Whales in The Whale: a blockchain conference in Budapest
There is a recently built conference center at the shore of the Danube River in Budapest, called The Whale. With its iconic fishy look (literally) it has quickly become a well-known piece of the city’s modern architecture. With a name and form like these, the building was the perfect place for setting up the biggest blockchain enthusiast conference in the region.
The two-day conference was visited by 400 showgoers, which is not bad at all, in light of stagnating market conditions and the lack of hype this year.
Organized by one of the oldest and most well-known cryptocurrency organizations in the country, the Blockchain Budapest successfully recruited Nick Szabo to give two speeches and generally act as the superstar of the conference.
The work done by the Californian computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo has paved the way for the explosion of cryptocurrencies and the decentralized agenda. Basically, he invented the concept of smart contracts and experimented with them long years before the birth of Bitcoin.
With the audience in suspenseful silence, he opened the first talk of the conference where he discussed the milestones in the evolution of money and how the digital currencies and smart contracts with the will to decentralize came together to form the cryptosphere we know today. He touched on many fascinating subjects, but due to time restraints, he could not take a deep dive into any of those. The second lecture was more technical and he had to the opportunity to walk the audience through his thought process on creating smart contracts — or digital contracts as they were first called.
The mostly Hungarian audience has finally had the chance to ask him about his origins: the name Szabo, which is denoted from a typically Hungarian name Szabó has long been at the center point of speculation about his connection to his ancestors’ homeland. Finally, he provided the details: his father had fled Hungary after the anti-communist revolution of 1956 and settled in the US, where he met his wife, Nicks’ mother. He does not speak any Hungarian with the exceptions of a few words like “jó reggelt”, meaning good morning.
Certain themes have dominated the whole of the conference: the stablecoins were going big and the issues of regulations have repeatedly appeared in talks and roundtable discussions. The cryptocurrency regulations — or rather the lack thereof, has long been an issue in Hungary, making the startups, the exchanges and other crypto services to move abroad. The aim of the Hungarian cryptocurrency community now is to convince the regulators that a positive business climate is a must in this highly competitive environment.
Based on the announcements they made, steps will be taken by the leading organizations to unite the community and change the landscape of regulation, which has been met with a positive reception among the state actors present there.
The lower floor was reserved for an exhibition room, where a great variety of startups, organizations, mining, and trading companies were present. We were glad that the Mikron project has been met with a positive attitude, we would like to thank everyone who showed up and had a talk with us. Mikron is providing a blockchain based solution for vivifying online communities, a way to reward your audience and the key members within the community and an easy donation solution for content creators. We were recruiting both partners and investors at the Budapest conference.
If you want to be the next partner of ours and have a webpage or a webshop that wants to facilitate user engagement, please visit mikron.io for details or give us a mail at info@mikron.io. If you would like to invest some bitcoins in the project, please join our Discord server or see the website.
