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, Duplex Channels use a network of payment channels to enable cheap, instant and trustless offchain transactions. The proposal, which he is currently implementing, is one of the most promising approaches to scaling Bitcoin.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/106

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 taking and what consensus in Ethereum land could look like in the future.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/105

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 joined us to talk about how he got involved in FinTech, what makes gift cards so interesting and how recently Gyft has been trying to reinvent gift cards by using the power of the blockchain.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/104