Blockchain Afternoon #3 Introducing Konsensus

The current chairman of Consensus, Niko.

Thank you, Joakim. That was very informative and and good presentation. And let me introduce myself again. My name is Niko Laamanen. I'm the current Consensus. Finnish Cryptocurrency Association Consensus chairman, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my background first so you can then maybe relate to where I'm coming from. And, and also I want to remind you what I'm talking about today are mostly all my personal opinions. I encourage everybody to do their own research, maybe listen to what I have to say. I'm not right a lot of times. And I would just like to spark your interest in the field and hopefully provide you as neutral information as possible. So cards on the table, I'm a beginner myself. I've only been active— actively in the scene for a year now. And also cards on the table, my cards are on the table there. So if you would like to keep in touch, please take my card, and you can leave in the box your own card if you want. Thank you. into my network. So I would really appreciate that. So I actually heard about Bitcoin in 2009, 2010, I don't remember exactly. I was in Tampere also. The Technical University of Tampere students were running this mini-golf which accepted Bitcoin, funnily enough. I was there with my mom, and funnily enough, she had to educate me on Bitcoin. Because I didn't know what that was. And she did, which was impressive to me. And at that time, I didn't really look into that much. For me, it was just like magic internet money or play money or whatever, a nerdy thing I like to do. So for a while, I was mining it with the CPU in 2010 just for fun. And then I guess I just returned the laptop to my previous employer because it was a work laptop. And then I don't know, and I don't want to remember. any amounts that I might have had. But that's some interesting tidbit. And then I realized, yeah, it's time to grow up and get a job and go work as a construction engineer. And I forgot about Bitcoin until pretty much 2 years ago when I started looking into it again. And I realized, wow, what happened to the price? Like, I really need to check this out. And then finally last year, I read the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper. It's 9 pages. I recommend all of you to read it. It's not super technical. Changed my mind. Changed my life totally. Changed everything. I used to spend a lot of money for useless things. I wasn't interested in saving, wasn't interested in investing. Bitcoin changed all that because nowadays I will have to go through this thought process whenever I'm going to spend my money. Do I value this, what I'm about to buy, more than I value my freedom? And more often than not, I don't. So I'm living a frugal lifestyle now, and as a result, I can be much more free, and I can do things like this to raise awareness and help other people. But just to let you know, I haven't been around so far— so long. So anybody who's thinking about starting learning, it takes a lot of work. For the last year, I've been studying like around 8, more, at least 8 hours every day, watching videos, reading articles. It's a very difficult field to understand because it's so comprehensive, cryptocurrencies, that is. It's a new asset class that involves a lot of knowledge in technology, economy, like psychology, and even, even physics in form of like energy consumption and generation, which I'm going to talk about later. But that's, uh, that's enough about me for now. Uh, let's talk about ConsenSys, which was formed, um, in March. We are rather new, and ever since we've been trying to organize events such as this. And, and thank you, Aki, for, uh, for putting this up, putting us up. This is the biggest event, uh, we've had so far, so really excited. And also people who are watching the livestream, uh, really awesome. And I would really appreciate if you could share it around and And give us a thumbs up or even thumbs down because both are very valuable to us, and that helps us to get the word out via the YouTube algorithm. So we've been creating some content. I have a talk show every Monday. Unfortunately, it's mostly in Finnish. There's one episode that is in English, so you can you can check that out. You can find us at Consensus R U when you when you search. From the YouTube. And I'm also making these short introductory informational videos about certain topics like personal security and stuff like that that are more directed to the beginners, but again, also, also in Finnish. And then as a, as a person, personally, I also make English videos on my own channel, which is called OmniFin. I'll talk about that later. So if you're thinking about Would you like to join maybe our mission at Consensus? We also have several non-Finnish speaking members, even though our main language is Finnish. We invite everybody. And our website, our beta website is now up, consensus.fi. So it's still just in Finnish, but I'm working on the translation. But you can use it already to Become a member, become a full member of our association, and it doesn't cost you anything. And I've just listed here our official rules. So if you agree with all those, you can proceed and and join in, and we'll we'll be happy to have you on board because what's the benefit? The more we are, the bigger the group we are, the more influence we have. So we we aim to influence the decision makers, the politicians, to give us better better regulation, give us more freedom. Basically, make things easier, especially most of you guys are probably thinking how you're going to get employed in the future. The job market doesn't seem so great. There's more and more people, there's less and less jobs. There's algorithms that are taking a lot of our work, robotics and stuff like that. So we are working on solutions to these problems. For example, how to create your own job, how to train yourself, how to educate yourself. Because nowadays education is pretty much free and available to everybody. But the key is where to find the best and most neutral information. And I can't stress this enough, everybody has a bias. I have a bias as well. So keep that in mind. Don't take anybody's word for gospel and always do your own research. Well, there's other benefits planned in the future. Probably going to give some discounts for events later when we have bigger events that we actually charge. Or even free tickets. And of course, we're going to have more and more meetings like this, also social ones. So always interesting to meet people. I always have a blast when I go to these meetups, like so many, so many interesting people. So that's definitely something to keep in mind if you're interested. That's about it about our association. And like Aki said, here's our Bitcoin address as well. You can do whatever you want with that. It's It also serves us as a transparent channel to— because everybody can just check on that address and see each and every transaction that is made in and out. So we also want to advocate this transparency feature of Bitcoin here. If you want to contact me, here's my email. It's my personal email for now because we've been having trouble with the ConsenSys email, so I didn't want to take any risks. And of course, make sure to join us at Telegram, follow us on Twitter, follow us on YouTube for sure. And yeah, I will also periodically share some English content, so it's not only going to be Finnish, even though mostly it is. And one more thing I would like to share about our association: we are working together with Blockchain Forum under the name Finnish Blockchain Alliance, and this is our way to leverage Both of our associations' power to try to lobby some of the regulation in Finland and try to make a better atmosphere and ground for everybody. And and to that end, I'll I'll welcome Marcus, who is the chairman, and he will tell a little bit about their work, and maybe you will be interested in joining as well. Oiva.