We’re excited to spotlight some of our BTC2019 teachers this year, and today, we’d like to introduce you to René Pickhardt. René Pickhardt will be teaching three Lightning Network master classes. Check out our chat with René to learn more:

How did you get involved in your subject area & why are you passionate about teaching it?

As a data scientist one of my interests was to scale web architectures. As the bitcoin blockchain (and others) doesn’t scale well I was curious about the Lightning Network as a protocol to avoid hitting the Blockchain in order to reach scale. As a political free knowledge activist I believe education is the best solution to fight poverty and social injustice thus I have been working in education and focusing on it my entire life. After I learned more about lightning in the first half of 2018 I recognized quickly that probably the biggest issue that we still have in lightning is that too few people are aware of it and too few developers understand it fully. This is why I started my youtube channel about the lightning network and tried to answer any question about the lightning network that people might ask on bitcoin.stackexchange.com.

Why do you think certifications and standards are important in the blockchain industry today?

The field is so new that it is hard for companies to decide if coworkers have a certain threshold of knowledge. Certifications might resolve this issue to some degree. Also it helps people who are interested in the field to have a better feeling how deep their understanding actually is.

Why have you decided to teach a session at #BTC2019?

First of all because Andreas was so kind to ask me to do it. Secondly it made sense to me to spread knowledge about the Lightning Network at the Blockchain Training Conference.

We’re looking forward to attending René’s master class at BTC2019! Make sure to join us by getting your tickets here.