Today I onboarded 2 institutional investors

I was invited to speak for ~30 CFOs and COOs of European Investments funds about Bitcoin and "Blockchain". It's a small sample group, but here are some takeaways people may find interesting:

• Most of them were very surprised when they found out Bitcoin isn't primarily used by criminals and that it's not the protocol, but exchanges that are getting hacked. The influence of the media is strong.
• Some of them read that Bitcoin is V1 and something else with better technology will emerge to overtake it. They thought they missed the boat on Bitcoin and were looking for this next thing. (I explained that most inventions can be copied by people working on projects with larger network effects)
• The expectations of what Smart Contracts will do were huge.
• Regulation is a big question mark to them and has held them back from getting involved.
• They were very skeptical about "blockchain" (permissioned blockchains) because they didn't see immediate use cases of the database for their business.

2 CFOs came up to me after the presentation to tell me they literally just bought bitcoin after my talk to try it out. I never sell my audience on anything, they simply got excited (happens sometimes). I of course had to tell them to move their purchases into their own wallets.

It may not be their organisations putting in money, but it's a start. These people need simple education just as much as anyone out there. Without it, I don't see them getting involved in any way any time soon.

Edit: Some people are under the impression I’m making this up because account registration takes time. One of them used Revolut so I had to explain him he didn’t own his keys. The other was already registered with Coinbase but never followed through for some reason.

Submitted June 14, 2018 at 03:29AM by SamWouters https://ift.tt/2y8aUOz