Resilience in Bitcoin, Proof-of-Work, Energy Consumption

The Munich Security Conference is on, and like last year we cooperate with the https://pirate-secon.org/ counter-conference, being kindly hosted on location.

As always, our meetup takes place in the evening and is free to attend, but you're welcome to get tickets (€25,-) for the full conference that runs for the whole weekend.

The theme of the conference is "Resilience". Resilience is also one of the fundamental prerequisites for Bitcoin to function. No one party or interest group must be able to take over the system. We will be looking into how this is achieved, and perhaps what can be learned from it in a broader context.

Proof-of-work consensus aka Mining is certainly one of the cornerstones that enables the Security of the network. Lately though, articles have been making the rounds that Bitcoin requires as much energy as countries like Denmark, and that one Bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as a family home in a week. Is that true? Is Bitcoin sustainable in a world afflicted with climate change, struggling to achieve CO2 neutrality? We will be trying to shed some light on this issue. Probably we'll have a pretty open-ended discussion round.

Target Audience: Everyone interested in the political, societal, and environmental aspects of Bitcoin and related technologies.

Speakers tonight include:

Florian Weigand holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science (TU Munich), was the lead backend developer at Foodora, had co-founded the startup bernstein.io securing intellectual property on the (actual) Bitcoin Blockchain, and has recently co-founded the bitcoin1x1.de education platform while also working at Allianz.

• https://twitter.com/weigand_florian
• https://de.linkedin.com/in/weigand

Tobias Mader holds diplomas in political science and business management, has been a self-employed entrepreneur since 1995 in the area of renewable energies, and is these days especially focusing on the digital transformation of the energy market towards the benefit of end customers with his company Volllast GmbH.

• http://www.volllast.com
• https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Mader7

Rough agenda for our track:

18:30 Get-together, socializing
19:15 Florian Weigand: How Bitcoin works and how Proof-of-Work makes it resilient
20:00 Tobias Mader: The renewable energy market in Germany, the challenges, and new perspectives with blockchain technology and crypto-currency mining
20:30 Q&A, discussion round
22:00 End of official part, socializing

Illustration from https://pixabay.com/en/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-money-3012035/