Last Thursday we held our mid-monthly workshop and presentations meetup.
First we were covering some news of recent weeks:
- Goldman Sachs Leaves R3 Blockchain Consortium - Exemplary for "private" "blockchains"?
- Ethereum Hard Fork No. 4 - Will such problems strengthen or weaken Ethereum and public blockchains in general?
- Segregated Witness Officially Introduced
- Segregated Witness Adoption graph on the Bitcoin Core developers website - Does it look good or bad?
- Nevertheless, Bitcoin is Booming, market cap at all-time high
Hans-Georg brought up an urgent issue for the end of this year, the OECD Common Reporting Standard, and how it could affect the Bitcoin Exchanges and all of us. He has also posted this to
Perhaps you want to ask your favorite bitcoin exchanges this question:
Will you be a Reporting Financial Institution, as defined in the https://www.oecd.org/ctp/exchange-of-tax-information/automatic-exchange-financial-account-information-common-reporting-standard.pdf , Annex, Section VIII?
Given that the number of participating countries will jump to over 100 (out of the 200 countries on our planet) on 2017-01-01, you may wish to know who reports your account information to your home tax authority.
[...] Also by the way, I think the nearly global renunciation of bank secrecy in 2017 is on the same level as Edward Snowden's revelations. Note that the mass media keep mum about it and that most people seem to be completely unaware, apart from those wealthy enough to have a competent financial advisor.
Going back to the originally scheduled program, talking about today's state of user security:
- Most popular passwords
- Biometrics insecure as well: Chaos Computer Club fingerprint reveals flaws of biometrics
- Best practice is multi-Factor authentication. Something you know. Something you have. Something you are.
Paper Wallets would be something you have. Rupert was giving a great introduction.
He didn't even shy away from entering a private key by hand in order to show how to redeem it the old-fashioned way (without a QR-Code).
He also presented a site he made together with a colleague where you can create your own paper wallet: http://paper-wallet.net/
The website is open source and runs completely client-side, i.e. pure HTML + Javascript, that means you can download the site onto your machine and use it offline.
Thanks Satoshi!
Attendees at large did not bring their own devices to try themselves as we had originally proposed for the hands-on experience, but we encouraged them to do try this at home!
Last but not least, a reminder for an upcoming event here in Munich: http://events.cointelegraph.com/
Another review with more photos is here: https://steemit.com/beers/@beers/german-beer-of-the-day-on-tour-6-augustiner-hell-at-wayra-munich-academy-during-bitcoin-munich-meetup -- albeit a bit focused on the beer. :)
We actually also had hot wine and cookies (besides pizza rolls and other drinks). Thanks to the members attending this time who contributed to this, because due to the lack of sponsors we had to pass the hat this time.
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