From the Front Page - Epicenter Bitcoin
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EB144 - Charles Hoskinson & Alex Chepurnoy: IOHK, Scorex And The Case For Ethereum Classic
August 16th, 2016 by
Epicenter From BitShares to his central role during the inception of Ethereum Charles Hoskinson has continually influenced key projects in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. After departing the Ethereum project in 2014, he has recently stepped back into the limelight by pledging support and resources to turn the fledgling Ethereum fork ETC into a viable project.
Charles joined us together with Alex Chepurnoy, a developer at his company IOHK. Besides Ethereum Classic, we talked about IOHK and...
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EB143 - Joey Krug: Augur - A Decentralized, Crowdsourced Prediction Market Built On Ethereum
August 9th, 2016 by Epicenter Prediction markets are fascinating financial instruments which have proven to be accurate at making predictions on things like the outcome of elections, geopolitical events and sporting events. But in our heavily regulated financial world, they are the subject of much controversy. In 2013 for instance, a well-known US prediction market, Intrade, was forced to shut down following a civil suit filed by the CFTC. While some people consider prediction markets to be a useful tool for society, oth...
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EB142 - Claire Warren & Scott Farrell: DnA Contracts - Bringing Human Discretion To Smart Contracts
August 1st, 2016 by Epicenter Blockchain smart contracts are self-executing contracts composed of computer code. These programs, which are executed by the entirety of the network, enforce the rules described within the code. Effectively, in this realm, code is law. And as we've seen recently, altering the outcome of that code after it has been deloyed, should we later realize that it was flawed or did not produce an intended result, can be messy. In addition, there are instances where human intervention can be necessary ...
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EB141 - Ralph Merkle: Revolutionizing Democracy Using DAOs
July 25th, 2016 by Epicenter Legendary scientist and cryptography pioneer Ralph Merkle joined us to discuss his recent paper on DAOs. Merkle examined how the voting mechanisms in today's democracies are flawed and how a decentralized, transparent DAO making decisions using prediction markets could create more efficient democratic systems.
Topics covered included:
- Merkle proofs, Merkle Roots and his early forays into cryptography
- Blockchains as living organisms
- Why DAOs will be subject to a Darwinian evolutio...
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EB140 – Manfred Kareer: Bitsquare - The Decentralized Open-Soure Cryptocurrency-Fiat Exchange
July 18th, 2016 by Epicenter Exchanges are often criticized as a central point of failure of the cryptocurrency space. This isn't without justification as, in recent years, we have seen a number of exchanges get hacked, robbed, or embezzled by their founders, which is far from insignificant. One proposed alternative are decentralized exchanges that would allow people make peer-to-peer trades using sophisticated smart contracts. However, there remains the fundamental challenge of interfacing with the legacy banking syst...
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EB139 – Martin Köppelmann: Gnosis - The Ethereum Prediction Market
July 11th, 2016 by Epicenter Few things arouse excitment among free market believers and enthusiasts of decentralization as prediction markets do. By allowing people to bet on any range of outcomes they promise more efficient markets and better information. Few people have worked with as much dedication on making the promise of prediction markets a reality as Martin Köppelmann.
After founding the Bitcoin prediction market Fairlay, he turned to Ethereum and started the Ethereum-based prediction market Gnosis. We dis...
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EB138 - Sergio Lerner: How RSK Will Bring Smart Contracts To Bitcoin
July 4th, 2016 by Epicenter Security researcher and RSK co-founder Sergio Lerner joined us to discuss RSK (also Rootstock), the project to launch a turing-complete smart contract sidechain to Bitcoin. We talked about how he got into the industry, spending countless days analyzing Bitcoin for vulnerabilities and finding a few along the way. And, of course, RSK, the ambitious project to strenghten the Bitcoin ecosystem through adding smart contract capabilities.
Topics covered included:
- How Sergio initially got inv...
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EB137 – Siân Jones: Regulatory Update - The Brexit, The EU And The DAO
June 29th, 2016 by Epicenter With recent news surrounding The DOA and the Brexit vote causing a stir in the blockchain world and beyond, it seems like a regulatory update is due. So we called up our favorite regulatory affairs specialist Siân Jones to enlighten us on some of the recent developments in Bitcoin and blockchain regulation.
Topics covered in this episode include:
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The Brexit and it's potential impacts on the Blockchain and Fintech space in the UK
- The Bank of England opening its doors to more t...
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EB136 - Arthur Breitman: Tezos - A Self-Amending Crypto-Ledger
June 20th, 2016 by Epicenter The lack of an explicit governance mechanism has created deep problems for Bitcoin. Ethereum, with the DAO-related soft/hard-fork discussions, may face similar challenges ahead. Yet, already in 2014 Arthur Breitman quietly started working on cryptocurrency network Tezos that has an explicit mechanism to let coinholders vote on protocol upgrades.
Our discussion with Breitman centered around how explicit governance could lead to a more secure and evolutionary protocol. We also discussed Te...
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EB135 - Stephen Palley: Lawmodynamics And How To Sue A DAO
June 14th, 2016 by Epicenter For many the promise of decentralized applications and DAOs is to be beyond the limitations and rigidity of the existing legal system. There is no question that where DAOs can roam freely, innovation can accelerate. But can the law, courts and regulations be left behind so easily?
Lawyer Stephen Palley joined us to discuss what happens when the new and old worlds collide and how courts will look at what goes on in the land of DAOs and DApps.
Topics covered included:
- Whether trust is...
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EB134 - Emin Gün Sirer And Vlad Zamfir: On A Rocky DAO
June 6th, 2016 by Epicenter Raising $150m+ through its toke sale, 'The DAO' has become the most notable decentralized application to date. The ambitious goal of the project is to form an decentralized organizations that efficiently makes investment decisions and generates a return for the token holders.
Computer Science professor Emin Gün Sirer and researcher Vlad Zamfir joined us to discuss the various security issues with the daring project and why they've called for a temporary moratorium on funding proposals. ...
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EB133 - Pascal and Julien Hamonic: Applying the Mechanisms of Thermoregulation to Cryptocurrencies
May 30th, 2016 by Epicenter One of the problems often cited when talking about cryptocurrencies is their level of volatility compared to traditional fiat currencies. This makes most cryptocurrencies a poor instrument for storing value, and introduces complexities when making purchases in fiat amounts. Stable cryptocurrencies include mechanisms which allow them to stay pegged to fiat currencies like the US Dollar or Euro. They present a number of advantages, and, in addition to taking the headache out of making purchase...
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EB132 - Stephan Tual: Building A Universal Sharing Network On Ethereum And A $150M DAO
May 23rd, 2016 by Epicenter In this episode we welcome back Stephan Tual, the COO of Slock.It, a German startup working at the intersection of the Internet of Things and the Ethereum blockchain. Slock.It’s small team also wrote the smart contracts that power ‘The DAO’, a decentralized capital management entity that recently raised north of $160 million for investing into Ethereum based projects. ‘The DAO’ has been featured in many mainstream news outlets, such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Ec...
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EB131 - Stefan Thomas & Evan Schwartz: Building The Internet Of Payments With Interledger
May 16th, 2016 by Epicenter One of the foundational problems in payment networks is that they are mostly uninteroperable. This problem exists at all levels, from consumer payment solutions like PayPal, to national and multi-national banks. This complexity is brought on by the proprietary nature of payment networks, and moving value from one to another requires a negotiation between parties on which common payment network to use in a transaction. We saw similar problems in the early days of the Internet, assembled aroun...
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EB130 - Erik Voorhees: Fooling The Fox - The Story Of The Shapeshift Hack
May 9th, 2016 by Epicenter 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 ...
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EB129 - The Far Future In Front Of Us
May 2nd, 2016 by Epicenter 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 included:
- How companies running on smart contracts co...
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EB128 - Jed Mccaleb: Stellar And The Vision Of An Open Financial System
April 26th, 2016 by Epicenter 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 syst...
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EB127 - Anthony Di Iorio: Jaxx, Ethereum And Why Community Matters
April 18th, 2016 by Epicenter 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 a...
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EB126 - Trent Mcconaghy: Scalable Public Distributed Databases With BigchainDB
April 12th, 2016 by Epicenter 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 blockchai...
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EB125 - Florian Glatz: Defining A Legal Framework For Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO)
April 5th, 2016 by Epicenter 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...
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