Bitcoin receives award at CeBIT 2014
Christoph Marckx 14/03/2014 Bitcoin, Business, Events, News, Services
Posted 8 hours ago
Oliver Flasskämper accepts Bitcoin award
Oliver Flaßkämper accepted Bitcoins award at CeBIT 2014
CeBIT, one of the most important exhibitions about technology and innovations in the world, is going on this week. The German festival attracts lots of attention. It has several famous key speakers, countless exhibitions, expert panels, everything to make this an interesting week. And, of course, Bitcoin was a trending topic at CeBIT as well.
Award for Bitcoin
After being talk of the town at SXSW 2014, Bitcoin managed to snag an award at CeBIT. This happened yesterday, during the presentation of the Linux New Media Awards. Bitcoin received the award in the category most innovative open-source project.
, managing director of Bitcoin.de,was officially representing the Bitcoin Federation and the scene. He, gladly, accepted the award.
The award is handed out by two parties. Medialinx AG, a company that resides in Munich, is the worlds largest content provider when it comes to Linux and open-source projects in general. Together with CeBIT Open Source, they try to find suitable candidates for this reward. They look for projects, organizations, individuals and companies for their outstanding services to Linux and open-source. Once a year, they hand out this reward to the project they think did the best work for the open-source business.
Yesterday that once a year momen,t finally, arrived again. Moderator Michael Fellner gave the microphone to open-source expert Thomas Uhl. Uhl had a fine way of introducing the winner, saying this years awarded project was a bit of IT and bit of cryptography. A damn lot of cryptography. If there still was anyone left who had no clue about who or what was going to win, these doubts were taken away with Uhls next words. Some would say its a gamble, others that it was fraud. Some claimed that one could lose a lot of money and someone else said it was no money at all, while others said it was the future of the digital economy.
After that second sentence, everyone knew what he was talking about. In normal circumstances, the award would be granted to Bitcoins original creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Obviously, it was impossible to do this, so Uhl presented the award to Flaskämper instead. He praised him for being the manager of Bitcoin.de and addressed him as the representative of the German Bitcoin scene.
Revolutionizing money
In his acceptance speech, Flaskämper explained that Bitcoin.de, the largest marketplace for the virtual currency in Europe, is doing really well. The exchange is healthy and free of problems as the ones Mt. Gox has been facing the past few months. Immediately after saying that, he expressed his desire to get a better infrastructure. It was his ending sentence that was the most inspirational: Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we share knowledge, Twitter and Facebook redefined freedom of expression; Bitcoin will revolutionize the way we work with money.
This kind of award is vital for Bitcoins acceptance. We focus too much on the bad news, while there are so many exciting, good things happening right under our noses.
For those that are interested, Linux Magazin promised to put up a stream of the ceremony on its website.