Then Versus Now. A 10 Year Review of Crypto.

It’s 10 years ago, this month, that 5 inquisitive minds showed up to the first Bitcoin meetup to be held in London at The Cleveland Arms in Paddington on the 31st of October, 2012.

As the number of attendees started to outgrow the pub by the spring of 2013, the team started to organise more formal monthly events that provided a melting pot of ideas, discussion and debate that imagined how the truly groundbreaking concepts that Satoshi Nakamoto had set loose in January 2009 might change the world.

And so Coinscrum was born as the UK’s leading community of crypto curios out of which a swathe of ideas & innovation – as well as multi-billion dollar businesses – emerged.

To celebrate this epic milestone, we welcome back a few of the guys and gals that were around in those early days to take a measured look at those 10 years in the rearview mirror – at how far we have actually come and where they think the industry goes from here. 

Lending us their thoughts and memories for the evening will be:

• Brett Scott – Author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (2013) & Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets (2022)
• John Matonis – the first contributor writing about Bitcoin on Forbes.com and founding director of The Bitcoin Foundation (2012)
• Nic Cary – Co-Founder of Blockchain.com
• Paul Gordon – Founder of Coinscrum (2012)
• Rhian Lewis – Founder of London Women in Bitcoin (2014), Author of The Cryptocurrency Revolution (2020)
• Vinay Gupta – Early crypto thought-leader, launch coordinator of Ethereum (2015), Founder & CEO of Matereum (2017)

They’ll take a look at:

• • How the world’s first dark market triggered Bitcoin’s first use-case & price bubble in 2011
  • How the seeds for the NFT boom were sown in Bitcoin’s earliest days
  • How developments in 2013 laid the foundation for the emergence of Stablecoins
  • How the limitations of Bitcoin’s own “Smart Contract” capabilities led to the birth of Ethereum
  • How Bitcoin mining emerged from bedrooms of a few geeks into a multi-billion dollar, energy-hungry industry
  • How far we have really progressed towards a world whereby crypto and public blockchain networks are ready for mainstream adoption
  • Where next for Bitcoin and Web 3.0
  • And much more

Join us to celebrate in the heart of Clerkenwell over food, drinks and intelligent debate on Thursday 27th October at 6pm. Get Your Ticket here