VOP Blockchain 4: Steemit Presentation, Augur and the Potential of a Hubcoin

This evening we hosted the 4th Vertical Open Connect about the Blockchain at Connect Hub, in Bucharest. For those of you who don't know what a VOP is, in short, it's a 2 hours networking event targeted at a certain niche. Think at it like a meetup, but with a minimal structure and format.

I host the blockchain related VOP, but we also have, at Connect Hub, VOPs for minimalism, healthy eating, social media and, more recently, e-commerce. We try to leverage the experience we gathered by hosting weekly events for more than 4 years, only this time with a more focused approach. So far, it seems to be working really good.

At today's event we were more than 10 people, all very well educated and blockchain savvy - which is something surprising even for me, it looks I heavily underestimated the number of people passionated about blockchain - and we had 2 presentations.

The first one was about Steemit and I did my best to present the platform as accurately as I could. Some of the people were already aware of it, some not too much, but everybody seemed really interested. We will have at least one more committed steemian - and one with a very interesting approach towards relationships - after this evening meeting. The part that was the most difficult to explain was that about governance, perhaps because I am still learning about it. Witnesses are still playing a very mysterious role for me, because they are also miners, but miners aren't witnesses, and it gets confusing at times, but I'm getting there. :)

The second presentation was about Augur and predictive markets, a free talk given by @fixone (who, by the way, is a prominent figure in the payment industry here in Romania, as one of the founders of the biggest payment processing company in the market). He is also quite versed in Ethereum (last time we had a real time demonstration of a contract deployment on the Ethereum blockchain). I wish to see him more present here, as a content provider.

After the presentations we had a little bit of a chat and just brainstorming various ideas and applications of the blockchain. It was a very good vibe and people seemed interested genuinely in developing something for real, not just learning.

So we decided that next time we will implement our own token, called hubcoin. Incidentally (or not) it happened that I already had the domain hubcoin.cash. We want to use this experiment as a learning process, not only for the mechanisms of creating and deploying smart contracts in Ethereum, but also as a way to map real life activities - like the ones that are taking place in a coworking place every day - to a crypto currency.

I really look forward to this. I feel like I'm going to have a lot of fun for the next 10-20 Mondays.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.