This post has information on bitcoin related things going spotted at Web Summit 2015. We attended the exhibition on the second and third day, catching two of the three bitcoin talks on the Friday. Held in Dublin’s Royal Dublin Society this year’s Web Summit had a couple of mentions of bitcoin across the days, so we went to check out the companies on display, and during the few days it was running, it went through the recent price spike and subsequent levelling out at over €300 after peaking at nearly €450 (up from the previous week’s €230)
We were walking the floor and in terms of companies, I saw the Coinmillions booth, a bitcoin gambling site. Also, while over in Simmonscourt I ran into Joao and Roberto from Circle who were walking the floors, and were very nice to stop and chat. We’d asked their CEO Jeremy Allaire some questions about Circle’s current status so far in Ireland during the recent bitcoin.com ama, getting some interesting pieces of information.
We continue to grow our Dublin Operations. We recently hired a new head of the dublin office, and are adding more business operations staff there, and also expanding and moving the office to the docklands.
We also asked how they’ve been getting on in general.
Experience has been great. Very easy place to do business, and a lot of local talent. We’re excited to continue to expand operations there. You should reach out to Joao about getting involved with the local community, I’m sure he’d be thrilled including sponsoring some things.
Circle co-founder Sean Neville is going to be in Dublin Wed-Fri of this week for the WebSummit
And they’re not the only bitcoiners in town. While many bitcoiners are buried in their trading screens taking advantage of the bitcoin boom that’s going on this month, others aren’t so lucky. But a quick look at twitter lets us see that Blockchain CEO Peter Smith in town, Safello doing a talk today, Zapgo exhibiting and Blend also here.
At the end of the night, we had a couple of beers in Christchurch, not far from the main Night Summit putting on display one of our review miners. There, we met a rather eclectic mix of people, including Daniel and Stephen of social reviewing app MDP Labs, who were giving away one bitcoin to people signing up to their app Trybal using the websummit promo code, which was pretty cool. We also ran into Maja and Katherina of social network Happytail.com, for dogs and dog owners. They were also bitcoin owners, so happy to hear about the price spike among other things we chatted about.
Day 3 – 5th November
So slightly hungover after bring one of our review antminer s1’s onto Dame Street last night, so there may be a few #bitcoinselfies across social media. The bitcoin price also tanked overnight, down to €320, although by the time I was typing this, it had recovered to €350. The last day of web summit had a fresh batch of companies exhibiting in the different areas of the show.
On day two, we found a number of new bitcoin exhibitors on the show. Estonian payments provider Piixpay had added some very obvious signs that they were in bitcoin to their booth, which really did help them stand out in the exhibition area. We had a brief chat with Ravio to get some information on what they’re doing, with a combination of payments processing, and invoice paying. They were very nice to give us a mug too! Around the corner, we ran into Marek from bitcoin sports (and e-sports betting) company OneHash.com, who offer a betting site you can register with just your bitcoin wallet address.
Not far away, we also came across a company called Scorechain from Luxembourg who provide a wallet, and API service, and blockchain analysis tools and had a chat with their founder Pierre about what they do. I did notice a very smartly dressed gentleman called Giuseppe from the Central Bank of Ireland walking among some of the bitcoin related booths on the Friday.
After that, we hit the second and third bitcoin talks, and you can read near transcripts of Gavin Andresen’s Web Summit talk, as well as Circle’s Sean Neville.
