Epicenter - Learn About Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin And Distributed Technologies

In the short history of the Bitcoin industry, there has been an impressive amount of high profile hacks, ranging from a few hundred thousand to many millions of dollars. In all of these, customers, Bitcoin users, where robbed of their funds because poor security policies, negligence, incompetence, or plain old scamming. Recently, the cryptocurrency conversion service ShapeShift fell victim to a hack in which over $200,000 of company funds were stolen, initially by an employee, and then by a hacker to whom this employee had sold sensitive company information. Luckily, no customers lost any money as ShapeShift does not hold any funds on behalf of users. We talked to ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees who walks us through this captivating ordeal, which sounds like it could be the plot of a movie. He speaks about how the company is trying to recover and what he has learned from this unfortunate event. Topics covered in this episode: How the ShapeShift hack went down What steps the company has taken to avoid this from

As the blockchain field continues evolving rapidly, Sebastien, Meher and Brian take some time to discuss the current environment and the longer term implications of blockchains. We discussed how smart contracts could affect the pace of innovation and the competitiveness of industries. We also talked about the role DAOs will play and what we can take away from the current DAO crowdsale and its connection with Slock.it. Topics covered in this episode: How companies running on smart contracts could impact the pace and cost of innovation A smart contract-based insurance example Why smart contracts and blockchains will challenge our understanding of organizations The current state of DAOs Slock.it and the DAO crowdsale Episode links: Maciej Olpinski's Blog Slock.it The DAO EB108 - The Big Chain Powwow This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/129

When Jed McCaleb discovered Bitcoin, there didn’t even exist an online marketplace to trade the cryptocurrency yet. The experienced founder who had earlier started file sharing site eDonkey, acted fast and started the first Bitcoin exchange MtGox which he later sold to now-infamous Mark Karpeles. Jed later founded the pioneering Ripple project before leaving to start Stellar. We discussed his journey through the industry and the ambitious plans Stellar has to create an open financial system that will give access to financial services to a much broader spectrum of humanity. Topics covered in this episode: Jed’s early involvement in the industry and founding of MtGox and subsequently Ripple Why Jed left Ripple and started Stellar How Ripple and Stellar differ The Stellar Consensus Protocol Why the organization behind Stellar is a non-profit foundation Stellar’s focus on developing markets and Nigeria in particular The role and distribution of Stellar’s currency Lumen Episode links: Stellar Website Stellar Co

We were joined by repeat guest Anthony di Iorio, a definite contender for having (co-)founded the most projects in the blockchain space including Ethereum, Kryptokit, Decentral and Jaxx. We got an update on the vibrant Toronto blockchain scene and Decentral. The main discussion revolved around the new wallet Jaxx that is simultaneously a Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet and takes a significant step towards a more unified and accessible cryptocurrency experience. Finally, we discussed his recent appointment as Chief Digital Officer at the Toronto Stock Exchange / TMX Group and the upcoming trade show Blockchain World Expo. Topics covered in this episode: Update on Decentral and Kryptokit How the Jaxx wallet Unique UI challenges of Ethereum wallets The role of community in bringing innovation to corporates His role as Chief Digital Officer at the TMX Group The upcoming Blockchain World Expo in Toronto Episode links: Jaxx Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet Decentral Decentral.tv Blockchain World Expo This episode is hos

One of the major drawbacks of Bitcoin is its low transaction throughput. Maxing out only a handful of operations per second, there have been many proposals to scale it up so that it can compete with existing distributed database technologies. As the blockchain’s demand continues to increase, it’s unclear if the Bitcoin protocol will ever be able to handle thousands, if not millions of transactions per second. BigchainDB is taking a different approach. Rather than trying to scale up blockchain technology, it starts with a big data distributed database, RethinkDB, and adds blockchain features and characteristics. Trent Mcconaghy, Co-founder and CTO of Ascribe and BigchainDB, joins us to talk about how this protocol may become to databases, what IPFS and Ethereum are to distributed filestorage and computing, respectively. Able to perform more than one million writes per second and capacities in the petabytes, BigchainDB has the ambition to become the world’s public database platform. Topics covered in this episo

The relatively new concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), is often praised as a new type of organizational structure that has no identifiable owner or owners, and whose actions are automated and determined solely by a pre-defined set of rules. Views on DAOs differ widely. On one hand, members of the Bitcoin/blockchain space often portrayal them as AI-like swarm organisms, free from the shackles of nation-states, and that can act at will regardless of laws or regulation. On the other hand, legal experts caution that, like corporations, DAOs and their creators could be held liable in civil lawsuits, and that they may be served a hard dose of reality when they end up in court. We are joined by Florian Glatz, attorney, researcher and software developer (not to mention the proud owne r of the awesome domain name blockchain.lawyer). We discuss some of the basic legal concepts surrounding contracts and in what ways smart contracts may or may not fit within our existing legal framework. We also div

The challenges Bitcoin’s wild volatility represents for achieving mass adoption have made the necessity for stable cryptocurrencies apparent long ago. With Ethereum applications, the problem is even more apparent as many use cases from predcition markets to insurance are impractical using the even more volatile ether. Maker DAO is an ambitious attempt to solve the problem by building a bank-like system to issue a value-stable currency on Ethereum. Rune Christensen joined us to discuss the need for Maker and the complex system to guarantee stability. Topics covered in this episode: Why money is the most successful product ever What makes stablecoins are necessary The different components of Maker such as the stablecoin Dai, the token MKR and the role they play Why Maker needs insurance against black swan events Maker’s different planned stages of increasing decentralization The MKR token sale and its value proposition for investors Episode links: Maker DAO Maker DAO Whitepaper Maker DAO DevCon Talk EB60 wit

We’re joined by , Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, investor and all around emblematic figure of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Brock tells his story, from his early beginning a entrepreneur in his teens, to the massively successfull video game industry businesses he built in the early 2000s. As Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, he gives us his perspective on how the Foundation’s role has evolved over time and its areas of focus going forward. Brock also weighs in the recent debates around governance and block size. Topics covered in this episode: The lemonade-stand beginnings of Brock’s entrepreneurship story How he became involved in gaming and pioneered the sale of digital goods The 400,000-strong professional gamer supply chain he built in China His first contact with Bitcoin and the initial concerns he had Blockchain Capital and how he ended up investing in dozens of Bitcoin startups The blocksize debate and whether Bitcoin needs an explicit governance process The future of the Bitcoin Foundation Episode l

For Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, part of the cypherpunk movement since the early 1990s, the vision of a decentralized financial system that has both openness and privacy has existed since long before Bitcoin. After many failed attempts, Bitcoin proved that that vision could be achievable. But Bitcoin also failed to deliver on the privacy features as blockchain analysis allows tracing movements and deanonymizing many users. Zooko joined us to discuss his project Zcash, a fully anonymous cryptocurrency that is scheduled to launch in July. Through Zcash’s use of ground-breaking Zero Knowledge Proofs (or zkSNARKs) the blockchain will leak no information about sender, recipients nor amounts. It was a fascinating discussion of the most anticipated launch of a cryptocurrency since Ethereum. Topics covered in this episode: Zooko’s long cypherpunk history How overconfidence derailed many cypherpunk projects Why Bitcoin’s privacy is broken and how Zcash provides true privacy The too-good-to-be-true Zcash team Why Zcash is ba

For orthodox Bitcoiners central banks are often seen as the incarnation of evil. But , alas, in the case of two Carribean central banking economists the feeling of reprehension wasn’t reciprocated. Winston Moore and Jeremy Stephen were formerly associated with the Central Bank of Barados and fascinated by the potential of cryptocurrencies, they explored the consequences of their central bank holding Bitcoin as part of their international reserves. They joined us for a discussion of central banking, the pecularities of monetary policy in a small island nation and what Bitcoin could bring to the equation. Topics covered in this episode: The function of central banks The role international reserves hold for central banks The peculiar challenges of central banks of small island nation states How speculative attacks on central banks work Why central banks may want to hold cryptocurrencies as part of their portfolio How Bitt plans to issue Barbados Dollar using the Bitcoin blockchain and the open asset protocol E

The problem around content monetization is one which content producers are constantly trying to solve. At the core of this problem is a mismatch between supply and demand. Content, which is increasingly abundant, is captured by human attention, which is in limited supply. The volume of content being produced is growing at staggering rates while total human attention remains flat. Our guest, , argues that the current content monetization model is outdated, broken and is in need of an overhaul. Previously at Google and YouTube, Maciej has a broad understanding content monetization models and lays out a vision for open marketplaces for attention using blockchains. He argues that content discovery systems like the Google Page Rank algorithm and Facebook’s News Feed could be replaced by open networks based on the mechanics of Bitcoin. Topics covered in this episode: How the current content monetization model works and why it’s broken The inner workings of content discovery The economics of content discovery Open

A pioneering feature of Bitcoin is verifiability of transactions: It is designed to enable low-power devices and high end computers alike to be able to verify occurrences on the blockchain. This observation led our guest, Adam Gibson, to wonder why webpages aren’t so easily verifiable as a Bitcoin transaction? Can I prove to you that I have certain bank account balance over the internet? Why do we submit photocopies of passports rather than furnishing a cryptographically verifiable proof of citizenship by logging on to a Government site? Born out of this intellectual itch is the TLS Notary protocol. It pioneers a new kind of auditing that enables participants to prove that a certain https page was in their browser. This protocol paves the way to brilliant designs for Proof of Reserves, Smart contract oracles and Decentralised fiat-to-bitcoin exchange. Topics covered in this episode: Why is the current Web structured to be not easily verifiable? What is TLS and how does it work? How TLS differs from SSL The T

A typical online transaction today isn’t very different from how it was done 25 years ago at the dawn of the Internet. In fact, online payments haven’t changed much at all. When we want to pay for something online, we copy very sensitive credit card information into a form on a website and trust that website to capture it securely and make proper use of it. If this seems like an old and antiquated way to pay, that’s because it is, and it costs billions of dollars per year in security and fraud prevention. The World Wide Web Consortium wants to standardize the way we pay online, making it more secure, and hopefully a better experience for users. is a computer scientists and Standards Lead at the W3C. We talk about some of the core problems with dealing with credentials on the web and making online payments. Specifically, we discuss the Web Payments Working Group (WPWG), and their efforts to bring banks, payments providers and browser manufacturers together to converge around a standard set APIs to make for a b

In the midst of the heated blocksize debate one could be forgiven to think that there is very little Bitcoin developers are able to agree on. Yet, when core developer and Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille introduced the concept of segregated witness at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong most of the Bitcoin community quickly rallied behind the proposal. Eric Lombrozo, CEO of wallet company Ciphrex and responsible for running the segregated witness testnet, joined us to discuss the proposal and its implications. Segregated witness, it turns out, does not only provide an elegant way to increase the blocksize via a soft-fork, it also solves transaction malleability and greatly simplifies updating the Bitcoin’s scripting language. It’s a crucial topic and may well enable a new wave of accelerated innovation in Bitcoin. Topics covered in this episode: The various benefits of segregated witness The mechanics of segregated witness How segregated witness solves transaction malleability How segregated witn

Zero Knowledge Proofs are methods of providing cryptographic proofs to another party while keeping some information secret. The simple concept of ZKP offer tantalizing possibilities: Banks could prove solvency without revealing depositors. Governments could prove the fairness of an election without compromising privacy. Computer science professor Eli Ben-Sasson joined us to discuss where blockchains and cryptocurrencies intersect with Zero Knowledge Proofs and related technologies such as zkSNARKs. It offered a fascinating view into what will surely become a core part of blockchain tech in the future. Topics covered in this episode: What are proof systems? Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and other terminology such as SNARKs and zkSNARKs The mechanics of Zero Knowledge Proofs The role of performance in Zero Knowledge Proofs Applications of ZKPs The widespread potential impact of ZKP to verify processes Episode links: Eli Ben-Sasson's Website SNARKs for C talk by Madars Virza Stackexchange: What are SNARKs SNARK

The idea that in the future tokens will play a crucial role in networks and organizations to incentivize decentralized collaboration and reward contribution is not new. It’s the original decentralized autonomous organization idea that has informed many projects that have been on the podcast (Swarm, Ethereum, Factom, Storj, etc). For Matan, the vision originally led to found decentralized ride-sharing application LaZooz. One year ago, he left LaZooz to found Backfeed, which is building the tools that so far have been missing to make mass collaboration without a central party possible. Topics covered in this episode: How he became interested in blockchains and started the ridesharing application LaZooz Backfeed’s vision for a social operating system for decentralized organizations The role of reputation, proof-of-value and tokens in Backfeed The applications Backfeed is currently building The business of model of Backfeed Episode links: Backfeed website Backfeed: An Introduction for Mere Mortals Matan Field

Vinay Gupta has been a programmer, 1990s cypherpunk, ‘resilience guru’, Ethereum release coordinator and currently collaborates with Consensys to mainstream smart contract technology. He also invented the Hexayurt, a cheap and resilient architectural structure for disaster-stricken communities. Recently, Vinay has become a thought leader in the cryptocurrency space. He is famed for his eloquence and ability to distill the crypto-finance technological paradigm into easy big-picture visualisations. Check out this podcast for some unique insights into technology, politics and history. Topics covered in this episode: His work on resilience. The connection between resilience and cryptocurrencies A history of the cypherpunks – who they were, what they believed in and why they failed. Why smart contracts matter? What is special about them? The impact cryptocurrencies will have on capitalism Why cryptocurrencies could be a great tool to explore basic income Episode links: Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpun

As blockchain technologies mature, new protocol specifications are emerging, which take unique approaches to software design and how consensus is achieved. We have talked about Multchain and OpenChain in the past, but Tendermint promises to be a viable solution for many permissioned blockchain use cases. It’s design is modular, meaning that the application layer (smart contract) and the consensus layer are completely independent. This provides added flexibility and allows for business logic to be written in practically any programming language. In addition, its unique approach to consensus, a round-robin Proof-of-Skate algorithm, is much better suited for permissioned blockchain scenarios than Proof-of-Work. Meher and Sebastien talk to Tendermint co-founders, Jae Kwon, Dustin Byington and Ethan Buchman, about this promising new blockchain protocol and how it is different from other projects we’ve seen so far. Topics covered in this episode: How Tendermint came to be and how it has evolved since its creation

Permissionable blockchains have gained much attention from enterprise this past year, and specifically, the traditional fiance and FinTech sectors. As new protocols emerge and the technology is matures, it is becoming apparent they are simply a new class of database, one which integrates business logic (smart contracts) and a consensus layer (PoS, PoW, etc). is the CEO of Eris Industries, a company which specializes in building permissioned blockchain systems for enterprise. Their aim is to deliver the technologies which enable companies to easily build and deploy applications which make use of blockchain and smart contract technologies. Topics covered in this episode: Casey’s impressive background as an engineer, Marine soldier, lawyer and startup founder Eris Industries and what the company is trying to achieve Permissionable blockchains and their usefulness in industrial applications Smart contracts, how to explain them and legal status How blockchains can be used to revolutionize the way organizations co

Andrew Miller is a computer science PhD student at the University of Maryland who focuses on cryptocurrency. Having gotten involved in Bitcoin in 2011 and focused on cryptocurrencies early in his research work, he is one of the most prolific researchers in the field. Our discussion mainly focused on security aspects of Ethereum including their gas model, Proof-of-Work algorithm and plans to switch to Proof-of-Stake. Topics covered in this episode: How he got involved in doing research on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies The blossoming of academic interest in the topic His work on analyzing Ethereum’s gas model Potential vulnerabilities of the Gas model Ethereum’s PoW algorithm How Ethereum handles the block size limit Episode links: Andrew's University Website Ethereum Analysis: Gas Economics and Proof of Work Overview Ethereum Analysis: Gas Economics Ledger Journal Hawk: Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.