Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies

Keeping Bitcoins safe from theft is probably one of the things Bitcoin holders worry the most about. Historically, there have been a number of recommended best practices like paper wallets, BIP 38 wallet cards and cold storage. Although these remain relatively safe ways to store Bitcoins, implementing these solutions can be complicated and difficult to manage for day-to-day transactions. Recently,...

Today’s episode is all about Factom, an open source project which aims to solve three core problems which apply to all Bitcoin 2.0 applications: Speed, Cost, and Bloat. Rather than writing every transaction to the blockchain, Factom allows decentralized applications to write blocks of transactions to Factom blocks, which themselves get hashed and stored to the bitcoin blockchain. At its core, Fact...

David A. Johnston is a very active member of the Bitcoin community. Aside from speaking at about every Bitcoin conference there is, David is the Managing Director of the DApps Fund, a board member MSC Protocol Foundation, as well as Co-founder and Executive Director of the BitAngels Network. On this episode we go deep in to decentralized applications, and who better to talk to about DApps than the...

Nicolas Courtois is a cryptographer and senior lecturer at University College London. He has been studying cryptocurrencies for some time and has written a number of papers on bitcoin. His talk is titled “Cryptographic Security of ECDSA in bitcoin” in which he exposes the security vulnerabilities in the specific variation of the Elliptic Curve digital Signature Algorithm used in bitcoin. Episode l...

Meni Rosenfeld is Founder of Bitcoil and Chairman of the Israeli Bitcoin Association. Having organized several meetups and conferences in Israel, he is a very active member of the Israeli Bitcoin community. Meni has been studying mining pool reward methods for several years and in 2011, wrote a paper titled “Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems”. This research gave him a broad understa...

BTC2B Brussels conference on October 16 & 17, 2014 This episode features two parts of a session on Bitcoin marketing. First, Richard Caetano, founder of Handshake and btcReport, talks about the importance of sharing stories to create user engagement. Then, you’ll hear a panel discussion moderated by Richard with Jeremy Garder, Executive Directory of the College Cryptocurrency Network, and Seba...

The College Cryptocurrency Network is a non-profit organization which aims to provide students, academics, and faculty with the guidance and resources required to start independent Bitcoin clubs on college campuses and in schools. Since being founded in early 2014, the CCN has grown to well over 100 chapters, on every continent, from middle schools to PhD programs. Director of Student Outreach, Ja...

Shawn Wilkinson, founder and lead developer of Storj, joins us for our first deep dive into a decentralized application. Storj’s particular domain is the decentralization of cloud storage. Their applications allow users to store their files in a decentralized peer-to-peer network that promises to be more secure and effective. At the same time, it creates a market where people can earn money by ren...

Every quarter CoinDesk puts out its excellent State of Bitcoin Report providing a snapshot of where the Bitcoin ecosystem is at. We took this opportunity to go back to our original formation and have a discuss of the report and the state of Bitcoin in general. It was lots of fun! Topics covered in this episode: Bitcoin Adoption Metrics Our January Predictions The continually slumping Bitcoin price...

Mehdi Medjaoui (Co-founder and COO) & Elie Chevignard (CMO) are the two guys behind Oauth.io, a service which aims to provide a simple and standardized way for developers to implement Oath. Working in digital identity management, they have an interesting proposal on how to build personal identity management into the blockchain. This proposition would effectively take the power away from centra...

The Isle of Man has been an area of interest for many Bitcoin companies as of late. The local government of this small British Crown Dependency, located in the middle of the Irish Sea, wants to attract Bitcoin businesses by adopting light regulation as well as providing accessible banking relationships and infrastructure for companies dealing in crypto. This business-friendly approach has made the...

Tom Ding is the CEO and Founder of Koinify, a platform for funding decentralized applications. Think of Koinify as a sort of Angel List to bootstrap and fund a new decentralized economy, specifically decentralized applications. With his company, Tom hopes to help build the decentralized app which help push this technology to the mainstream. With his extensive knowledge of this space, we talked abo...

Siân Jones was recently in London for the Inside Bitcoins conference . She interviewed two people with extensive knowledge of regulation and how it should apply to Bitcoin. Marco Santori is Chairman of the regulatory affairs committee of the Bitcoin Foundation and recently appointed Global policy council of for Blockchain. As the New York Department of Financial Services BitLicense proposal nears...

La maison du Bitcoin is a dedicated Bitcoin center located in the heart of ”Silicon Sentier”, which is situated in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris. Founded by entrepreneurs Eric Larchevêque and Thomas France, La maison du Bitcoin is an open space where people are encouraged to walk in and get information about Bitcoin. It also offers a variety of services such as a co-working space for bitcoiners...

Dr. Bastian Brand is an investment manager at Pathfinder Capital. Pathfinder Capital is a London-based Venture Capital firm that focuses on frontier markets and cryptocurrencies. He is also the founder of the Bitcoin Startups Munich group and was previously a consultant at McKinsey. The episode focused on his comprehensive paper surveying the investment landscape in the cryptocurrency space. We di...

Flavien Charlon is the founder of coloured coin wallet Coinprism. Colored coins allow people and organizations to securely issue and trade real-world assets like commodities, stocks and bonds on the bitcoin network. Coinprism recently won the global Startup Challenge hosted by the Bitcoin Foundation in May 2014. Other notable projects include Predictious, a Bitcoin-based prediction market. He has...

Thomas Spaas, director of the Belgian Bitcoin Association and an international tax lawyer in Antwerp, and our regulatory affairs correspondent Siân Jones, join us to discuss a Swedish court case on VAT, the European Value Added Tax. The case has made it all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union and may set the precedent for how the sale of Bitcoin will be taxed. For 10% off Inside...

Today’s panel discussion is called “The ever changing landscape of Bitcoin mining” where moderator Jez San is joined by some of the most prominent figures in the mining industry, Marc Aafjes of Bitfury, Dave Carlson of Megabigpower, Timo Hanke of Cointerra and Naveed Sherwani of Peernova. The discussion revolves around several key topics, notably, everyone seems to agree the industry should move a...

George Samman is co-founder and COO of the Bitcoin derivatives exchange, BTC.sx. George helps us get a broad understanding of derivatives as a financial product, and we explore their uses in the context of Bitcoin. He also brings his perspective with regards to bridging the gap between Wall Street and the Bitcoin ecosystem. As a Chartered Market Technician, he has a very technical view on market m...

This episode features a panel discussion called “Decentralized Applications and Appcoins.” Flavien Charlon, founder of Coinprism, Ron Gross of the Mastercoin Foundation and Gavin Wood of Ethereum discuss the fascinating things which are happening in the so-called Bitcoin 2.0 space. The panel starts with a short status update on each of the panellist’s respective projects. They also dig into some o...

Edmund Edgar is the founder of Reality Keys. His startup won the Startup Challenge award at the Bitcoin 2014 Conference in Amsterdam. They are providing cryptographic data feeds on real-life events. This can then be used to base derivatives, contracts or insurances on. There is no question that services like Reality Keys will play a key role in crypto currency’s future. Previously he was Director...

CoinSummit London Conference Series – July 10 and 11, 2014 In this episode we talk to Olivier Janssens, a Bitcoin early adopter and investor, and his associate Andrew Turner. We discussed Olivier’s recent $100,000 bounty replace the Bitcoin Foundation. He told us why he chose Mike Hearn’s Lighthouse project as the winner of 40% of that bounty and the effect that Lighthouse could have on Bitcoin co...

Coinapult’s CEO Ira Miller and marketing specialist Freya Stevens join us for a discussion about their company and plans for the future. We particularly dove into their new Locks feature, which allows people to ‘lock’ the value of their bitcoins to other assets such as US Dollar, Euro or gold from directly within the Coinapult wallet. The goal is to remove one often-named barrier to mainstream ado...

CoinSummit London Conference Series – July 10 and 11, 2014 This episode features a panel discussion called “The challenges of operating a Bitcoin business in Europe”. Peter Smith, COO of Blockchain.info, Mark Lamb, CEO of Coinfloor and Frank Schuil CEO, of Safello provide their insights on some of the challenges of running a Bitcoin business on the old continent. These challenges include regulator...

Gavin Wood joins us for an episode that is all about Ethereum. The uniquely ambitious Ethereum project with its turing-complete programming language is building a platform on which the next generation of decentralized applications can be run. While the project is still in development, the goal is to provide the infrastructure for the completely decentralized web of the future. The first part of th...