Early Birds: Bob Alexander, Jon Peterson, Gabe Freund, and Ron Britz were the early birds. We had 26 in attendance today and no ZOOMers.
Honorary Members: Ron Britz, Dick Nelson, Mark Simon, and Karen Holtmeier were in attendance.
Guests: Rob Alexander was a guest of Bob Alexander, Gary Diamond was a guest of Mark Simon, and Todd Fronek was a guest speaker today.
President Bob Alexander brought the meeting to order with a ring of the bell and a moment of silence.
Announcements
- There is a board meeting after the regular meeting today.
- There are still Craft talk dates available in August and beyond. Please contact Craig or Bob Alexander to get on the schedule.
- We will discontinue ZOOM meetings unless the membership thinks we need to continue them. Let Craig or Bob Alexander know your preference.
Pot of Gold: Julius Webster drew 5 cards today and the 4th card was Ron Britz for a mini-craft talk about being a grandfather and the 5th card and winner of the pot was Dick Nelson.
Business Networking:
Sean Merkel of Summit Fire is looking for a project manager that would like to travel. They will also be having a job fair in July.
Business Exchange/Sharing:
Jim Erickson, Paul Ralles, and Jim Christianson all had business to share today.
Craft Talk:
Jim Erickson introduced our topic of Bitcoin investing. Jim reminded us that he had brought up this topic last July and since then he has been an investor in Bitcoin using a website www.gemini.com as his platform (another website might be www.coinbase.com ). He has watched the volatility of this investment ever since.
Tony Rubin brought up issues he sees with Bitcoins as an investment. Chief among these is the lack of regulation, lack of understanding what you are investing in, and a market that is ripe for manipulation by a few individuals such as Elon Musk.
Todd Fronek of Larkin Hoffman, an intellectual property attorney, gave us a primer on Bitcoin concepts and terminology. Some of the vocabulary is words like NODES (which are in essence a ledger of Bitcoin transactions), MINING (which is the finding or creation of bitcoins by data mining of transactions), and WALLETS (which are an individual holdings of Bitcoins).
Bitcoin was invented about 12 years ago and there are over 100 million people invested in Bitcoin in the world. The inventor of Bitcoin has said that there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins mined.
There are no governments that control any of the cryptocurrency marketplace and that is part of the appeal in that governments cannot manipulate its value.
Ultimately a Bitcoin exists solely in cyberspace and is located in a WALLET which is protected by a “seed phrase” or password consisting of 24 characters. It takes an immense amount of time and computing power to break into a 24-character password, so it is quite safe from hacking.
Register with Jim Erickson at jim@solomonssg.com or 612-325-3009.
Looking ahead
June 23, 2021 – Knollwood Liquors- Paul Ralles
June 30, 2021 – No Meeting
July 7, 2021- B2B CFO- Peter Eaton
July 14, 2021- New American Funding- Jon Peterson