Crypto Biz Magazine—July, 2014/Issue.02

BITCOIN IN THE BELTWAY—
WHO, WHAT, AND WHERE IS CHARLIE?
by BEN ISGUR
I was lucky enough to be able to attend Bitcoin in
the Beltway this past weekend, hosted by none other
than the man who is probably the best known Bitcoin
philanthropist, Jason King of Sean’s Outpost. When I
say lucky enough, I mean it—for many reasons. First,
I was local, and not always having to travel far makes
events like this much easier to make it out to. Second, I
was the recipient of Jason’s good will—I keep to a tight
budget and wasn’t able to find a way to add in the
price of attendance in time for the event, but he was
kind enough to offer me a last-minute press badge so
I could still come by and have a great time interacting
with the community.
However, the third, and most significant, reason I say I
was lucky enough to attend, is the all-star list of speakers
and Bitcoin businesses that were in attendance.
For those not fortunate enough to be there them selves,
I snapped a few pictures during my time there. There was
quite a bit going on!
The gentlemen and lady running BitPay’s booth were
constantly swarmed by people wanting to talk to them.
I couldn’t even find a time to get a quiet picture of just
them and their booth, so I had to settle for this! I’ve heard
Plenty of other big names in the cryptocurrency world
were there as well, showing off the newest of the new.
Mycelium’s booth was staffed by Dmitry Murashchik,
or, for those that know him by his alias, Rassah, and he
had a neat little new gadget from Mycelium to show off.
What is that he’s holding, you ask? It’s called Mycelium
Entropy. It’s a tiny random wallet generator that is
designed to be plugged directly into a printer. It remains
entirely offline during the process, and prints out a
beautiful paper wallet. It can also print out 2-of-3 wallets,
if you’d prefer. If you can see the tiny white button on the
device, that is used to switch between the two modes:
2-of-3 and single address. Dmitry had printed off test
versions of each to show off the functionality, and while
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Crypto Biz Magazine
of much worse problems than having your
time demanded by interested potential
customers, though.
And even if I couldn’t get a solid picture
of their booth, I didn’t walk away emptyhanded.
I stole (was given, same thing)
a stuffed copy of Bitpay CEO Tony
Gallippi’s dog.
I imagine the real-life version to be much
cuter, but I bet that he doesn’t wear a
Bitpay shirt!
The Mycelium Entropy—plug into your printer, it
prints a beautiful paper wallet, or 2-of-3 wallets
the paper is simple, the functionality
is both quite obvious and quite
valuable. Mycelium intended to
launch a Kickstarter for the device,
but they’re being prevented from
doing so by Kickstarter themselves,
who claim that their project violates
Kickstarter’s rule against
providing financial services. If this
device interests you, look to see a
crowdfunding project going live
very soon from Mycelium—and
probably on a better website than
Kickstarter; hopefully one that
can understand the difference
between financial services and data
security services.
Moving on… Also in attendance
was BitMainTech, a Bitcoin mining