Benedikt Bünz, author of Bulletproofs, discusses bulletproofs and verifiable delay functions. Topics covered include the application of bulletproofs in cryptocurrencies, the differences between bulletproofs, SNARKs, and Starks, the importance of privacy in transactions, and the potential use of verifiable delay functions in preventing attacks in blockchains.

In this episode, we speak with Matthew Di Ferrante of the smart contract auditing firm Zero Knowledge Labs about security in the blockchain. Specifically we discuss how he first got interested in security and blockchain technology, some of the cases that have happened in the last few years and how the Ethereum security team responds to a security event. If you want to learn more from Matt you can follow him here This week's episode went long, so we are including this link to a bonus piece on governance

In this episode, we sit down with Howard Wu to explore zkSNARKs, the challenges in the application of this awesome technology, the new ideas emerging for how to scale them and his latest work on DIZK. This is the 2nd in our ongoing series about Zero Knowledge technologies. To get a good sense of Zero Knowledge Proofs, please listen to our introduction to the topic in Episode 21. Howard Wu is an early member of Blockchain at Berkeley, the co-author of Libsnark, and a managing partner of Dekrypt Capital. Links: libsnark - https://github.com/scipr-lab/libsnark libsnark-tutorial - https://github.com/howardwu/libsnark-tutorial DIZK paper - https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/691 DIZK library - https://github.com/scipr-lab/dizk

In this episode, we sit down with Raul & Preston from Prysmatic Labs to discuss sharding, the evolution of the spec, Ethereum 2.0, what happens to a side chain during a hard fork, and whats coming up for this important scaling solution. Prysmatic Labs is building a sharding solution in Go and the Ethereum 2.0  side chain that is set to combine PoS + Sharding. Links: https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/how-to-scale-ethereum-sharding-explained-ba2e283b7fce https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/ethereum-sharding-biweekly-development-update-9-prysmatic-labs-f2b1ad55e825

Eric Tang from Livepeer discusses off-chain computation, challenges of on-chain computation, Fisherman Paradigm, TrueBit's error submission, transcoding efficiency, video content payment models, Livepeer's transcoding focus, decentralized storage partnership, and DApp design

In this episode, we sit down with Ethan (Bucky) Buchman, co-founder & CTO of Tendermint, to talk about testnets. We look into what they are, what purpose they serve and cover examples from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot. Links Testnets on Karl.tech The latest gossip on BFT consensus Bitcoin Testnet Ropsten Testnet Kovan Testnet Rinkeby Testnet Join the Cosmos testnet Join the Polkadot testnet

In this episode, we dig into what the term smart contract means with our guest James Prestwich. First introduced in 1994 by Nick Szabo, smart contracts have inspired whole ecosystems of companies and projects to start thinking about blockchain in much bigger terms. We explore what the term 'smart contract' means, where it comes from, some use cases and some of the new challenges that come along with it. Follow James on twitter @_prestwich

In this episode we sit down with Ele and Alexis from OSCoin to talk about what they are building and the general problem of open source incentivization. We dig into the incentivization and governance models they imagine for the Open Source world as well as some technical aspects of the platform they intend to build. Links: OScoin Social Architecture - Building On-line Communities Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure Elinor Ostrom Radical Markets Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society Open Source Without Maintainers

In this episode, we explore the zcash community and projects implementing zero knowledge proofs at the Zcon0 conference. We discuss exciting ideas generated at the event and cover topics such as bulletproofs and the challenges of network upgrades. Check out the talks and highlights from the conference!

In this introductory episode, we discuss what makes up blocks and block headers. We also cover a bit about state vs history, what exactly makes up a transaction and do a quick intro to a Merkle Tree. For more, please check out these resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/268/ethereum-block-architecture https://www.coursera.org/lecture/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-blocks-I5uc7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkletree