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

With over 600,000 views, James D’Angelo’s educational videos at the World Bitcoin Network are among the most popular resources on Bitcoin. Besides his excellent technical explanation, he has also been vocal about the dangers of the increasing centralization of mining. James joined us to talk about his background as a rapper, the World Bitcoin Network, his proposal to use the Bitcoin blockchain to fight climate change and his argument that keeping Bitcoin decentralized would require sacrificing the anonymity of miners. Topics covered in this episode: How he first learned about Bitcoin and started the World Bitcoin Network His proposals on identity and climate change The crucial mistake Satoshi made in designing Bitcoin Why none of the current ideas can solve the underlying problem of the centralization of mining power Why decentralization should be the only design criterion for Bitcoin His Axiom: That anonymity and decentralization of miners are inversely correlated How Identity-based Mining could foster dece

Identity is probably one of the most important constructs in our society. In our modern world, protecting one’s identity has become complex, as we no longer rely solely on governments to prove who we are. In addition, most identity sources can be easily compromised. Credit cards and social security numbers weren’t developed with the Internet in mind, and other identifiers such as logins and passwords aren’t well suited truly secure authentication and authorisation. We’re joined by Tim Pastoor, Founder of 2way.io, to discuss how we can improve control of our identities using concepts borrowed from Bitcoin. Tim walks us through how people could better manage different identities and build reputation networks using Identifi, a global address book protocol invented by Martti Malmi, one of the very first Bitcoin users. We also talk what role this system could play in the future as autonomous agents and artificial intelligence become more prevalent. Topics covered in this episode: The history of identity systems a

The Bitcoin and blockchain industry has been through a lot this year. While the Bitcoin price has experienced relative stability, perhaps indicating slow growth, the space has grown into a rich and diverse ecosystem of startups and open technologies. Through inspiring proof-of-concepts and exciting use cases, blockchain technologies have gained legitimacy as a viable technology to improve transparency, reduce costs and optimise processes, to name a few of it’s benefits. In this episode, all three Epicenter Bitcoin hosts, Brian, Sebastien and Meher, come together to look back on the events which marked the space this past year, and speculate on where thing may be heading in the future. Topics covered in this episode: Shift in focus from Bitcoin to blockchain technologies Public vs. private blockchain debate Bitcoin blocksize debate Media censorship and r/Bitcoin dictatorship Ethereum and it’s flourishing ecosystem Sebastien’s new startup: Stratumn This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and S

Gideon Greenspan, a computer scientist and CEO/Founder of the Israeli startup Coin Sciences, joined us for a discussion of their private blockchain platform MultiChain. Besides diving into the popular question of what’s the point of a private blockchain, we covered his earlier colored coins implementation as well as his view that blockchains are best understood as a novel database paradigm. Topics covered in this episode: How Gideon got involved in the blockchain space Their colored coins implementation MultiSpark and why it failed to get traction Why he saw a market for an open-source private blockchain platform and started MultiChain What mining diversity is and how it is used for consensus in MultiChain How permissions work in MultiChain The issues of privacy in blockchains and why you can’t have auditability and privacy How private blockchains differ from regular distributed databases The five criteria to decide if a project needs a blockchain The problem he sees with smart contract blockchains Episode

Christian Decker is a PhD student at ETH Zurich, where he is currently finishing up the world’s first PhD thesis entirely about Bitcoin. The computer scientist has been part of the Bitcoin community since 2009 and just recently turned off his last miner after 6.5 years! We talked about the current scalability debate and what his research indicated what blocksize could reasonably be handled today. We also discussed his proposal for Duplex Micropayment Channels. Like the Lightning Network, Duplex Channels use a network of payment channels to enable cheap, instant and trustless offchain transactions. The proposal, which he is currently implementing, is one of the most promising approaches to scaling Bitcoin. Topics covered in this episode: How losing 9000 btc got him on the front page of the New York Times The scaling Bitcoin debate and what blocksize could be handled today How payment channels work and could be used for off-chain transactions The advantages Duplex Micropayment Channels have with regards to pri

With Proof-of-Stake (PoS) a blockchain is secured not by spending an external resource such as electricity but by using value internal to the chain itself. The promise of higher security at a lower cost is what also drives Ethereum to plan a move away from Proof-of-Work to PoS in the future. Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir, who leads their effort in the complex search for the optimal PoS consensus system joined us for an in-depth discussion of the challenges of PoS, the approach Casper is taking and what consensus in Ethereum land could look like in the future. Topics covered in this episode: How he became interested in consensus and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Why Ethereum plans to switch to the PoS systems Casper in the future What the Long-Range Attack and Nothing-at-Stake problems are and how Casper addresses them How a betting mechanism is used to get validators to reach consensus What centralization pressures exist for validators and what operating a validator will look like The role of security deposits in C

Businesses with the alleged potential to become the next Google are plentiful in Bitcoin-land, but finding actual commercial success is a lot harder. The best example of a commercial success is gift card company Gyft that became known as the first place to give access to a wide range of merchants for bitcoin holders and later achieved the largest exit so far in the crypto space in an acquisition by payments company First Data. Gyft CTO joined us to talk about how he got involved in FinTech, what makes gift cards so interesting and how recently Gyft has been trying to reinvent gift cards by using the power of the blockchain. Topics covered in this episode: Giyom’s early involvement in FinTech in the early 2000s His previous projects Bernal Bucks and Credibles that explored gift cards and alternative currencies Why gift cards are a great place for financial innovation The mechanics of gift cards today and why their security is broken How Gyft Block can improve the security of gift cards using the blockchain Wh

One of the concerns confronting the Bitcoin community is that of scaling the transaction throughput rate: How do we go from the current rate of approx. 5 transactions per second to a thousand times that? In this episode, we talk to Emin Gun Sirer and Ittay Eyal from Cornell University regarding Bitcoin NG; a next generation Bitcoin blockchain design that addresses some protocol based limitations preventing Bitcoin from increasing transaction throughput. Their proposal also enables fast (initial) transaction confirmations on the order of 10-20 seconds. Topics covered in this episode: Metrics to measure the security and fairness properties of Nakamoto consensus as implemented in Bitcoin. A network emulation of Bitcoin designed by their team to study properties of Bitcoin network. Technical design of Bitcoin NG Concerns with Bitcoin NG Impact of Bitcoin NG on various stakeholders if it is adopted in the main Bitcoin network. Episode links: Bitcoin-NG White Paper Bitcoin-NG: A Secure, Faster, Better Blockchain

Among the dividing themes in the Bitcoin space is the idea of public versus private blockchains. While some argue that private and permissioned blockchains can offer better scalability and lower latency for enterprises, others insist the Bitcoin blockchain will offer the best level of security and robustness longterm. Recently, projects have emerged that propose the best of both worlds by leveraging both off-chain and on-chain transactions. This is the idea behind Openchain, an “open source distributed ledger technology, suited for organizations wishing to issue and manage digital assets in a robust, secure and scalable way.” Openchain uses a client-server model where there is only one authoritative validating node. Read-only observer nodes keep the central node honest by auditing transactions in real time. About every 10 minutes, a copy of the Ledger, and its transactions, is hashed and inserted into a Bitcoin transaction so that it can be fossilised in the blockchain. We’re joined by Flavien Charlon, the on

A brilliant fact about crypto-economic blockchains is that they enable the construction of naming systems that transcend limits imposed by Zooko’s triangle. Traditional naming systems such as human names, Domain Name System (DNS) and Facebook profile names are subject to Zooko’s triangle and cannot be secure, human memorable and decentralised at once. For instance human names such as Meher Roy are human-memorable and decentralised but not secure (nothing prevents hundreds of people being called Meher Roy). Domain Names like are secure and human-memorable but require a central authority to hand out names. OneName leverages Bitcoin to build a Global Identification system called blockchain ID. Blockchain IDs for users can be associated with real world identity data such as social media profiles, government issued papers etc. In this episode we converse with Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali, co-founders and leaders of OneName, Blockstore and BlockStack. They explain the rationale and vision behind their push for a Globa

We’ve made it to episode 100! Our guest for our celebratory episode is Juan Benet, inventor of the Inter-Planetary File System and founder of Protocol Labs. IPFS is a distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. The possibilities for IPFS could range from distributed cloud hosting to websites without central servers to even replacing HTTP. It’s a project as audacious as any we’ve had on the podcast and Juan did an outstanding job explaining the technology and vision. Topics covered in this episode: Why HTTP is broken and how IPFS could complement and ultimately replace it The different technologies IPFS is based on including DHT, Git, Bittorrent and SFS How IPFS could enable the ‘permanent web’ by distributing file storage Content-addressing and how hosting works on IPFS Mutable content and the Interplanetary Naming System (IPNS) Filecoin and incentivizing hosting on IPFS Why IPFS is a great fit for smart contracts How he wants to build and monetize core

One of the key innovations of Bitcoin is the ability to easily implement payment channels. A number of use cases have been discussed or demonstrated, among which is the idea of pay-per-use. This is particularly useful when charging for things like WiFi or streaming video by the second. With this in mind, one could imagine a line of communication between two peers, where data flows in one direction and payments flow in the other. This is the idea behind Streamium, a free and open-source service which allows content creators to stream live video directly to viewers, and get paid instantly. We’re joined by Manuel Aráoz and , the two brilliant software engineers from Argentina who created Streamium. They have worked together on numerous Bitcoin projects these past few years, including ProofOfExistence.com, Faradam, Decentraland, RelayStore, and actively contributed to the BitCore javascript library. Topics covered in this episode: The current state of Bitcoin in Argentina The general idea behind Streamium, how i

When invented the concept of prediction markets almost thirty years ago, he felt he had stumbled on a concept with huge implications. By allowing people to bet on the likelihood of future events, prediction markets promise to allow better forecasts and better decision making. Research into the area has been vibrant, culminating in Hanson’s concept of Futarchy: A prediction-market based governance system. At the same time, the real-world applications have been few and far. Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, joined us to discuss his invention, futarchy and the challenges of disruptive technology. Topics covered in this episode: How prediction markets can surface information The history of prediction markets How futarchy works Whether futarchy could settle the blocksize debate Why prediction markets failed to get wide adoption How Bitcoin is facing a similar adoption challenge Episode links: Science 'The Promise of Prediction Markets' (PDF) Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet B

Prediction markets are considered one of the most promising applications of blockchain technology. Although the concept and some early implementations have existed for years, decentralized prediction markets present a number of advantages to their centralized counterparts. joins us to discuss Truthcoin, a “Peer-to-Peer Oracle Protocol which absorbs accurate data into a blockchain so that Bitcoin-users can speculate in Prediction Markets”. We dive deep to explore the advantages of decentralized prediction markets, their various real-world applications, and their potential to revolutionize the creation and propagation of knowledge in our society. On this episode, we are thrilled to introduce a new co-host on Epicenter Bitcoin, Meher Roy. He has a biochemical engineering background and previously worked as an adviser to HyperLedger. Since discovering Bitcoin, he spends most of his free time understanding blockchain technology and its potential impact on our lives. We’re confident that Meher will bring a high lev

It is often said that technology is neutral. It’s certainly commonplace for Bitcoin to be thought of as such. In reality, technologies may be characterized as an embodiment of human intention, and therefore, cannot be considered as culturally or politically neutral. At least, this is the opinion of our guest, . A research scientist at MIT Media Lab and CEO of ID3, a nonprofit which aims to deploy a new generation of trusted digital institutions, John has spent the last seven decades researching the interaction between technology and society. He joins us for a fascinating discussion on the flaws of our institutions in present day society and how we can leverage technology to build a new social ecosystem. Topics covered in this episode: The political values of Bitcoin The idea of cooperative currencies The current state of identity and data ownership, and how it may be improved The governance of decentralized technologies How cybernetics and self-organizing systems may be applied to governance The Open Mustard

As the debate about forks, the blocksize and decision making in Bitcoin continues, we are joined by Adam Back. Adam is best known for his invention hash-cash which became one of the fundamental building blocks of Bitcoin. He is also the inventor of the sidechains concept and founder and president of Blockstream, the single biggest employer of Bitcoin core developers. With Adam we talked about the different blocksize proposals and how a decentralized cryptocurrency should be governed in general. He is an influential conservative voice in the current debate and has been warning that a rapid increase of the blocksize could undermine the decentralization of Bitcoin. Topics covered in this episode: Adam’s concerns with Bitcoin XT and the approach by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn Why Adam favors a slower blocksize increase to preserve decentralization How Bitcoin will function as a settlement network in the medium-term with the bulk of transactions going through the Lightning Network or sidechains Why forks are in

As the debate about the blocksize continues to roar through the Bitcoin community, Gavin Andresen joins us to take a step back and ask the big questions: How should these decisions be made in the first place? What does the governance of Bitcoin look like now and what do we want it to look like in the future? In a challenging time for Bitcoin, it’s a critical discussion to have with the Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation and successor of Satoshi. We cover everything from the current blocksize debate to the nature of forks to how decisions will be made in Bitcoin XT. Topics covered in this episode: MIT Digital Currency Initiative The way Gavin thinks about Bitcoin How were decisions made throughout Bitcoin’s history What the Nakamoto/market consensus is Forking the software vs a fork of the blockchain Who should make decisions in Bitcoin and how the interest of different stakeholders should be reconciled Why the desirable state is to move towards many different implementations How decisions will be made

Ever since the financial system collapsed in 2007, the call for alternatives has grown louder. Bitcoin itself can be seen as such an alternative. Simon Dixon’s search for a way to put capitalism on a sounder financial footing began before Bitcoin with a focus on equity crowdfunding. Since then he has built Bank to the Future into an innovative crowdfunding business that takes an aggressive contrarian stance. He has also launched an investment fund focused on cryptocurrencies together with Max Keiser called Bitcoin Capital. He joined us for a fascinating discussion about the flaws of the banking system, Bitcoin and the search for alternatives. Note: Our sponsor Vaultoro is raising an equity crowdfunding round on Bank to the Future. Read about the details and invest here: Topics covered in this episode: Why capitalism is built on a broken banking system The problems Bitcoin solves The flawed ways banks approach blockchain technology How Bank to the Future is a contrarian bet on the financial system Bitcoin Cap

In a long-overdue episode, we finally had the chance to dive into one of the most known but poorly understood cryptocurrency/blockchain project: Ripple. Reviled by many in the Bitcoin space, we put aside any prejudices and sat down for a fascinating conversation with Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas. We talked about his early days in the Bitcoin space, how Ripple came about, what the Ripple network looks like today and how its consensus protocol works. Topics covered in this episode: ‘ early experiences in the Bitcoin space How Ripple was created The problem Ripple is trying to solve How the Ripple consensus algorithm works Whether Ripple is decentralized or not What the correspondent banking system is and how Ripple wants to disrupt it The recent FinCen fine and what it means for Ripple Episode links: Ripple Ripple Labs Ripple Labs Fined $700,000 by FinCen Richard Gendal Brown: The Deep Insight at Ripple's Cores Peter Todd Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm Review Ripple Consensus Protocol Whitepaper This

Close to two years after the initial whitepaper, the revolutionary Ethereum network has finally launched. The decentralized smart contract platform is, without a doubt, the most exciting cryptocurrency project since Bitcoin. The versatile platform with its turing-complete scripting language aspires to power the distributed applications of the future. Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin joined us for the second time to discuss the Frontier Launch, future plans for scalability, governance and the road ahead for the organization and the protocol. Topics covered in this episode: Ethereum’s frontier launch and the upcoming development stages The plans for how to create a scalable blockchain architecture The thinking around transitioning to proof-of-stake The state and new board of the Ethereum Foundation How Ethereum’s development will be funded in the longer term His thoughts on the governance of Ethereum and Bitcoin When private blockchains make sense and if Ethereum What mistakes were made during the development