Hashing It Out

We're happy to welcome back Truebit Protocol to the podcast! This time we're speaking with Jason Teutsch, mathematican, computer scientist, and founder of the protocol. Truebit is an incentivization scheme for the compute and validation of off-chain code execution with on-chain commitment and validation. We talk about the protocol, but also about their two-token model for producing value in the network and encouraging participation. Truebit is a very interesting protocol, listen and then check it out!

International payments is not an easy challenge to tackle, and Stellar is working diligently to upend the current aging and fee-ridden systems for a more democratized method of international asset transfer. In this episode we have Nikhil Saraf, Principal Software Engineer at Stellar Development Foundation, to educate us on the core features of Stellar, how it achieves consensus, and the practicals of how Stellar can be integrated into regular business and consumer applications.

You want $150k? Have an idea? Is it Web 3.0? Check out Tachyon. Gabriel Anderson come on today to discuss the accelerator program by Consensys Labs, what it's like to transition from engineer to entrepreneur, the common features investors look for in an early stage startup, and the avoidable roadblocks and pitfalls that startups encounter. Check out Tachyon here: https://labs.consensys.net/tachyon/ and submit your application!

This episode, Corey brings on Vinay Gupta from the Mattereum project. This was spawned from a tweet thread from Vinay about people and their stuff that excited Corey, and the following conversation does not dissapoint. Today, we dive into the fundamentals about the transaction costs associated with the lifecycle management of physical goods. What does that mean? Why do you care about your stuff, and why do you hold onto it? Enjoy!

Today's episode brings on Steve Marx from ConsenSys Diligence. Steve only talks with Corey this episode as Collin has to move across the states. Together, they chat about the what the "Diligence" section of ConsenSys is, how it got started, and where it's going. From there, Corey and Steve discuss the very concept of security and how it pertains to Ethereum. Don't miss this episode, as you'll walk surely walk away with a new, useful view of how to stay safe in the blockchain world!

We are very privileged to present Péter Szilágyi and Martin Swende of Ethereum to discuss the 1.9.0 release of the Geth Ethereum client. This release is chocked full of huge quality of life improvements as well as new features. We delve deep into the process for producing this release, what these features are, what they mean going forward,, and speak about the impact of Ethereum 2.0 on the Geth client. It's a great honor having them donate their time to discuss their work, and it's a fantastic conversation.

Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, comes on the air with us to talk about how tooling is evolving in smart contract security, the landscape of security auditing today, and we have the opportunity to congratulate him on being named a leader in Forrester Research's Midsize Cybersecurity Consulting Services, Q2 2019 report. We go over advancements in fuzzing, static analysis, formal verification, and some interesting and unexpected problems found in smart contracts.

Blockstack is releasing their decentralized computing platform next year, and we have Aaron Blankstein on to talk about their whitepaper and what it means for decentralized applications in the future. Using their identity management system, Blockstack ID, their file storage system, Gaia, and their formally verifiable and non-Turing Complete smart contract language, Clarity, Blockstack will make it easier to build dapps on the Bitcoin network.

Today's episode Corey and Collin bring on Andrew Poelstra, a mathematician and Director of Research at Blockstream. The guys dive straight into ECDSA vs Schnorr signatures, its history, and their future in crypto systems. They talk about Mimble Wimble, and how it bled into upcoming massive improvements of the Bitcoin protocol. Lots of great stuff to sink your teeth into this episode so we go a bit longer than usual. Enjoy the show!

Welcome back, Dr. Sirer on our 50th episode! The Avalanche consensus protocol was released last year by a pseudonymous team of researches "Team Rocket" (no relation to Pokemon, our sources say). Dr. Emin Gün Sirer has been a strong proponent of the protocol and has developed an implementation under his company AVA Labs. With test TPS of 6500 on a realistic test environment, AVA is already showing speeds rivaling VISA on Black Friday. We re-hash Avalanche for the audience and then explain how the AVA implementation works, learning more about open questions such as smart contracts on AVA.

With great pleasure, we present to you, Austin Griffith. You've seen this man all over YouTube, often rockin' a bowtie, and showing some amazing and dynamic live demonstrations of his creative process in designing new user experiences for Ethereum. Author of the xDAI burner wallet, expert in meta transactions, and dapp development pioneer, Austin's energy and knowledge is palpable. This episode is a lot of fun and highly educational.

We interview Nik Kunkel of MakerDAO on the technology behind their DAI stable token and the MKR token.

Interview with Nik Kunkel of MakerDAO on the cryptoeconomics behind their USD stable token.

We have CTO of Ren, Loong Wang, on to educate us on their token transfer protocol. Ren is building a system that allows a user to transfer a token from one change to another, without the drawbacks found in techniques like atomic swaps. They have a network of "dark nodes" which run on their virtual machine, RenVM, to computer across the transactions and share data over the network. Interesting technology with many use cases!

Champion of decentralization, Zaki Manian, rejoins us for updates on Cosmos since their Mainnet launch. We dive into the design principles of Cosmos, their consensus mechanisms, incentivisation model, and how to integrate your decentralized application into the Cosmos Network. We also learn more about who is currently using Cosmos and how, what Zaki and Cosmos will be speaking on at NYC Blockchain Week events, as well as how Cosmos differentiates itself from other technologies being produced. Riveting as always!

We bring you another brilliant mind on the show for this episode! Russell O'Connor, developer of Blockstream's Simplicity programming language for Bitcoin, dives deep into formal verification topics. We learn about the language design principles driving Simplicity, how formal verification plays an integral role in making the language suitable for securely automating Bitcoin transactions, and the challenges in creating a smart contract script for Bitcoin. We get a glimpse into the future of blockchain automation, and he elucidates what is being done right and what could be done better in blockchain platforms to place security first in smart contract design.

We are excited to have the Kadena team back on with an update. The erudite Stuart Popejoy and brilliant Emily Pillmore speak more on Pact, the smart contract language with built-in formal verification used in the Kadena Chainweb. We learn more about formal verification: what it means, how it works, and a bit of its limitations. They also give us an update on Chainweb itself and talk us through some of the challenges since we last spoke... AND their innovated solutions to those challenges! This episode is sponsored by www.trailofbits.com

We shouldn't pick favorites, but this is definitely one of our favorite episodes so far. We have the extreme pleasure of learning from Brandon Goodell, Research Associate at Monero Research Lab, about Monero, how it's designed, privacy in Monero and how it compares to other coins like ZCash, scalability, and consensus mechanisms in general. This is exactly the kinda conversations we built this show for, and there were more than one eye opening moments. Definitely scope this one out! Sponsored by www.trailofbits.com

Ahoy-hoy! Today we have Director of Security at MyCrypto, Harry Denley. We talk about phishing attacks! No, not assaults at jam band concerts, the kind where you lose your money. We go over the process of finding these attacks, reacting to them, and staying ahead of the scammers. We talk about the tools used to intercept and analyze these attacks, and the processes surrounding gathering the evidence against the attackers. Harry is doing amazing work, and he's really putting effort into keeping us all safe. Thanks, Harry!

Liam Horne is a developer, decentralization expert, and an open source entrepreneur with a focus on state channels. L4 and Counterfactual have released a new development playground that lets software engineers learn and play with state channels right from their browser. Liam gives us insights on what it's taken to get to this point, where the state of state channel development is right now, and where we're going with layer 2 solutions for scaling blockchains.