OnChain Scaling to become The Future of Bitcoin
A Bitcoin Status Report
A risk posture based on current technical capabilities will overly constrain any system's growth. Bitcoin and the world at large are complex dynamic systems that respond to feedback. A useful system growing will be met with virtuous, self-reinforcing cycles of improvement as capacity challenges appear.
Jeff Garzik
A futurist, entrepreneur and software engineer. Jeff is co-founder and CEO of Bloq. Jeff serves on the board of Coin Center, and the advisory board of BitFury, BitPay, Chain.com, Netki and WayPaver Labs. Jeff has delivered presentations on bitcoin and blockchain at TEDx, State of Digital Money, many bitcoin conferences, as well as private briefings to corporations, governments, central banks, and hedge funds.
Jeff has a long history of early technology adoption. After helping to inaugurate CNN.com on the Internet in the early 1990s, he worked for a succession of Internet startups and service providers. At the same time, he worked continuously on open source software engineering projects for over two decades.
Involvement in one of the best known open source projects - the Linux kernel - led to an extended tenure at Linux leader Red Hat during open source's most formative years. Jeff's work is found in every Android phone and data center Linux installation today.
In July 2010, Jeff stumbled across a post describing bitcoin. Immediately recognizing the potential of a concept previously thought impossible -- decentralized digital money, he did what came naturally: developed bitcoin open source software. That gave rise to the start of micro-businesses with bitcoin at their foundation. Almost by accident, Jeff found himself at the heart of the global, revolutionary, technology phenomenon known as bitcoin.Scaling Bitcoin for the Next Generation
In this talk, I'll describe Bitcoin-NG (Next Generation), a new blockchain protocol designed to scale. Bitcoin-NG is a Byzantine fault tolerant blockchain protocol that is robust to extreme churn and shares the same trust model as Bitcoin. I'll describe the novel techniques Bitcoin-NG uses to achieve extreme scale, the novel metrics we have introduced for measuring the performance of blockchains, and a novel experimental framework we are building in order to measure empirical performance in repeatable situations. Unlike other scaling techniques, such as payment channels and the Lightning Network, Bitcoin-NG has well understood performance that does not depend on the emergent properties of the credit graph, leaks no information about the relationships between different actors, does not complicate the user experience, and requires very little change to existing clients. Overall, our experiments demonstrate that Bitcoin-NG scales optimally, with bandwidth limited only by the capacity of the individual nodes and latency limited only by the propagation time of the network.
Emin Gün Sirer
Emin Gun Sirer is a professor of computer science at Cornell University, where he is also a co-director for the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts. His research focuses on all things related to decentralized systems. His group is known for having discovered and fixed the Selfish Mining attack, having developed Bitcoin-NG, a next generation protocol that is compatible with Bitcoin that supports VISA-level scale on chain, having deployed Falcon, a relay network to improve mining decentralization, and having proposed Bitcoin vaults, a technique to deter thefts of bitcoins at rest.
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The Law of Forks
What Happened When Ethereum Forked, And What Bitcoin Can Learn.
A review of the legalities of Hard Forks, with an emphasis on Bitcoin, stakeholders and special interests.
Andrew Hinkes, Esq
Represents leading companies & entrepreneurs in state and federal commercial litigation matters related to contract litigation, representation of court-appointed fiduciaries, business torts, bankruptcy adversary litigation, employment-related litigation, and electronic discovery. Andrew also advises clients regarding document retention issues, management of electronically stored information, electronic records management strategies, and web site terms of service and privacy policies. Andrew is frequently published and cited for his work in the virtual currency area, and is a noted authority in the areas of virtual currencies, smart contracts, distributed ledger-based technologies, computer data security/breaches, and technology regulation.
Dr. Charles Evans
Dr. Evans is Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at Barry University in Miami, Florida, and Executive Director of Conscious Entrepreneurship Foundation, which promotes the use of Bitcoin and other fintech innovations among the 80+% of the world's population that is unbanked or underbanked. His academic research focuses on Bitcoin, including "Bitcoin in Islamic Banking and Finance" and "The Blind Economists and the Elephant: Bitcoin and Monetary Separation."
Dr. Evans has been teaching Economics and Finance since 2003, and has been involved with virtual currencies since the first wave of moneypunk projects during the 1990s Dot.Com Era. He is an Editor of Ledger, the peer-reviewed journal that focuses on cryptocurrency, and a member of the National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE) and the Financial Education Association (FEA).
The Micro-Global Economy
My presentation focuses on Bitcoin use cases in small-scale, cross-border trade. I am Executive Director of Conscious Entrepreneurship Foundation, which promotes the use of Bitcoin among the world's unbanked and underbanked. Currently, we work primarily with entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in West Africa: Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. For the 5.5 billion potential Bitcoin users, its use as a P2P medium of exchange is of greatest value. (34min + Q&A)
Andrew Stone
Andrew Stone is the developer of Bitcoin Unlimited, has been an investor in Bitcoin since early 2012 and is currently the Software Architect at OpenClovis, Inc, a company that provides clustering and high availability software to telecom, aerospace and defense equipment manufacturers.
Expedited Forwarding in Bitcoin Unlimited
To optimise the propagation of transactions and blocks, it makes sense to minimize the per-hop latency -- that is, minimize the time it takes to move data from one node to another. Currently, the bitcoin network uses a three message sequential conversation to send a block or transaction. This talk will report on efforts and discuss strategies to reduce this to a single message, and will also provide a general Bitcoin Unlimited status update. (31 min + Q&A)
Andrew Hinkes, Esq
Andrew Hinkes represents leading companies & entrepreneurs in state and federal commercial litigation matters related to contract litigation, representation of court-appointed fiduciaries, business torts, bankruptcy adversary litigation, employment-related litigation, and electronic discovery. Andrew also advises clients regarding document retention issues, management of electronically stored information, electronic records management strategies, and web site terms of service and privacy policies. Andrew is frequently published and cited for his work in the virtual currency area, and is a noted authority in the areas of virtual currencies, smart contracts, distributed ledger-based technologies, computer data security/breaches, and technology regulation.
The Passion of TheDao
Analysis of TheDao's governance failures and how future smart contract platforms can avoid disaster. (61 min.)
Dr. Peter Rizun
Peter R. Rizun is a physicist and entrepreneur living in Vancouver, Canada, and is co-founder and co-managing editor for Ledger. His main research interest is developing analytical theory that explains properties and emergent phenomenon of the Bitcoin Network. He has written two papers related to Bitcoin that received significant interest, “A Transaction Fee Market Exists Without A Block Size Limit” and “Reduce Orphaning Risk and Improve Zero Confirmation Security With Subchains”, and gave a talk on block space as an economic commodity at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Montreal. He was the recipient of the $105,000 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) CGS Doctoral Award and was recognized as a “Leader of Tomorrow” by the Alberta Science and Technology Foundation (ASTech). He holds a B.A.S
Block Propagation and the Z-parameter
This talk will explore how block propagation, as described by the Z-parameter, affects both the market price for block space and a node’s ability to "keep up” with the blockchain. The key takeaway is that an increase in the quantity of block space produced by miners naturally corresponds with improvements in the network's ability to produce that block space. The network can grow organically without the need for top-down interventions by developers. (21 min + Q&A)
Riccardo Spagni
Riccardo is a member of the Monero Core Development Team. With an academic background in informatics and logistics, Riccardo spent years in software development and the import/export industry. Due to the success of the business he started with his wife, he had enough freedom to start tinkering with Bitcoin in 2011. In 2012 he became involved in various cryptocurrency-related projects. Riccardo and his wife live along the Garden Route on the coast of South Africa, where he spends weekends pack rafting, hanging out with their six dogs, building and flying multicopters, playing with LEGO, and collecting watches.
Dynamic Block Size Caps
What should the long term solution for the Bitcoin blocksize be? Although there is much debate about how to implement it, there isn't much contention over the fact that current static block size cap is not optimal in the long term. An overview of existing proposals, along with a comparison and history of Monero's working dynamic block size. (30 min + Q&A)
Meni Rosenfeld
Meni Rosenfeld is a mathematics M.Sc. graduate of the Weizmann Institute of Science, specializing in machine learning. He has worked as the head of research of the internet startup Similarweb, where he was in charge of developing algorithms for measuring connections between websites and analyzing web traffic. After being exposed to Bitcoin in March 2011, he has focused exclusively on activity in this field. He has established the Bitcoin community in Israel, founded Bitcoil - Israel's first Bitcoin exchange service, and performed mathematical research on the algorithms that underlie the functioning of the Bitcoin and blockchain system. He now serves as the chairman of the Israeli Bitcoin Association.
A fork in the road: Must we choose a path?
Many people have been anxious about choosing sides in the debate over Bitcoin's scaling and governance, and dreading the possibility of a contentious hard fork tearing the community apart. But do we really have to choose? What if splitting the Bitcoin network can actually be a natural process in Bitcoin's evolution? And where does the power to decide Bitcoin's rules ultimately come from, anyway? (25 min + Q&A)
Dr. Bob McElrath
Bob's first career was as a theoretical physicist, and he wrote 30+ papers on on Higgs bosons, dark matter, and black holes at particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. That wasn't nearly interesting enough for him so he took a left turn into remaking money with cryptography, and is now CTO and Chief Scientist for SolidX Partners in New York. He's now working on building an identity platform on blockchains and tutoring bankers about Bitcoin.
Bob is an editor for the Ledger Journal.Braiding the Blockchain
The "chain" structure of Bitcoin only works if the network is synchronous and new blocks are propagated with zero latency. Since the real network is asynchronous, orphans (stale blocks) appear due to this communications latency. By allowing blocks to name multiple parents, we can tie up asynchronously produced blocks into a specialization of a Directed Acyclic Graph we call a "braid". The orphan problem causes a race condition among miners that reduces the security of the system [Eyal et. al.]. We present an analysis of this braid structure on a Bitcoin-like network and present (1) how to achieve the fastest possible block time in such an asynchronous network (2) an analysis of the Bitcoin network under this additional assumption -- which indicates an optimal equivalent block time of 11.6s. Moving to a braid can drastically increase the transaction rate accepted by the network while reducing the block time, provide a mechanism to heal network splits, and dynamically adjust to changing network conditions. (32min + Q&A)
Tom Zander
Tom is a software guru, open source fan and developer. Tom has more than 20 years professional programming experience in a range of languages. Toms experience has been varied, but focus is on C++ & Linux. Since 1998 Tom has been involved in various open source projects. His first big application that was released was part of KDE in 2000. Tom is involved with Bitcoin since 2013 and has worked in financial companies in order to learn more about economics, money and fin-tech.
Steady Growth comes from Steady Innovation
Tom Zander's talk takes a look at bitcoin communication on the network. Tom explains how it works and attempts to find various parts that could become better. He will explain one solution for scaling which he coined Optimistic Mining more in depth. (27 min +Q&A)
Andrea Suisani
A software developer for almost twenty years, recently transitioned to what they use to call a full-stack software developer. That means doing 4 jobs while being payed only for one. On the bright side such a role gives opportunity to improve skills through a lot of IT fields like database system administration, system administration, coding and project management. Holding a Bachelor degree in statistics, and getting into Bitcoin in 2011, Andrea briefly pool mined with a Radeon GPU, and hasn't looked back since.
Block Propagation using Xthin: Setup and Testing Process
The main objective was to obtain useful BU node performance statistics for real-time block propagation within and outside the Great Firewall of China (GFC) along with a more in deep knowledge of performance gain brought by Xthin technology when used on the broad bitcoin p2p network. During the talk I’ll cover all the needed steps we had to made to achieve our goal and what we have learnt about the interaction between the bitcoin p2p network and the GFC. (37 min + Q&A)
Chronos Crypto
Chronos Crypto is a long-time Bitcoin enthusiast, with a degree in Computer Science and a passion for finance and macroeconomics. His perspective on the world financial system is that another catastrophe is increasingly inevitable, and Bitcoin needs to be ready. Over the past two years, he has operated a crypto-oriented YouTube channel, where he covers the finer points of blockchain technology.
Xtreme Thinblocks
The bandwidth and time required to propagate new blocks on the Bitcoin network presents a scaling challenge. Xtreme Thinblocks uses a unique Bloom filter to take advantage of the shared knowledge of pending transactions, reducing the resources needed to send new blocks between nodes. (31 min + Q&A)
