After Yanislav, Thomas Nägele outlined what the House of Blockchain has achieved so far and what can one expect in the future. He also mentioned that he was proud to meet some of the HoB tenants during Consensus 2019. Thomas finished his short speech by asking everyone to try to re-create a cube from a string of cubes (one of æternity’s cool “swag” items).
Some of the guests started the “are you smart enough to re-create the cube” task immediately. It took me a few hours, but I managed to do it too! :D Was fun!
Others decided to focus on conversations and drinks.
Apart from the welcoming speeches, the program of the event included a surprise — a 30 minute long Quiz (AKA Trivia) organized by Mattia and me. The Quiz included 21 questions (“the magic crypto number”) divided into three categories — Liechtenstein, æternity, and the House of Blockchain.
There was a group that managed to provide a right answer to almost all questions and won an æternity-branded Ledger Nano S hardware wallet to store their AE tokens and POSSIBLY other cryptocurrencies. :D
Pablo, æternity’s CEO for the Americas Region, was enjoying the evening with the community. The Director of the Office for Financial Innovation — Thomas Dünser —and his wife left the party one Ledger Nano S richer. Pablo was part of their team during the Quiz, so maybe that helped. :)
More than a hundred guests attended the anniversary celebration and actually mingled.
All attendees took the opportunity and networked with their fellow peers. Some of them were able to make new contacts, others caught up with friends.
Helped by Marion Vogel, the Director of æternity’s Crypto Foundation, I managed to get the Foundation’s team together for a photo. I see it used in presentations now. :)
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Stephan Verbücheln from CNLAB, the company that performed æternity’s security review before the launch of the Mainnet, had a surprise present for Yani and Thomas. What was it? The first volume of the PGP 6.5.1 source code printed on paper. Crazy right? But there is an interesting story behind this (taken from Wikipedia):
Shortly after its release in 1991, PGP encryption found its way outside the United States, and in February 1993 Phillip Zimmermann became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for “munitions export without a license”. Cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were then considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time. Penalties for violation, if found guilty, were substantial.
Zimmermann challenged these regulations in an imaginative way. He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book, via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold widely. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could cut off the covers, separate the pages, and scan them using an OCR program (or conceivably enter it as a type-in program if OCR software was not available), creating a set of source code text files. One could then build the application using the freely available GNU Compiler Collection. PGP thus became available anywhere in the world.
What is even more interesting is that on the day the present was delivered (May 24th, 2019) a news article was shared in the digital space announcing that that government officials in Germany are considering ways to force chat app providers to hand over end-to-end encrypted conversations in plain text on demand. As history shows us, however, this will not be an easy task. Stopping encryption is like stopping mathematics or the expression of free thought — it never works in the long run.
Cheers to encryption and to the House of Blockchain!
If you are interested in learning more about the HoB, visit their official website.
If you are into real blockchain technology, I highly recommend you to check out this short blog post introducing what æternity is and what are its main technological features:
I hope you enjoyed this!
