Intoducing myself - physicist, travel startup guy, neural networks and cryptocurrency

Hi everybody!

I have found steemit through a friend who also introduced me to Bitcoin many years ago. Back then GPU Mining was the new shit and we put together a computer to mine :D Later we saw that ASICs will become a thing and decided to buy. For everyone who is not into mining: ASICs are computers specifically designed to do a single thing, in this case mining bitcoin. These chips can do nothing else. There were 3 serious offers of ASICs and we wanted buy one unit of each. They only guy who actually delivered in time, Yi Fu Guo, was the only one, where everything was sold in seconds and we were too slow. Later he offered to sell just the raw chips and we ordered pack of them. Bought PCB Boards, found a company to print these Boards and place the bitcoin chips on them. Unfortunately Yi Fu Guo never delivered the chips and we were sitting on a lot of electronics without use :D After these unlucky events we were a bit more lucky with Bitfury Miners and got at least our money back.
When Ethereum was launched I was really excited. But i was also very skeptical, mostly like "well a software platform? This has always failed". Making this work looks extremely hard to me. So I didn't buy any ETH until late 2015. Now it is late 2016 and I found Steemit and it looks very promising!

What else should be said about me? Hmm, I studied physics in Darmstadt, Germany and doing my PhD now, which centers around thermodynamics, polarization, molecular dynamics and finding a way to bring all these equations together. So mostly theoretical modelling of physical systems. Which brings me to my startup I have founded with friends 2 years ago. This was a real intense experience. We are 4 friends and we all kept our jobs and tried to push it as good as possible in our free time. See a product video here: (see bottom) and our website here http://www.roadatlas.eu . To make it short: We create road trips after you have given us your preferences. In the beginning we applied for a funding by ESA and we got it, that was a huge motivation. End of last year we pushed our product to Google Store and found out how many bugs are there for real and fixing them was a real pain, haha. In May this year we wanted to release our final product and do some marketing in order to get many users. We were really excited since we already had over 500 users, without any kind of marketing. When we started to write blogs etc. and tried to get users, we realized it did not change anything. The weekly users who rolled in every week continued to do so, but we could not rise these numbers by any means. This was a real downer. So most likely our product is just not good enough to make people stick to it and spread the word. When Google released Google Trips this was the final stab into the heart of our motivation :D

Last but not least, I'm also very interested in neural networks, I read a lot, I meet with some friends every week, where we write code together and try to understand more of it. We have started with feed forward networks, gone to recurrent networks, looked at frameworks like tensorflow and caffe and now our group tries to build something useful, applying this knowledge to real tasks and another part of the group tries to build biologically inspired neural networks, mostly harnessing STDP and synaptic homeostasis mechanisms. Or better say, we try to find algorithms, that are computable in reasonable time while still being able to learn unsupervised just like our neurons in our brains (because backpropagation comes with many problems). Also I can share a talk I have given as a consequence of discussing about AI on some meetups, here is the link: (see bottom)

So far about me, feel free to call me a nerd :D