From the Front Page - Epicenter Bitcoin
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EB104 - The Gyft Of The Blockchain And Improving Prepaid Cards
November 9th, 2015 by
Epicenter 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...
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EB103 - Emin Gün Sirer & Ittay Eyal: Bitcoin-NG, Scientists Versus The Church
November 2nd, 2015 by Epicenter 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...
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EB102 - Flavien Charlon: Openchain, Centralized Digital Assets Without Blockchains or Consensus
October 26th, 2015 by Epicenter 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...
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EB101 - Ryan Shea & Muneeb Ali: Bringing Decentralization to Identity with Blockchain ID and Onename
October 19th, 2015 by Epicenter 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...
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EB100 - Juan Benet: Decentralizing the Web With the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS)
October 12th, 2015 by Epicenter 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.
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EB99 - Manuel Aráoz And Esteban Ordano: Streamium, Pay-Per-Second Video Streaming For Indie Producers
October 5th, 2015 by Epicenter 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...
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EB98 – Robin Hanson: Futarchy, Prediction Markets And The Challenge Of Disruptive Technology
September 28th, 2015 by Epicenter 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.
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EB97 – Paul Sztorc: Truthcoin & Prediction Markets, From Information-Overload To Crowd Intelligence
September 21st, 2015 by Epicenter 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.
Paul Sztorc 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 advan...
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EB96 – John Clippinger: Developing A Social Ecosystem Of Trusted, Self-Healing Digital Institutions
September 14th, 2015 by Epicenter 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, John Clippinger. 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...
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EB95 – Adam Back: Why Bitcoin Needs A Measured Approach To Scaling
September 7th, 2015 by Epicenter 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 ge...
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EB94 – Gavin Andresen: On The Blocksize And Bitcoin's Governance
August 31st, 2015 by Epicenter 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...
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EB93 – Simon Dixon: How Bank To The Future Is Rethinking Finance
August 24th, 2015 by Epicenter 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 Ke...
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EB92 – Stefan Thomas: Understanding Ripple
August 17th, 2015 by Epicenter 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 included:
- Stefan T...
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EB91 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Frontier Launch, Scalability And The Road Ahead
August 10th, 2015 by Epicenter 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 ...
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EB90 – Dave Hudson: Insights From The Data Mine And Other Adventures Around The Block
August 3rd, 2015 by Epicenter Bitcoin mining and the intricate game theory that surround it is a topic that we've visited many times. Difficult to grasp in its complexity, it is these dynamics that determine the security of Bitcoin in the short and in the longer term. This time we were joined by none other than Dave Hudson. He is the author of the leading mining blog hashingit.com, VP of Software at PeerNova and had a long career in chip manufacturing including at Qualcomm.
We talked about dynamics in the mining marke...
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EB89 – Greg Slepak: The Turtle Crawl Towards Internet Decentralization
July 27th, 2015 by Epicenter Amidst all the discussion of alternative uses of blockchains, it is often forgotten that the very first fork of Bitcoin, Namecoin, pursued a daring vision for a decentralized, censorship-resistant internet. Greg Slepak, co-founder of the okTurtles Foundation joined us for an interesting discussion of DNS, Namecoin and how blockchains can be used to decentralize the internet.
Topics covered included:
- What DNS is and the role it plays in the architecture of the internet
- What man-in-th...
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EB88 – Sian Jones: Bitlicense And The Regulatory Straitjacket
July 20th, 2015 by Epicenter In this episode, we revisited the perennial topic of digital currency regulation with Siân Jones, our regulatory correspondent and founder of the regulation-focused virtual currency consultancy COINSULT. With the final version of the BitLicense, what may turn out to be the most influential document for digital currency regulation, is now out. Besides diving into many different aspects of the onerous BitLicense, we talked about California's coming rules, how Bitcoin startups will be affected...
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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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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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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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