A Banker Finds Bitcoin - with Matthias Reder
May 9, 2023
This weekly podcast about Bitcoin is the initiative of the Viennese financial journalist Niko Jilch. The goal: to strengthen and network the German-speaking Bitcoin community - and to bring the Bitcoin phenomenon closer to as broad a mass as possible.
We accompany this project as one of the main sponsors in this blog and also make all podcast episodes available here as a video.
Many of you may already know Matthias Reder as a full-blooded Bitcoiner from various podcasts, interviews and events. He has been working as Bitcoin Key Account Manager at Coinfinity for many years now. But Matthias actually comes from the banking world. Before joining Coinfinity, he worked as a sales management manager for Raiffeisenbank. One day, he suddenly hears about Bitcoin and recognizes its huge potential.
But Matthias' path to Bitcoin was not an easy one and he had to pay a high "apprenticeship fee", as he calls it himself. Namely, in 2016 he became a victim of a scam and lost 15 Bitcoin. According to Niko, this scam was one of the biggest pyramid schemes around Bitcoin and a total of over EUR 100 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen. Matthias recalls, "Back then we had a very different situation than today. There were relatively few meetups, access to information was much smaller, and many people sold you a scam back then without knowing it themselves."
And yet, Matthias did not turn his back on Bitcoin after this loss - quite the opposite. This experience motivated him to look deeper into Bitcoin and learn from his mistakes.
"I was so scared that I lost those Bitcoin. How did I fall for that? After that, I watched a lot of videos about Bitcoin and attended Bitcoin Austria Meetups to educate myself. I was ashamed for a long time to have made such a mistake as a seasoned banker, but what remains is the experience."
With this experience, Matthias now wants to help other people protect themselves from such scams. Today, Matthias looks after wealthy clients at Coinfinity, is regularly invited to interviews with well-known media, and he himself organizes events with well-known speakers from the German Bitcoin community.
Matthias key message to you: Be your own bank!
Matthias sees the autonomous and self-sufficient custody of Bitcoin as one of the most important tasks of every Bitcoin hodler.
The Coinfinity Bitcoin App is here! Stay humble, stack sats.
