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The city of Miami, Florida hosted Bitcoin 2021 the largest live festival to date in the original cryptocurrency’s 12-year life. Total attendance at Miami conferences topped 50,000 and showcased some of the biggest stars in the crypto world, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, MicroStrategys CEO Michael Saylor, progressive crypto Miami mayor Francis Suarez and the Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
As Miami Bitcoiners partied across the earth, 9,000 miles away in Hong Kong, a group of around 30 gathered for a meeting of the Bitcoin Association HK. Hong Kong Bitcoin fans weren’t very high profile names, but no less enthusiastic. These were technical blockchain experts, traditional investment advisers, anti-establishment cypherpunks, and crypto newbies trying to learn more about the digital assets that are changing the financial world.
Cryptocurrency encounters large and small are on the rise around the world. Many of these events can be found on Meetup.com, where cryptocurrency and blockchain-focused gatherings have grown by around 90% since last year, according to data from Meetup.com. RSVPs to crypto-related meetings have also increased 127% since January 2020 despite the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic.
Hong Kong Bitcoin Association
The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong was co-founded in 2014 by Leonhard Weese, who is now president of the club, following the success of a few informal gatherings which prompted the creation of a more formal membership organization.
A self-proclaimed Bitcoin maximist, Weese is a technical writer for Lightning Labs and also works to evangelize and promote the Lightning Network, a layer 2 protocol for the Bitcoin network that enables faster transactions and waives high cryptocurrency fees.
As a student of economics, Weese became fascinated with Bitcoin. The idea that you could make money with a computer and that it exists outside the realm of central banks or governments and challenges popular assumptions about how money works or how the economy works, Weese said, in an interview with Forkast. News. At first, meetups were really just a tool to bring people together to discuss BTC. There wasn’t a lot of information about it at the time and we ourselves didn’t know what Bitcoin was.
Many attendees at the Hong Kong events that night last week were there for that sole purpose to learn more. Some were newbies like Ken Wong, an ecommerce executive who told Forkast.News that he had not yet invested in Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, but believed they had a huge potential for the future.
A mainstream investment advisor who asked not to be named for fear his interest in this nascent asset class might worry some of his high net worth clients admitted he was bewildered by the strength of the crypto market. and had come out of pure curiosity.
I really want to know where the value of Bitcoins comes from, they always say Bitcoin is digital gold, but even gold doesn’t really have a high value, and it also has a maximum value, said the investment advisor. But Bitcoin is not stopping. It just goes up.
Eugenie Kwok, the owner of After Five at the Fringe Vault, the café where the Hong Kong Bitcoin meeting was held, accepted Bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network. Kwok told Forkast.News that she has invested in Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, since 2017, and she believes cryptocurrencies definitely have a role to play in the future of financial transactions. .
Accepting BTC was an easy decision, Kwok said. Throughout the evening, many regulars from the Bitcoin Association used the service, exchanging their Satoshis for drinks and food.
Oppose the establishment
While everyone our Forkast.News team met were friendly, many were unwilling to speak to a recorded reporter. Almost no one would provide contact details for tracking questions beyond highly encrypted platforms like Telegram and Signal.
A hot topic of discussion for the evening was the position of the Hong Kongs Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) which recently proposed to ban the vast majority of retail investors in the territory from buying cryptocurrencies while demanding crypto exchanges to obtain licenses.
Clifford Choi, the director of the Bitcoin Association, told Forkast.News that he predicted this scenario years earlier.
I’m not really surprised at the reaction of the CFS, ”said Choi. “We have the Hong Kong government, which is trying to protect this elite ruling structure, and we also have a lot of political instability, hyperinflation and other global economic pressures that are pushing businesses and governments towards the end. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. “
But the SFC is too late to stop small investors from buying and selling Bitcoin, and the proposed regulations will likely only serve to create a much less secure environment for crypto traders, Choi said.
There is a real disconnect between what the law does and what software does, Choi said. The retail trade will always have access to decentralized exchanges and the law does not have jurisdiction over software.
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