From the Front Page - Epicenter Bitcoin
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EB117 - Eric Lombrozo: Upgrading Bitcoin With Segregated Witness
February 8th, 2016 by
epicenterbitcoin 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... Read More -
EB116 - Eli Ben-Sasson: Zero Knowledge Proofs
February 1st, 2016 by epicenterbitcoin 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... Read More -
EB115 - Matan Field: Backfeed and the Social Operating System for Decentralized Organizations
January 25th, 2016 by epicenterbitcoin 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 to... Read More -
EB114 - Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To Programmer Capitalism
January 18th, 2016 by epicenterbitcoin 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 visual... Read More -
EB113 - Jae Kwon, Dustin Byington & Ethan Buchman: Tendermint - Private Modularized Blockchains
January 11th, 2016 by epicenterbitcoin 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](https://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/107/) and [OpenChain](https://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/102/) 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 laye... Read More -
EB112 - Casey Kuhlman: Permissioned Blockchain And Disrupting Industrial Application Design
January 6th, 2016 by epicenterbitcoin 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). Casey Kuhlman is the CEO of Eris Industries, a company which specializes in building permissioned blockchain systems for enterprise... Read More -
EB111 - Andrew Miller: The Gas Model And Ethereum's Economics
December 28th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 included: - How he got involved in doing research on ... Read More -
EB110 - James D’Angelo: Satoshi's Big Mistake And The Centralization Of Bitcoin
December 21st, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 sacrif... Read More -
EB109 - Tim Pastoor: Rethinking Identity As A Decentralized Web Of Trust With Identifi
December 14th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 authorization. We’re joined b... Read More -
EB108 - Brian, Meher & Sebastien: The Big Chain Powwow
December 8th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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... Read More -
EB107 - Gideon Greenspan: The Blockchain Is A New Database Paradigm
November 30th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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. Read More -
EB106 - Christian Decker: Scaling Bitcoin With Duplex Micropayment Channels
November 23rd, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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, ... Read More -
EB105 – Vlad Zamfir: Bringing Ethereum Towards Proof-Of-Stake With Casper
November 16th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 tak... Read More -
EB104 - The Gyft Of The Blockchain And Improving Prepaid Cards
November 9th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 Giyom Lebleu joined us to talk about how he got invol... Read More -
EB103 - Emin Gün Sirer & Ittay Eyal: Bitcoin-NG, Scientists Versus The Church
November 2nd, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 (in... Read More -
EB102 - Flavien Charlon: Openchain, Centralized Digital Assets Without Blockchains or Consensus
October 26th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 so... Read More -
EB101 - Ryan Shea & Muneeb Ali: Bringing Decentralization to Identity with Blockchain ID and Onename
October 19th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 cal... Read More -
EB100 - Juan Benet: Decentralizing the Web With the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS)
October 12th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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. Read More -
EB99 - Manuel Aráoz And Esteban Ordano: Streamium, Pay-Per-Second Video Streaming For Indie Producers
October 5th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin 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 se... Read More -
EB98 – Robin Hanson: Futarchy, Prediction Markets And The Challenge Of Disruptive Technology
September 28th, 2015 by epicenterbitcoin When Robin Hanson 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. ... Read More
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