This past weekend, Kryptografen attended the 3rd annual Baltic Honeybadger in Riga, Latvia. Hosted by the P2P cryptocurrency exchange, Hodl Hodl. This two-day conference focused on everything bitcoin, from security, wallets, the politics and monetary theory to the technical nitty-gritty.

Taking place in a converted warehouse, there was approximately 500 guests and speakers from all over the world. The opening words were held by Max Keidun and Roman Snitko of Hodl Hodl that went on to present the host for the weekend, Peter McCormack of ‘What Bitcoin Did‘ podcast. Kicking off at 10 am on Saturday, the next two days were nine-hour packed with over 35 diverse talks and panels.

With both bitcoin and toxic maximalists coming face-to-face, the conference felt almost like a festival of sorts. There was partying going on in every corner and eccentric outfits and people everywhere. It was in many ways a release for those everyone who is obsessed with bitcoin.

Highlights

Of course, like every conference #BH2019 had its highlights. We have composed a list of our favorite presentations :

Rodolfo Novak, Founder of CoinKite, announced the release of the new Coldcard Mk3. With this, he also held a talk about how to design a hardware wallet.

Jimmy Song was, in general, a crowd favorite. He was featured in one of the first panels which discussed the ‘unpopular opinions in Bitcoin’, but his talk about ‘How Bitcoin Changes Incentives’ kicked off the conference with a welcoming howdy.

‘Yellow Rock Bad, Orange Coin Good: Environmental & Social Impacts of Gold & Bitcoin’ by Hass McCook, was a funny visit to the negative impacts of gold.

Giacomo Zucco was back once again to open day two of Honeybadger. He was the funny man at the conference, with a same-same but different from his talk last year, this year it was called ‘Shitcoin Apologism’

‘Bitcoin as Base Money’ with @crypto_voices, Matthew Mezinskis, was an interesting comparison to bitcoin and money that is currently part of the monetary base.

Noteworthy Announcements

Roman Snitko announced that @hodlhodl exchange going open source

BTCPayServer announced that Square Crypto has given them a grant of 100,000 dollars to the BTCPay Foundation. What this foundation works with is working on updating the BTCPay Server, in order to help make money accessible to financially-sovereign individuals through world-class, open-source payment processing and give access to the full bitcoin network. The foundation works to continue developing:

Roman Snitko announced that @hodlhodl exchange going open source. This means that the software will freely be available to anyone who wants to launch their own version of the peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange.

Finally, Canadian Bull Bitcoin Joins Blockstreams Liquid Exchange network. The Liquid network is a second layer tech for bitcoin.

Strange Theories of Money and Credit by https://twitter.com/evoskuil

If you did not have the chance to be in Latvia this weekend, it is possible to watch the Livestream recordings of each day below:

Day 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpZWSWUIVE

Day 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns_I2LpeAbQ

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