From the Front Page - The Ether Review
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The Ether Review #54 — Demian Brenner of Open Zeppelin
February 3rd, 2017 by
Arthur S. Falls In Brief: If there is one thing we learned in 2016 it’s that building a secure, stable, decentralized application is difficult. One of the responses to the problem has been the Open Zeppelin smart contract framework.
Open Zeppelin is really a community of developers 300 strong. Collectively they have built the framework over time in a similar fashion to Truffle or Dapple. In addition to maintaining the Open Zeppelin framework, the community audits smart contract deployments like the Golem, ...
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The Ether Review #53 — Dan Boneh, Master Cryptographer
January 14th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: From better signature schemes for blockchains, to quantum preparedness, to novel cryptography like zero knowledge proofs and threshold signatures, Dan Boneh takes us on a tour of cryptography in our age.
Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Dan Boneh, has been working in the field of cryptography for over 25 years. During which time he has co-developed a signature scheme known as BLS Signatures. This was an opportunity to have some real questions answered, or more a...
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The Ether Review #52 — Arcade City is Back on the Road
January 7th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: In spite of the tumultuous public life of it’s founder, the sharing economy project is evolving and moving forward rapidly. We’ve just seen the end of a successful token launch and an all star advisory board informing new leadership fronting a strong dev team. Arcade City is back on the road.
Three members of the post-Chris David team: Bernd Lapp, Michael Thuy, and Stephan Ponnet discuss the status and future roadmap of Arcade City. What was once thought of only as a ride sharin...
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The Ether Review #51 — Hack Ether Camp: There Can be Only One
December 20th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: Round 2 of the biggest hackathon in blockchain is nearing it's apex. On the 22nd of December a winner will be announced. Today the man behind the hack.ether.camp virtual accelerator, Roman Mandeleil looks back over the last two months of competition and explains how the platform operates. Then we hear from some of the leading contestants:
Once artchain has been established, the art market can be securitized, which has heretofore been an impossibility. This is the Blockchain Revoluti...
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The Ether Review #50 — Tezos, Forkless Protocol Upgrades
December 12th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: Tezos is a blockchain based smart contract platform that incorporates protocol level governance, modular design, and a functional scripting language. Pretty much the shopping list of features the Ethereum community is looking for. Yes, Yes, I know this is supposed to be a show about Ethereum, but examining emerging platforms is the best way to understand what the people with the deepest understanding would like to see changed in the protocol.
Tezos is modular, designed to enable dr...
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The Ether Review #49 - Digital Markets and Steemfest
December 1st, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In today's episode we compare two books by William Mougayar: Opening Digital Markets (1997), and The Business Blockchain(2016). We also discuss the Steemfest conference which took place in Amsterdam last month.
William Mougayar is an entrepreneur, venture advisor and angel investor, who previously held senior positions at Hewlett-Packard and Cognizant. He is the founder of Startup Management (http://startupmanagement.org/) where he blogs and curates on start-ups and the cryptocurrency economy...
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The Ether Review <5:00 - Polkadot & Melonport
November 25th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: Melon is a protocol and asset management software suite for setting up and managing portfolios containing cryptocurrencies. It achieves this through the use of the Polkadot blockchain network.
Raison D’etre
Polkadot, designed by Gavin Wood, is like an internet of blockchains. It is the communication protocol that Melon needed to manage digital assets across multiple blockchains. Right now there is no safe way to give the ability to secure and manage digital assets to another e...
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The Ether Review #48 - Tracking A Hacker
November 20th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: The DAO hacker and Geth attacker have left a trail of evidence that can provide high quality identifying information about their persons.
Bok Khoo is an actuary in the finance industry and software enthusiast. Recently Bok has turned his interest toward blockchain forensics. In particular tracing malicious actors on the Ethereum network.
www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/100-tri…in-shanghai/ www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/the-ong…eum-attacks/ www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/commen…w...
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The Ether Review #47 — Epic Infrastructure in China
November 15th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: Chinese multinational, Wanxiang Group, has purchased over 700 hectares of land on which to build a smart city where it plans to experiment with blockchain based organizational systems.
Wanxiang Group is a Chinese multinational focused primarily on automotive parts manufacturing. Recently Wanxiang has been moving into finance and agriculture. Now, with the establishment of the Wanxiang Blockchain Labs research organization and Fenbushi Capital investment fund, Wanxiang is making big...
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The Ether Review #46 - Curtis Yarvin & Galen Wolfe-Pauly on Urbit
November 7th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Sometimes the urge to layer in-jokes into a podcast title is impossible to resist. . . and then 24hrs later you change it.
The effort to understand the significance of type based and functional programming languages led me to the Urbit project. This attempt to re-design the internet is one of a number of technologies that have evolved alongside blockchain and address some of the same problems. The Urbit developer's focus on mechanical perfection is a sensibility worth observing.
The first ...
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The Ether Review #45 - Australia - Agricultural Finance, Financial Assets, & Antipiracy
November 3rd, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls In many ways still a frontier nation, Australia's style of innovation is practical and direct. Three of the startups covered in todays interviews come from industries outside of tech, each looking to blockchain to solve a problem unique to their industries. Finhaus Labs, a research and consulting team offers supporting services and friendly advice to these, and the rest of the local blockchain business community.
Interviews: Nick Addison, Finhaus Labs Connor Svendsen, independent
Emma We...
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The Ether Review #43 - BHP, Tracking the Most Valuable Rock on Earth
October 21st, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Core samples from oil wells can be worth more than gold. BHP Billiton, one of the largest mining companies in the world, is piloting a program to track their custodianship and provenance using IPFS and Ethereum.
Not only is this an interesting use case, but it is also the first time we have seen a production deployment of both IPFS and Ethereum.
If you would like to contact Tyler, please email me at the address mentioned in the podcast.
twitter.com/FreeMyVunk twitter.com/arthurfalls
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The Ether Review #42 - Dominic Williams, Dfinity and Infinite Scaling
October 18th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Dominic Williams is a cryptographic researcher focussed on scaling and the representation of real world assets in digital form. Dfinity, Dominic’s infinitely scalable virtual machine, is simple, and extremely powerful.
This is the third time I’ve interviewed Dominic. The first was for the final episode of Beyond Bitcoin. Dominic enters at the 1hr 32min mark to explain Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. The second was in February 2016 on The Ether Review to discuss his work on synthetic ...
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The Ether Review #41 - Martin Lundfall, Rage Against the Machine
October 13th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls What is the Ethereum Virtual Machine, what design trends and decisions influence its operation and what does that mean for Ethereum the platform?
Today we dive deep. There is a debate around whether the flexibility of the imperative paradigm of programming language design or the verifiability of the functional paradigm are more appropriate for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Martin is in the functional camp which he believes can make Ethereum a more robust and powerful platform. The EVM itself ...
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The Ether Review #40 - Perianne, Don & Alex discuss The Muskoka Group
October 8th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Between August 24th-26th, a group of leaders in blockchain thought, business, and advocacy met at the Tapscott’s lodge in Muskoka, Canada.
The goal of the meeting was to discuss strategies of stewardship and governance of the blockchain space. Currently, the Chamber of Digital Commerce is the most prominent advocacy group.
Founder & President, Perianne Boring joined Don and Alex Tapscott, on the eve of the event to discuss their goals.
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The Ether Review #39 - Zooko Wilcox, Zcash and Cryptography in the 1990s
September 30th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Zooko Wilcox has more than 20 years of experience in open, decentralized systems, cryptography and information security, and startups. He is recognized for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko’s Triangle”, Tahoe-LAFS, BLAKE2, and SPHINCS. He is also the Founder and CEO of Least Authority. He sometimes blogs about health science.
In recent years, progress in the area of zero knowledge proofs has made it possible to construct a blockchain whose miners can verify transactions, o...
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The Ether Review #38 - Pelle Braendgaard, Prehistory
September 23rd, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Blockchain is a recent innovation, cryptocurrency is not. From the mid 80s to the end of the Dot Com Boom in the late 90s, cryptographers and developers tackled many of the problems we are encountering today in this new era of digital currency.
Pelle Braendgaard is a veteran search engine webmaster (AltaVista) and participant in the cryptocurrency space of the early nineties. Back then, the Crypto Finance Conference, held in Aguila was the epicenter of the community. A tremendous amount of p...
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The Ether Review #37 - Jaan Tallinn, Threats to Human Life on Earth
September 20th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Jaan Tallinn is the founder of Skype and Kazaa and long time angel investor. More recently, Jaan has concerned himself with preventing the destruction of humanity. Strong Artificial intelligence is the least understood of threats and this is Jaan's chief concern.
Ascended Economy Meditations on Moloch cser.org futureoflife.org
Content: Jaan Tallinn, Siri, Arthur Falls
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The Ether Review #36 - Emin Gün Sirer, Wrapping it all up
September 15th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Crypto guru Emin Gün Sirer wraps up the DAO hack and hard fork. While the entire episode is over for the main Ethereum chain, some questions remain unanswered. After speaking with Emin, the intrigue seems to have only deepened.
hackingdistributed.com
initc3.org
etherreview.info
Content: Emin Gün Sirer, Arthur Falls
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The Ether Review #35 - Coinfund & Synereo
September 12th, 2016 by Arthur S. Falls Lucius Gregory Meredith, chief technology officer at Synereo is a mathematician and cryptocurrency expert. The Synereo platform began as a decentralized social network but out of a need for smart contracts, high scalability, and concurrent transactions, the project has become something much more than a replacement for facebook. Greg’s work is fascinating and novel, and frankly I don’t do it justice in this interview. Interested listeners should follow up on the provided links. What lead me t...
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