Record attendance for Bitcoin Meetup with Tony Vays in Zürich

On Wednesday 13th of September the Bitcoin Association Switzerland hosted the largest Bitcoin Meetup so far. The event with Tony Vays was attended by more than 330 Bitcoin enthusiast in Volkshaus Zürich. A lot of veterans but as well a lot of new joiners, the Bitcoin Community around Zürich is expanding! Dominique Lara Salzgeber opened the Meetup and introduced the special guest and speaker Tony Vays. Before Tony started Ronald Kogens from sponsor “Froriep” introduced the community in the currently very hot topic of ICOs and token sales from a legal perspective. Especially the different token models that could be offered like utility token, debt token, equity token or participation rights token und the later set-up of the company. Does it make sense to set up a company in a way of a foundation, like Ethereum did, or in a way of a stock corporation or limited liability company?

After this Tony joined the stage with big applause. He introduced himself and brought some background what he has done before he entered the Bitcoin Community in early 2013. Tony worked as a Risk Analyst at Bear Stearns and later becoming a VP at JP Morgan Chase in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Since he joined the Bitcoin trail he is independent content creator at LibertyLifeTrail, on his YouTube Channel & WorldCryptoNetwork focused on sound economics & finance. In addition he is hosting the Podcast “Cryptoscam” where he analyses also other Cryptoprojects like Ethereum at the moment. He started with a poll in this large audience, what is the amount of people that already own Bitcoin. Just a few hands didn’t showed up here, what was an impressive result for Tony. He then showed two interesting quotes from Nobelprize winners. First one from Paul Krugman 1998, where he was claiming the impact of the Internet in the future won’t be bigger than the impact of the fax machine. The other quote was done by Milton Friedman 1999, where he predicted a reliable “e-cash”, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A. So in fact Bitcoin, 10 years before it started. The next slides of the presentation covered the history of Bitcoin with interesting price turning points. Even for veteran guys it was very interesting and impressive, how Tony linked Bitcoin history with the price movements. For example the acceptance of Bitcoin from Wikileaks and the popping of the first bubble 2011 when the price crashed from around 30 USD to just 2 USD. How 2012 the Chinese TV influenced the price, by presenting Bitcoin to an audience of more than 500 million. How Silkroad and Mt. Gox leveraged the price 2012 and 2013 and the Cyprus banking crisis have had a great influence for the European Bitcoin Community, because at that level started the massive media attention. And the main reasons why Bitcoin than declined after the first ATH of over 1000 USD end 2013. In Tonys view it was just this formula:

Price = Demand (New Bitcoin Users) – [Supply (Merchant Selling) + Mined Coins]

Especially the Merchants that accepted Bitcoin as payment have had for him a negative effect on the price. Because they just sold the coins after they received them, what influenced the price in a negative way. He then compared the price movements of Silver and Bitcoin and it was interesting to see the similarities just with a time gap of around two years.

The next part was very important and impressive, because Tony was showing what makes Bitcoin precious and unique, compared with any other asset class. The Top use cases are:

-Donations to causes, goods and services government does not approve of -Gambling -Hiding assets -Transferring value cross borders

Later also Tony showed up how simple and easy the Bitcoin Whitepaper was written compared with other papers and regulations. And how the governments in the world working towards a cashless society, to bring down the costs but more important control the people, allow negative interest rates and generate tax revenues. A nice comparison with the past was when Tony showed how Rome declined because of their bad monetary regime. When Rome devaluated the currency the end of the Empire was near.

In the next minutes Tony explained how he predicts price movements with technical analysis. He called also that the 3000 USD will be the bottom in the current drawdown, what seems to be proven just two days later. A Q&A session followed where Tony explained, that he doesn’t like Altcoins which are a kind of pennystock investments for him and a tread against Bitcoin. And that the electricity costs are not really a problem for the Bitcoin network, it’s a feature to keep the Bitcoin network safe and he is running a miner by himself. He received a big applause for his impressive and outstanding presentation. In the closing words Bitcoin Association President Lucas Betschart thanked him for his great talk and invited the audience for an apero in the foyer financed by the sponsors of this event what was very gladly accepted by the community for additional talks and discussions.