EB69 – Thomas Voegtlin - Electrum, SPV Wallets And Bitcoin Aliases
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Powering an estimated 5-10% of all Bitcoin transactions, Electrum is one of the leaders of the Bitcoin wallet space. The open-source walled was started in 2011 and played a key role in the development of the light-weight SPV wallets. Developer Thomas Voegtlin joined us for a discussion of Electrum, their recent 2.0 release and the rapidly evolving Bitcoin wallet space in general.
Topics covered included:
- The evolution of Bitcoin wallets and what motivated him to start Electrum - Electrum 2.0 and its new features such as Multi-sig and hardware wallet support - The security tradeoffs between using an SPV wallet versus a full node client - How Bitcoin aliases could do away with Bitcoin addresses
Support the show, consider donating:
BTC: 1JYiE3xZcEspiEV5bTtu4qaL3Eux48F8Lo (http://bit.ly/2nSmOSK)
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In the world of Bitcoin podcast, there is one show which definitely stands out as the longest running, Let's Talk Bitcoin! In its 4-year history, the show has produced over 320 episodes and expanded to become a network of podcasts which includes Epicenter and many others.
We're joined by Adam B. Levine the founder and host of Let's Talk Bitcoin! It was thanks to Adam that Sébastien and Brian first connected in 2013, so in many ways, we consider him as the "spiritual grandfather" of Epicenter. Adam reflects on his signature show and the network he created in 2014. He discusses the future of the network and makes an announcement live on the show, which even takes us by surprise.
Topics discussed in this episode:
- The history of the Let's Talk Bitcoin! podcast
- What listeners can expect for the future of the show
- The LTB Coin reward token experiment, what was learned and the future of that project
- The Let's Talk Bitcoin! Network and how it's evolving
- The Tokenly project and its use cases
- Token.fm: a platform for music creators to sell licences to their music as tokens
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Token.FM - Early Access: http://token.fm
- BTC Media: http://btcmedia.org
- Adam B. Levine: Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network, LTBCoin, Monetizing Content & Crowdfunding — Epicenter: https://epicenter.tv/episode/064/
- Let's Talk Bitcoin!: http://letstalkbitcoin.com
Sponsors:
- Jaxx: Wallets that Unify the Blockchain Experience Across Devices - http://jaxx.io
- Ledger: Smart card security for your Bitcoins - Get 10% off your first order when you use the code EPICENTER - http://ledgerwallet.com
This episode is also available on :
- Epicenter.tv: https://epicenter.tv/176
- YouTube: http://youtu.be/FBypnbWXHMA
- Souncloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-176
Watch or listen, Epicenter is available wherever you get your podcasts.
Epicenter is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.
The Ethereum Blockchain has received considerable interest from the music industry as a potential method of managing music licenses and finances in an automated fashion.
Here I catch up with Phil Barry, who is a co-founder at Ujo Music, a company driving the development of smart contracts for the music industry. We cover themes such as:
Current pain points for artists - high number of middlemen between listener and artist, long lag time in receiving royalty payments.
How smart contracts could reduce the needs for intermediaries in the music industry.
Ujo music’s demo prototype with Imogen Heap’s song Tiny Human. This song was released on the Ethereum blockchain.
Challenges with the idea.
Future plans.
Check out the video to see how a global financial infrastructure can help artists get paid better for their work.
Links:
Ujo Music website: http://ujomusic.com/
Release of the song Tiny Human on the Ethereum blockchain: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/imogen-heap-shows-how-music-smart-contracts-work-using-ethereum-1522331
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to the podcast: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/
- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc
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There is no doubt that proof of work, introduced in the Bitcoin white paper, has stood the test of time as a robust and resilient Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism. However, many issues may prevent Nakamoto Consensus from securely scaling over the long term. The risk of validator centralization, network forking, block scarcity and high energy costs required to mine a block have all been extensively debated with no realistic long-term solutions to date. A new paper titled "Algorand" attempts to addresses these problems.
We're pleased to be joined by Professor Silvio Micali, a computer scientist at MIT, who is known for his work in many of the technologies blockchains rely on today. As one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs, he has been decorated with a number of prizes and awards, including the Turing Award, which he received in 2012 for his work in cryptography.
Prof. Micali describes the concept of Algorand, an alternative approach to proof of work which offers high security guarantees while allowing the network to scale with demand. Relying only on a trivial amount of computation to validate transactions, Algorand also reduces the probability of network forks to near-zero. It uses novel mechanisms to select validators for blocks and enabling them to come to consensus on them.
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Professor Micali's fascinating career in the fields of computer science and cryptography
- The technical limitations of proof of work
- The ideal properties for a truly decentralized, secure and scalable cryptocurrency
- Algorand's new approach to Byzantine consensus
- Algorand's strong adversarial model
- How validators are randomly selected by the network
- How validators are chosen and how they arrive at consensus
- How Algorand guarantees a low probability of network forks
- How Algorand addresses the issue of scaling and block size
- Algorand's roadmap and future plans
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Algorand White Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01341v7.pdf
- Algorand talk by Silvo Micali on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xauku8XWoSE
- Silvio Micali - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Micali
Sponsors:
- Jaxx: Wallets that Unify the Blockchain Experience Across Devices - http://jaxx.io
This episode is also available on :
- Epicenter.tv: https://epicenter.tv/169
- YouTube: http://youtu.be/a40Xt7GnPvs
- Souncloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-169
Watch or listen, Epicenter is available wherever you get your podcasts.
Epicenter is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.
Support the show, consider donating: 13VEc3hiRHvPU6hKDqorNep6VA36pjzzHb (http://bit.ly/25wFqM1)
One of the problems often cited when talking about cryptocurrencies is their level of volatility compared to traditional fiat currencies. This makes most cryptocurrencies a poor instrument for storing value, and introduces complexities when making purchases in fiat amounts. Stable cryptocurrencies include mechanisms which allow them to stay pegged to fiat currencies like the US Dollar or Euro. They present a number of advantages, and, in addition to taking the headache out of making purchases, can be used by cryptocurrency traders who need a stable unit of account for hedging their assets.
We talk to brothers Pascal and Julien Hamonic, Core Members of the Nu team about the NuBit stable cryptocurrency. Similarly to the mechanisms that keep our body temperature stable, NuBits relies upon the introduction of new coins into circulation when demand increases, and for coins to be taken out of circulation when demand drops. Shareholders (NuShareholder) vote on these measures as the network relies on custodians who bring liquidity into the market in exchange for dividends, and on speculators who ""park"" coins in exchange for potential returns when demand increases again.
Topics we discuss in this episode:
- What is NuBits and what is the goal it is trying to achieve
- The different components of Nu (NuBits, NuShares)
- The economic mechanisms behind the $1.00 USD peg
- Who are the different participants in the network (NuBits users, NuShareholders, custodians)
- The important role of custodians in providing liquidity to the network
- The consensus model used in Nu
- The initial allocation of NuBits and NuShares
- The governance mechanisms in Nu
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Nubits: https://nubits.com
- NuBits Whitepaper: https://nubits.com/about/white-paper
Sponsors:
- Hide.me: Protect your privacy and personal data with a free VPN account at Hide.me/epicenter
Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/133
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-133
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to our newsletter: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/newsletter
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc
Support the show, consider donating: 3JwpaKcFGsbS632fcwZWYUQubHQZ24brer (http://bit.ly/1zdmQCy)
Backbone to the financial system? Powering decentralized technology? The first true world currency? There is probably who hasn’t dreamt of a world ten years from now when Bitcoin would be all those things. The promise of cryptocurrencies are enormous, but will Bitcoin really emerge as the winner? And how can we reconcile this grand vision for Bitcoin with an ecosystem where projects launch new coins and blockchains every day?
The one project that rekindles those Bitcoin dreams and paints a potential path to Bitcoin’s ultimate success are sidechains. Developed by Adam Back, Greg Maxwell and several other Bitcoin core developers, sidechains aims to allow the permissionless, rapid innovation of alt chains, but using the established monetary base and network of Bitcoin.
It’s a complex project, but with Blockstream founders and sidechains visionaries Adam Back and Greg Maxwell we couldn’t have had better companions on our journey into understanding the coming Bitcoin-Sidechains-Macrocosm. Topics included:
- The motivation behind sidechains
- The concept of digital scarcity
- Concerns about the security of sidechains
- Different stages of sidechains from federated pegs to merged mining to block extension
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Blockstream: http://www.blockstream.com/
- Sidechains white paper: http://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf
- Saving Bitcoin From Destruction: http://blog.bettercrypto.com/?p=1003
Sponsors:
- ShapeShift: http://shapeshift.io
Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/065
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-065
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sébastien Couture.
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to our newsletter: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/newsletter
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc
Support the show, consider donating: 1NiAfwkdp5qsgy9NDGTFPabxpPhhAdR43L (http://bit.ly/1pKWtXT)
One of the major drawbacks of Bitcoin is its low transaction throughput. Maxing out only a handful of operations per second, there have been many proposals to scale it up so that it can compete with existing distributed database technologies. As the blockchain's demand continues to increase, it's unclear if the Bitcoin protocol will ever be able to handle thousands, if not millions of transactions per second. BigchainDB is taking a different approach. Rather than trying to scale up blockchain technology, it starts with a big data distributed database, RethinkDB, and adds blockchain features and characteristics.
Trent McConaghy, Co-founder and CTO of Ascribe and BigchainDB, joins us to talk about how this protocol may become to databases, what IPFS and Ethereum are to distributed filestorage and computing, respectively. Able to perform more than one million writes per second and capacities in the petabytes, BigchainDB has the ambition to become the world's public database platform.
Topics we covered include:
- A brief update on Ascribe since Trent was last on the show
- The motivations behind BigchainDB and that problems it's trying to solve
- How BigchainDB plans to solve the typical scalability bottlenecks found in blockchain protocols
- BigchainDB's capacity, performance and latency characteristics
- BigchainDB's consensus model, applied to RethinkDB
- Potential application for BigchainDB, in both centralised and decentralised application stacks
Links mentioned in this episode:
- BigchainDB: https://www.bigchaindb.com/
- BigchainDB Whitepaper: https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/
- Ascribe: https://www.ascribe.io/
- Left Gallery: https://left.gallery/
- 23vivi: https://23vivi.com/
Sponsors:
- Ledger Nano: Smart card security for your Bitcoins - Get 10% off your first order when you use the code EPICENTER at http://ledgerwallet.com
Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/126
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-126
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to our newsletter: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/newsletter
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc
Support the show, consider donating: 3F1oAeaN5gbZothT7q4S67agrs2zcvjXid (http://bit.ly/1EX03i4)
Started in May 2013, Coinkite has by now almost advanced to senior citizen status in the short-lived Bitcoin startup space. CEO Rodolfo Novak joined us for a discussion about what drove their initial interest in Bitcoin, why they initially focused on providing 'bank-like' services and how they've transitioned to powering the infrastructure of countless Bitcoin startups with their API. We also discussed multi-sig and the business strategy they pursued that allowed them to be profitable and not require venture funding.
Topics covered included:
- How Coinkite started
- Why they have come away from calling themselves a Bitcoin bank
- Why they have been putting so much emphasis on multi-sig
- How they've ended up building an insane amount of features
- The transition of their business model to providing a powerful API for startups
- What the Bitcoin ecosystem in Toronto is like
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Coinkite: http://bit.ly/1QX86mp
- Coinkite-Ledger Partnership: http://bit.ly/1cKX58M
- How to use Ledger Nano with Coinkite: http://bit.ly/1IH8Jzh
- p2sh.info: http://bit.ly/1HpQCxF
Sponsors:
- Shapeshift: Buy and sell alt coins instantly at http://ShapeShift.io
- Ledger Nano: Get 10% off your first order when you use the code EB09 at http://ledgerwallet.com (valid until 09/30/15)
Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/079
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-079
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sébastien Couture.
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to our newsletter: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/newsletter
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc
Support the show, consider donating: 3A4MKzcxBMPPssUMMSSjvTBvgBTu4iy4m5 (http://bit.ly/1G0laAA)
One topic that is guaranteed to cause heated discussion among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is the idea that blockchains can be controlled by known validators and function without an underlying cryptocurrency. Some think this is a non-sensical idea fabricated by those spineless enough to want to appease regulators and but clueless enough to miss the whole point of cryptocurrencies. But others believe that Bitcoin is unsuited for a lof of 'Bitcoin 2.0' applications and that permissioned ledgers have wide-reaching potential to increase efficiency and transparency.
Tim Swanson joined us for an important discussion of permissioned ledgers. He's among their best-known proponents and has recently published a whitepaper discussing how they work and looking at different startups in the space.
Topics covered included:
- Why the 'blockchains without bitcoin' idea is so controversial
- Why it is strange that KYC is done widely on Bitcoin users but not on the validators
- Why even semi-decentralized blockchains can provide big efficiency gains
- Why the 51% attack possibility is an obstacle for the use of Bitcoin as a settlement network
- Why financial institutions don't care about censorship resistance but do care about irreversibility
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Tim Swanson: Permissioned Distributed Ledgers Whitepaper http://bit.ly/1QLDrMn
- Tim Swanson: Needing a Token to Operate a Distributed Ledger is a Red Herring: http://bit.ly/1JdB94z
- Robert Sams: No, Bitcoin is not the future of securities settlement http://bit.ly/1eCRz9P
- JP Koning: Why bitcoin has failed to achieve liftoff as a medium of exchange http://bit.ly/1GhoxmQ
Sponsors:
- Shapeshift: Buy and sell alt coins instantly at http://ShapeShift.io
- Vaultoro: Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just 1mg at http://vaultoro.com
Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/084
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-084
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sébastien Couture.
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to our newsletter: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/newsletter
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc
Support the show, consider donating: 3JkHB5g6XGVmBTSj5UrNvpg1uYHeYifToC (http://bit.ly/1LAkunQ)
When it comes to Bitcoin, Tim Swanson is known to many as the man who sees the glass half empty. Whether or not that's true, it's fair to say that Tim has critical opinions about Bitcoin and questions many of the assumptions held by those who wish to see it succeed. A researcher and educator, he is the author of several books including "Great Wall of Numbers: Business Opportunities and Challenges in China" and "Great Chain of Numbers: A Guide to Smart Contracts, Smart Property and Trustless Asset Management". He also blogs about Bitcoin, economics and various other topics at OfNumbers.com. He currently serves as an advisor to Hyperledger and is Head of Business Development at Melotic.
We covered a lot of topics on this episode:
- True cost of Bitcoin transactions
- Bitcoin as a niche technology Vs. Bitcoin maximalism
- Consensus-as-a-service and semi-trusted networks
- Hyperledger, a decentralised ledger platform
- Melotic, a digital asset exchange
- Bitcoin's adoption as a payment system
- Trusted transparency in mining
- Remittances
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Tim's Blog: http://bit.ly/1BsrS1N
- Dave Hudson's Blog: http://bit.ly/1H1cKhS
- Slicing data: what comprises blockchain transactions?: http://bit.ly/15Df2Cy
- OP-ED: The Rise and Rise of Lipservice: Viral Western Union Ad Debunked: http://bit.ly/1ynbnQ4
- A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?: http://bit.ly/1thK2Dd
- Architecture of Internet Money: http://bit.ly/1ynbv1Y
- The Marginal Cost of Cryptocurrency: http://bit.ly/1K6kgUW
- Some Crypto Quibbles with Threadneedle Street: http://bit.ly/1EqO00f
- A Note on Cryptocurrency Stabilisation: Seigniorage Shares: http://bit.ly/1yOxnYX
Sponsors:
- ShapeShift: https://shapeshift.io
Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/063
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-063
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sébastien Couture.
- Visit our website: http://epicenterbitcoin.com
- Subscribe to our newsletter: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/newsletter
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/epicenterbtc