At the last meeting, Ian suggested to have cryptocurrencies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency) as topic for our meeting next month.

One aspect is the increasing amount of power that is consumed in order to mine "coins".

The other interesting aspect introduced by, but not limit to, cryptocurrencies is the concept of the blockchain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain), an open, distributed ledger of transactions.

Is there interest? Any volunteers to talk about something regarding this topic (history, current status, etc)?

No interest then, I guess. How about "how to backup and what applications to use" as topic? Recently, I got contacted through meetup in regards to experience with timeshift (https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift). Any takers for this topic? Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/