Introduction
I'm Christian of Bitcoin Cast. I normally host Bitcoin Cash Meetups in Southern California, but with the recent turn of events have had to move them online.
Obstacles
There are two obvious obstacles that came to my mind when moving a BCH meetup online.
One thing is that Bitcoin Cash people like to support merchant that accepts BCH during a meetup. My thought was to find an online merchant that accepts BCH, and have them on for the first 5-10 minutes of the call. This would give attendees a chance to support a merchant accepting BCH.
Another obstacle to deal with is that the social dynamic is different with in online meetups than in-person meetups. With IRL meetups, you can freely switch between conversation groups. This can be somewhat simulated with online meeting software using breakout rooms in zoom, or different audio rooms in discord. However, it is not ideal, since with real life meetups, you can faintly hear the other conversations in the background.
Moving Forward
I decided to make these meetups developer-focused for two reasons. First, a great deal of Bitcoin Cash people in California happen to be developers as well. Second, since many of us are stuck at home with a lot more time on our hands, I thought this would be a great opportunity to encourage building cool software projects for Bitcoin Cash.
Tools Used
Telegram - Announced the meetup on the Bitcoin Cash California Telegram Chat. It has been a helpful tool for collaborating with BCH people in the area.
Discord - Discord I'd say was somewhat helpful. I mainly used it because I could create multiple audio rooms for the meetup, since I don't have a zoom pro account to create breakout rooms.
Zoom - The great thing about zoom, is that meetup attendees don't need to sign up for an account to join the call. It's been really reliable for video calls, and I've been using for Bitcoin Cast shows as well.
Cryptpad.fr - This is kind of like a cross between pastebin and google drive. I used it to take and share notes during the meetup. You don't even need an account to create a note.
Meetup.com - Just another way to publicize your meetup events.
Meeting Summary
There were 6 attendees total. Everyone had a chance to talk about which software projects they were working on. For the most part, everyone stayed in the same room during the meeting. We even had a surprise visit from Tobias Ruck (a talented bitcoin script writer) towards the end.
Here's a list of some of the attendees and what they're currently working on for Bitcoin Cash and the SLP ecosystem:
Christian - spicebutton.com [https://github.com/alt-win]
Dreamtrove - SLP tipping bot + atomic swaps, SLP minting baton controled by smart contract, cross-chain token transfer
Ty Everett - gateway.cash, pay-per-use router in BCH + TOR, Virtual machine stored on blockchain, BCH DNS system [https://github.com/ty-everett]
Sterling - Snappy Cash browser extension, twitter faucet [https://github.com/sterlingbeason]
Conclusion
The meeting went very well, and was inspiring for more software creation for Bitcoin Cash + SLP enviroment. I plan to host this online gathering next weekend at the same time, making this a weekly event, and look forward to the progress that will be made on each project. I also hope to see visits form other Giants in the BCH software community at future meetings. The likes of Imaginary_Username, Jonald Fyookball, Chris Troutner, Jason Cox, and Pokkst would be awesome additions to future gatherings as well as any other BCH software contributor (Cheers to you if you're on that list reading this article:).
Although this quarantine has made things difficult, I've decided to make the most of it with these new meetups. What do you plan to build for Bitcoin Cash?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, BitcoinCast!