Last week I was invited to the Johannesburg Binance meet up and I thought why not. We had an announcement on the 1st May that all transactions in and out of Binance require extra information to be filled out on a separate pop up like the origin of the funds or where is your crypto withdrawing going even if it is to yourself on another wallet.
Roughly 500 people attended todays meet up which is more than I expected.
I was also curious how many people might attend and was genuinely hoping to learn something new. There was roughly 500 people which is good news, but I would estimate less than 10 had much crypto knowledge. Still the turnout number is an indication of how quickly crypto is growing. Would this be the same number if we were in a Bear market? There was roughly 30% of the people attending who have registered with Binance and have no crypto which I found rather odd.
I would say this was proper retail attendees who have entered the crypto space within the last 24 months and the vast majority have no idea. You could gauge the lack of knowledge when one person was confused between the difference of a server and a blockchain.
The main speaker covered the basics of investing in crypto, but not once did I hear the saying not your keys, not your crypto. Many were taking notes from the guest speaker which included the 4 year crypto cycle and summing this up there was very little detail being shared and this could be due to the lack of crypto knowledge in the room. We have all been at this point ourselves and the vast majority of this room are only starting on that journey now.
This may sound all negative, but not really as the positives are we are so far ahead in the knowledge we hold. There is such a big difference we are definitely up many levels from the majority of crypto investors. I would not classify the vast majority of those on HIVE as retail as we are not the dumb money.
The chap I set next to today is a financial advisor who has been in crypto for a few years and is all in with XRP. He at least uses a cold wallet and was there for the same reason why I was there and that was to see the tax implications and what options are available. He has no idea about staking and was asking me so many questions we will meet up again over the next few weeks. He would like to join HIVE and is a perfect fit as he is a futures trader and mentioned he would use HIVE more like a journal sharing his trades.
The tax question and the extra pop ups with all the information was asked and it is a requirement for Binance to become registered in South Africa. Binance will not share any information with the tax man until they are fully licensed. Apparently they are waiting approval for an SBV license which is a financial body operating in SA overseeing banking. The trigger amount is R5000 ($250) which is half of what it used to be and is shockingly low.
Food and drinks were served at 1pm which is when I left as they only had a quiz section left to finish off afterwards. At least they had 3 areas serving food and drinks because the turn out was excellent.
This sending and receiving of crypto is called the "travel rule" which I have never heard of before and they say it is more about protecting investors funds. We know that is total BS as why would you need to know who is receiving the funds if you are sending it to yourself? The legal council talking us through all of this was an ex SA treasury lawyer for the Reserve Bank in SA. The good news is they are not up to speed with crypto and are clueless and helpless to the work arounds that are available that we know exist and more will be developed.
To summarise the morning it was not a total waste of time and was actually good fun even though I learned very little. I do not think I would attend another event, but it was a good experience to gauge where we all are.