The Bitcoin Podcast

One of the biggest challenges if we want to secure the Internet of Things centers on identity. Specifically: how will we go about getting billions or hundreds of billions of intelligent devices to connect and communicate with each other securely? It’s not just about Tesla knowing that the device on the other end of a firmware update is a Model S versus a Model X. It’s about the thousands of sensors within that Tesla communicating with the road and other infrastructure, or knowing that a command to brake or swerve is a legitimate command that comes from the driver or another trusted subsystem. This week we invite Blockchain specialist and steategy analyst from Chain of Things, Mr. Conor Colwell, to the show to discuss cryptography, security and IoT industries globally. Chain of Things is set up to explore all security applications within blockchain IoT and look at the development of open-standards for the industry to use. So sit back, press play, and dive in.

BCoin is a bitcoin client which implements BIP-37. It can track transactions, public keys, and public key hashes (bitcoin addresses) without saving the entire blockchain to disk. This means you can have a wallet with a synchronized balance and send and receive payments without keeping track of a 20GB database. BCoin is implemented in pure javascript, and is browserify-able (this means compiling a binding to an ECDSA library is not even required for node.js). For us, the fact that peer to peer communication is not encrypted on the Bitcoin network seems like more of an oversight to me than anything else. They now have begun integrating the Lightning Network. It's called "blight". Purse.io takes over this episode as both Christopher Jeffrey (JJ) who is the CTO & Engineer at Purse and podcast regular Steven McKie join us in the studio. We continue to give you that mid-week goodness.

It is hard to think it's been eight months since Ryan X Charles came onto our show, as we are in dire need of an update on what he was been working on. There are a lot of great content creators on the internet, but most of them aren’t earning any money. Yours is a way to solve this problem. By thoughtfully incentivizing payments to creators, they give people a reason to pay for content on the internet. Their app depends on an integrated bitcoin wallet, and this week they have made important progress enabling small payments with low fees: they have broadcast our first micropayment on bitcoin testnet. Well hot damn. Let's get to it!

It’s no secret that tech has a diversity problem. Women are largely underrepresented, and Blacks and Latinos are almost invisible. While microeconomics assumes national income and aggregate price as given, and explains the determination of relative productions and prices of various goods and services, quite the opposite is true for macroeconomics. It is assumed that the value of bitcoin is directly dependent on its use for transactions. Enter, Collin Thompson, who is a blockchain technology and IoT entrepreneur, and venture capital investor out of Hong Kong.

The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable. Enter DECENT, which provides open-source software that enables users to share unlimited virtual content; the company’s main goal is to give a chance to individuals whose voice is normally controlled. What better person to explain all of this to us than one of the company’s co-founders and CEO? Matej Michalko joins us in the studio this week.

When a ballot proposal that would have replaced the city ordinance failed, Uber and Lyft left Austin, TX as promised. Since May 9, there have been no ride-sharing services available in this city of almost a million people. So it’s no surprise that tech-savvy Austinites, like this episodes special guest, Christopher David, who have taken matters into their own hands without the concern about red tape or corporate bullshit. Arcade City is a rideshare startup designed to be integrated into the Ethereum blockchain. Now, we keep it 100 here at The Bitcoin Podcast and I won't pretend there isn't any skepticism. The thing that worries me about this is that the guy was called out recently for being a bit of a scam artist. Turns out, he has straight forward answers to all our questions. And yes, we do have trust in him and Arcade City.

We (up 'til now) haven't talked to much about the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is a network of payment channels. When Alice wants to pay Carol, or Dave, or Susan, she finds the shortest route and makes a payment through the route using smart contracts. If Alice cannot find any route to pay Dave, Alice opens up a channel directly to Dave. Makes sense? No? Well...for starters our guest is Olaoluwa Osuntokun who might know a thing or two about it. In addition, Steven Mckie (Yours) and Valerian Bennett (PopChest) join us as the Bitcoin Justice League assembles to talk how this network affects their own creations.

The "vibe" around Bitcoin has been neutral to negative for two years now and plenty of bitcoiners are tiring of the politics around the block size limit. Ethereum is young and exciting but not like anything else in the crypto space. A recurring theme at the Satoshi Roundtable is that Bitcoin problems are leading to rise in Ethereum interest. Enter our guest this week, Anthony Di Iorio, CEO and founder of Jaxx and Decentral, who co-founded Ethereum in 2013. Jaxx and ShapeShift together will, without doubt, be the easiest solution for buying ether with bitcoin (and vice versa) ‒ and it’s done right in your Jaxx wallet.

Our guest today is Mariana Dahan is the Senior Operations Officer in the Office of the World Bank catalyzing progress towards identification systems using 21st century technology solutions. With Google Trends data showing that searches for the word “blockchain” have exponentially increased, we may be entering the peak of the hype cycle for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. That’s because its decentralized approach to verifying changes in important information addresses the centuries-old problem of trust, a social resource that is all too often in short supply, especially amid the current era’s rampant concerns over the security of valuable data.

Part 2 of the Steven McKie character piece is concluded. In addition, this episode we are talking with Max Kordek, the founder of a new decentralized platform called Lisk. Since the launch of Lisk there was a lot of confusion about what it really is, and what it enables people to do in the future. Max gladly came on our show to clean up some misunderstandings, and explain briefly what Lisk is and what it isn’t. LISK will go to the moonnn; only need patience! Oh, and part 2 of our character piece of Steven McKie! We bring the goods!