On March 20, the Zcash Club Barcelona kicked off its activities in this Spanish city. We met up with the Meetup guests and spent a very entertaining and interesting evening. We talked about freedom, Zcash, Bitcoin (new attendees were interested in learning about Zooko, the creator of Zcash), taxes, the Spanish tax agency (Hacienda), and the MiCA law in Europe.
It was certainly very enriching and interesting to hear the opinions and perspectives of the attendees.
Some interesting anecdotes:
The Meetup was attended by Bitcoin enthusiasts (who belong to other crypto communities active in Barcelona), and they told us they were drawn to the event because Zcash is “making a lot of noise” everywhere. We thought this was worth sharing.
We also discussed “real-world use cases” for Zcash and noticed there is a lot of misunderstanding about them. Some attendees believed Zcash was only for speculation and trading, not for fast payments. We explained a bit about ZODL and its integration with NEAR.
And speaking of NEAR, someone who leads that community in Spain attended our meetup and was interested in meeting Zcash members in person. They’ll be hosting a meetup in the coming months and expressed interest in organizing a joint Zcash+NEAR event in Barcelona. We hope to finalize something.
We also spoke with a member of the Logos community who expressed interest in hosting a collaborative meetup with us. It would be great to organize a Zcash+Logos meetup. Definitely, the more we come together to promote privacy, the better it will be for everyone.
And we played games too!
We spent the afternoon playing “Who Wants to Be a Zcasher?”-style games, where we took the opportunity to answer questions and clarify Zcash concepts and features. Everyone really enjoyed this game format, and we sent the winners a few ZEC as a welcome to Zcash (which allowed them to try out ZODL, though some of them already had Cake Wallet).
We also handed out POAPs to attendees eager to keep digital mementos of their participation.
What did we learn from this Meetup?
There are many questions surrounding the use of Zcash wallets for fast payments. In other words, people aren’t aware that this is possible. We need to organize another Meetup or a specific workshop on Zcash wallets.
We’ll soon be holding Meetups in other cities across Spain, because we believe it’s important to raise more awareness about this topic. There’s a lot of fear surrounding the tax authorities and the MiCA regulation.
After the Meetup, we wrapped up the day by sharing a few beers with some of the attendees. We toasted to Zcash, networking, and privacy. Cheers!
See you at the next Meetup. Let’s keep going!