Our Private Key meetup at Oak & Ice Berlin last Tuesday was one of our most successful ones ever.
More than 45 people showed up, so our venue was too small. Some people had so sit and stand on the staircase which leads to the basement room of Oak & Ice.
We gave away free Dash, which you might consider a good reason for attracting a bigger crowd than usually. But only 27 claimed their free Dash, and many more stayed for the talk. I would have expected that more people would come just to grab the money and disappear, especially as the talk was in German (many of our regular visitors don't speak German), but the opposite was true.
People seemed to like the talk that Thomas Beyersdorf and Gerd Schaumann gave about the German cooperative movement ("Genossenschaftsbewegung") and how they plan to integrate Bitcoin and Blockchain technology.
Especially Gerd, who worked with Germany's former chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s, fascinated the audience with his plea for self-responsibility and less dependance on the state.
They talked about their Academy, which will educate the 22 Million members of German cooperatives about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and their plan to establish mobile Bitcoin ATMs on trucks all over Germany.
So far there are no Bitcoin ATMs in Germany, because the regulatory authority BaFin has been very restrictive towards cryptocurrencies. Cooperatives, however, are not regulated by BaFin, they are self-regulated. Gerd himself is the chairman of a so-called Prüfverband, which has the same role for cooperatives as BaFin has for other legal entities.
Therefore cooperatives can do more than things than normal companies, which is the main reason why Deutsche Bitcoin-Genossenschaft ("German Bitcoin Cooperative") was founded. It will even issue their own coin, baptised the "C-Mark". This is of course reminiscent of the "Good old D-Mark", which was replaced by the weak Euro - a decision that many Germans consider a mistake.
The "C" stands for "Cooperative". Unlike the D-Mark, which was issued by Germany's central bank, the C-Mark will be a full-fledged, decentralised cryptocurrency, based on open source code and a permissionless public Blockchain.
People asked very good questions and seemed to be really interested in these ventures. I suppose that Deutsche Bitcoin-Genossenschaft has won some new members this evening.
Pictures by Anastasya Stolyarov