May 23–24, 2019
St Julian’s, Malta
The summit in Malta, known as “Blockchain Island”, was yet another successful opportunity for PointPay to share experiences with colleagues. It was a pleasure to immerse ourselves into a truly unique atmosphere created by progressive-minded crypto-enthusiasts. The event brought together about 5,500 participants, among which was Joseph Muscat, Prime Minister of Malta. He is known for his advanced views and is firmly convinced of the great promise of blockchain technologies.
We were thrilled to see Tim Draper and Roger Ver again. Their presentations always attract attention. Roger traditionally surprised the participants with his unshakable confidence stating that the penetration of cryptocurrencies in all spheres of everyday life is not a matter of the nearest future.
At the same time, “The Bitcoin-Jesus” demonstrated remarkable awareness in everything that concerns the current state of the cryptocurrency market. The culmination was his discussion with the analyst and trader Tone Ways. Roger Ver argued that BTC does not stand up to a competition with BCH, primarily due to the high cost of transactions.
His opponent, in turn, assured that such technical solutions as Lightning Network and SegWit allow sending small bitcoin transactions without having to pay high fees. The crucial moment for the public was a dispute for $10,000. Roger promised to present this amount of funds to Tone on the following terms. Tone sends a BTC transaction equal to $ 5 with one satoshi per byte fee. This is, by the way, a standard fee for BCH transactions. If Tone’s transaction is confirmed within 24 hours, Roger owes him $ 10,000. The transaction was finally confirmed in ten hours. Nevertheless, experts noticed that the transaction was manually added to the block by one of the mining pools. The explicit goal of this action was to help Tone Ways win the dispute. Who won the dispute after all?
