From the Front Page - Epicenter Bitcoin
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Epicenter Bitcoin #68 – Kamikaze Attack, Block Halving And The Perils Of Proof-Of-Work
March 2nd, 2015 by
Epicenter Is Bitcoin secure from attacks that could destroy the currency? To a large part, this is determined by how expensive it is to carry out an attack and by the potential profits the attacker could generate. Ideally, an attack is so expensive to carry out that no profit-driven attacker would engage in it.
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EB69 – Thomas Voegtlin - Electrum, Spv Wallets And Bitcoin Aliases
March 9th, 2015 by Epicenter Powering an estimated 5-10% of all Bitcoin transactions, Electrum is one of the leaders of the Bitcoin wallet space. The open-source walled was started in 2011 and played a key role in the development of the light-weight SPV wallets. Developer Thomas Voegtlin joined us for a discussion of Electrum, their recent 2.0 release and the rapidly evolving Bitcoin wallet space in general.
Topics covered included:
- The evolution of Bitcoin wallets and what motivated him to start Electrum
- Electr...
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EB70 – Chainalysis, Surveillance And The Path To Mass Panic
March 16th, 2015 by Epicenter When spinning up a few hundred data-gathering Bitcoin nodes prevented some breadwallet users from transmitting bitcoin transaction, a minor panic quickly erupted about the Bitcoin compliance startup Chainalysis and their supposed sybil attack on the Bitcoin network.
Chainalysis CEO Michael Gronager joined us for a discussion of what happened and what role transaction monitoring will play in the future. We dove deep into the tension between the desires for user privacy and the requirements...
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EB71 – Lisa Cheng - Token Sales And Crowdfunding In The Cryptocurrency Space
March 23rd, 2015 by Epicenter Creating a new token and selling it to fund the development of software has become a preferred way of fundraising for cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. It’s a tempting tool, allowing startups to avoid traditional investors, build a community and allow anyone anywhere to own a stake in the project. For participants, there is the promise of big financial upside and being part of novel undertakings.
Lisa Cheng, whose consulting firm Vanbex has accompanied many crowdsales, joined us for a discu...
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EB72 – Siân Jones - Cryptocurrency Regulation Update: Uk, Isle Of Man, California, Bitlicense
March 30th, 2015 by Epicenter When one is busy driving a technological and societal revolution forward, complying with complicated regulatory requirements is rarely a top priority. Yet, the reality is that at this stage the often ambigious and rapidly evolving regulatory landscape can have an outsized impact on the fate of cryptocurrency startups and on the adoption/integration into existing systems.
Epicenter Bitcoin Regulatory Correspondent and founder of COINsult Siân Jones joined us for an update on the state of ...
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EB73 – Dan O’Prey & Daniel Feichtinger: Hyperledger Decentralised Ledger Platform
April 6th, 2015 by Epicenter The cryptocurrency ecosystem is increasingly divided into different camps. There are those betting and working on the eventual mainstream success of Bitcoin. And there are those who take elements of Bitcoin’s technology and repurpose them to improve existing systems.
Hyperledger is one of the projects firmly in the latter camp. They are envisioning a world where innumerable interoperable ledgers are operated by different parties. Hyperledger is their tool for the creation and managemen...
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EB74 – Robby Dermody: Counterparty - Assets, Dividends And Decentralized Exchange
April 13th, 2015 by Epicenter In the crowded race to become the leading ‘Bitcoin 2.0’ platform, Counterparty has stood out by avoiding fancy crowdsales and instead building a platform that works. The protocol, which sits on top of Bitcoin and thus benefits from the security of its mining power, allows issuing assets, paying dividends or trading in a decentralized way. Over the past year, it has been the platform of choice for many crowdsales and is also what powers LTBCoin.
Co-Founder Robby Dermody joined us for a...
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EB75 – Paul Brody: Internet Of Things And The Democracy Of Devices
April 20th, 2015 by Epicenter As the cost of computing continues to plummet, the number of connected devices is increasing dramatically. In the future powerful computing capacity will be in billions of devices ranging from the lightbulb to the car door to new wearables. This new internet of things (IoT) will dramatically change our lives.
Paul Brody, a Technology Strategist and the former VP of Mobile and IoT at IBM, joined us for a discussion of where the IoT is going. We discussed their white paper on why a decentr...
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EB76 – Emin Gün Sirer & Ittay Eyal: From Selfish Miners To The Miner's Dilemma
April 27th, 2015 by Epicenter Bitcoin's approach to solving the double spending problem is to make a collusion and attack on the network prohibitively expensive. One of the main factors that will determine Bitcoin's chance of survival in the long-term is whether the behavior that maximizes the profits of miners contributes to or sabotages the health of the network.
The game theory that determines this is complex and our understanding of it still incomplete. But research is increasing and two people who have been at the fo...
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EB77 – Andreas M. Antonopoulos: Mastering Bitcoin
May 4th, 2015 by Epicenter Few question that educating people about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is one of the most important and challenging tasks to achieve mass adoption. And perhaps even fewer disagree that there is no one more gifted at communicating the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin than Andreas M. Antonopoulos. A technologist, entrepreneur, LTB host and author, he has been speaking, writing and educating about Bitcoin for years and become one of the most popular people in the Bitcoin space.
He joined u...
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EB78 – Trent McConaghy: Ascribe And The Internet Of Ownership
May 11th, 2015 by Epicenter The idea of using the Bitcoin blockchain to represent and track the ownership of off-chain assets is almost as old as Bitcoin itself. One of the startups that is pursuing this vision is Berlin-based Ascribe, which allows creators to register ('ascribe'), transfer and archive digital art.
Ascribe CTO Trent McConaghy joined us for a fascinating discussion of their ambitious goals to enable a so-far elusive secondary market for digital art, help creators monetize their work and ultimately r...
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EB79 – Rodolfo Novak: Coinkite And The Feature Factory
May 18th, 2015 by Epicenter Started in May 2013, Coinkite has by now almost advanced to senior citizen status in the short-lived Bitcoin startup space. CEO Rodolfo Novak joined us for a discussion about what drove their initial interest in Bitcoin, why they initially focused on providing 'bank-like' services and how they've transitioned to powering the infrastructure of countless Bitcoin startups with their API. We also discussed multi-sig and the business strategy they pursued that allowed them to be profitable and no...
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EB80 – Joseph Poon & Tadge Dryja: Scalability And The Lightning Network
May 25th, 2015 by Epicenter Since Gavin Andresen's proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size, how Bitcoin can scale to accommodate higher transaction volumes has been heatedly debated among developers. One of the most promising long-term options to allow near infinite scalability is the Lightning Network. Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, the co-authors of the whitepaper, joined us for a discussion of scalability and how the lightning network could allow massive numbers of off-chain transaction in a trustless way.
Topi...
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EB81 – Nathaniel Popper: Digital Gold - The Inside Story Of Bitcoin
June 1st, 2015 by Epicenter From the mysterious creation story, to the early development among a small group of cypherpunks, to the emergence of the Silk Road, the collapse of MtGox, to the entry of a tidal wave of VC money and the Silicon Valley elite, Bitcoin's short history has been action-packed. It's no surprise that this could make for a riveting story and NY Times journalist Nathaniel Popper's book 'Digital Gold - Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money' is precisely...
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EB82 – Mike Hearn - Blocksize Debate at the Breaking Point
June 8th, 2015 by Epicenter Whether the block size should be increased to 20MB has created more controversy than any other question in Bitcoin's recent history. For some, it is an urgent and necessary step in Bitcoin's evolution. Their view is that leaving the block size at 1MB would be irresponsible inaction with potentially catastrophic consequences. Others see increasing the block size as unnecessary and a dangerous first step down a slippery slope towards a more centralized Bitcoin.
We were joined by Mike Hearn,...
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EB83 – David Andolfatto: Fedcoin And The Implications Of Cryptocurrencies Issued By Central Banks
June 15th, 2015 by Epicenter Many people think of Bitcoin as the ultimate contender against the power of central banks, most importantly the Federal Reserve System. But that is certainly not the only way that cryptocurrencies and the blockchain can be used and one particularly interesting idea is that central banks could issue their own cryptocurrencies.
To discuss how this could be done and what the consequences could be we were joined by David Andolfatto, a Vice President of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of ...
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EB84 – Tim Swanson: Permissioned Ledgers And The Case For Blockchains Without Bitcoin
June 22nd, 2015 by Epicenter One topic that is guaranteed to cause heated discussion among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is the idea that blockchains can be controlled by known validators and function without an underlying cryptocurrency. Some think this is a non-sensical idea fabricated by those spineless enough to want to appease regulators and but clueless enough to miss the whole point of cryptocurrencies. But others believe that Bitcoin is unsuited for a lof of 'Bitcoin 2.0' applications and that permissioned ledgers ...
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EB85 – Adam Draper: Accelerating 100 Bitcoin Startups With Boost VC
June 29th, 2015 by Epicenter Revolutionary progress doesn't happen without lots of work and in the case of Bitcoin that requires many different startups building technology. Few have contributed to this as much as Silicon Valley based startup accelerator Boost VC, which has been focusing on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups since 2013. Focusing exclusively on Bitcoin for an extended time, they've invested in companies such as Blockcypher, Coinprism, Coinjar, Mirror, Snapcard, Zapchain and many others.
Boost VC Foun...
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EB86 – William Mougayar: The Business Of Decentralization
July 6th, 2015 by Epicenter Peter Thiel argued in his book 'Zero to One' that the way to build a great and highly profitable company is to build a monopoly. But with decentralized technologies, there is a real question whether these monopolies can be built or whether the monopolies will end up being publicly owned goods (like Bitcoin) that can't be monetized directly.
William Mougayar, who is an experienced tech executive and angel investor, has been writing extensively about these issues and was one of the investo...
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EB87 – John McDonnell: How Bitcoin Will Win Online Payments
July 13th, 2015 by Epicenter Solving the pain points of online payments was the applications that garnered the most attention in Bitcoin's early days. In recent times, as consumer adoption of Bitcoin payments has been underwhelming much of that attention has shifted elsewhere. Nevertheless, companies keep working hard on making the vision of a universal, global payment system a reality.
Among those companies, one stands out as the top contender to compete with existing payment systems: Bitnet. Funded with a heavy wa...
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