The Third Web

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 digital assets. Today, we hear about the aforementioned Dfinity.

http://dfinity.network/

https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/beyond-bitcoin-27th-and-final-an-architecture-for-the-internet-of-money

https://www.etherreview.info/2016/02/16/ether-review-16-dominic-williams-synthetic-assets/

https://twitter.com/dominic_w

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls

Content: Dominic Williams, Arthur Falls

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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 is often overlooked as a black box, but is one of a tripartite of technologies including the consensus mechanism and the distributed ledger, whose design is interdependent. Exploring the relationship between these components is an interesting way to gain a deeper understanding of everyone's favourite world computer.

Content: Martin Lundfall, Arthur Falls

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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.

http://www.muskokagroup.org/

https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_how_the_blockchain_is_changing_money_and_business

http://blockchain-revolution.com/

http://www.digitalchamber.org/

Content: Don Tapscott, Perianne Boring, Alex Tapscott, Arthur Falls

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In Brief

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, or state changes, without seeing the information contained in those transactions. Many of the individuals developing these tools have joined Zooko to form the Zcash company. Zcash aims to be a truly anonymous cryptocurrency, but more than just a currency, it is the first step toward managing privacy on public blockchains. Recently, at the Cornell University blockchain hackathon, Zcash team members participated in a successful effort to include an implementation of zero knowledge proofs known as ZKsnarks into an ethereum client running on a test net a monumental achievement in blockchain anonymity. In addition to this, the Zcash team are using the BTCRelay codebase to construct ZRelay, a bridge between the Zcash, Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains.

The final third of this episode is a casual discussion of the culture of the field of cryptography roughly between 1990 and 2000.

https://z.cash

Chain analysis tools:

Blockchain.info

OTX.me

live.ether.camp

Chain analysis services:

Elliptic: https://www.elliptic.co/

Chain Analysis: https://www.chainalysis.com/

A very limited article on the history of cryptography but a conclusion worth skipping to:

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/41/a-brief-history-of-cryptography

The Cypherpunk FAQ:

https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt

Wikipedia links:

Phil Zimmerman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

David Chaum:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum

History of cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cryptography#World_War_II_cryptography

Great Forbes article on the dismay some mathematicians feel at the dominance of the NSA in their field of employment: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/05/mathematicians-urge-colleagues-to-refuse-to-work-for-the-nsa/#2f02244c6c2e

Content: Zooko Wilcox, Arthur Falls

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In Brief

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 progress was made but the Dot Com crash and terror attacks of 9/11 caused a halt to almost all progress. It was not until the emergence of Bitcoin that the wheels again began to turn.

Pelle takes us on a tour of forgotten knowledge and reaffirms some basic principles which the Ethereum community has lost sight of:

What is a contract really?

“It’s something that came out of - you could call it an open source community of business people over thousands of years . . . It’s not a piece of paper, it’s not a piece of code, but it’s actually a relationship with multiple parties where each party has some kind of duty, some kind of obligation and then some kind of right in exchange. That’s what a contract is . . . it’s more an ephemeral concept”

Blog.stakeventures.com

etherreview.info

Content: Pelle Braendgaard, Arthur Falls

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Jaan Talinn 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.

slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch

slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy

cser.org

futureoflife.org

etherreview.info

Content: Jaan Tallinn, Siri, Arthur 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.

Note: River Keefer is in fact in his final year

hackingdistributed.com

initc3.org

twitter.com/el33th4xor

twitter.com/arthurfalls

etherreview.info

Content: Emin Gün Sirer, Arthur 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 to Synereo however was not the tech, but the idea that conversations about the direction of development could be conducted by users, on the platform in question itself. This would filter the noise of open forums like Reddit and Twitter, where uninvolved parties have equal voice.

After we’ve heard from Greg, Jake Brukhman of CoinFund discusses investment in the cryptocurrency space. The CoinFund blog is one of the most insightful and impartial out there, driven by the research their team conducts. We occasionally syndicate CoinFund content on ConsenSys Media - it’s definitely worth a read.

synereo.com

Coinfund.io

Content: Lucius Gregory Meredith, Jake Brukhman, Arthur Falls

Additional music for today’s episode was provided by Dreamers Delight

The threat of Ethereum regulation as a result of the DAO fiasco raises the question: At its core, is blockchain a financial technology?

The Crypto project is viewed by many to be an effort to safeguard mankind's future.

Vinay Gupta says it’s time to realign the crypto project with human survival rather than human greed.

Topics Covered:

Will Ethereum become regulated and merge with Fintech? Is this a bad thing?

In the event of a global financial collapse, have we built an infrastructure which will benefit the many, or enable the few to hide their wealth?

Is the anarcho-capitalist/crypto-anarchist dream fading in favor of more pragmatic views?

Rather than finance, should we focus on problems like climate change and global popular representation?

And what about provably fair online dating?

https://twitter.com/leashless

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls

Content: Vinay Gupta, Arthur Falls

Julian Zawistowski, of Project Golem explains the distributed computing platform he and his team at Imapp are producing. The first alpha, Brass Golem will be released in weeks. The Imapp organisation itself is an interesting organization worth having a look at.

Before we get to Golem however, Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long explains what blockchain can offer to financial institutions, regulators, and the Wall St as a whole.

https://caitlin-long.com/

http://golemproject.net/

http://imapp.pl/en/index

https://twitter.com/caitlinflong

https://twitter.com/julianofimapp

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls

Content: Caitlin Long, Julian Zawistowski, Arthur Falls