In this episode Dirk Jaeckel & Ksenya discuss zcash with Zooko. Unfortunately, Zooko’s voice was not recorded properly. We are sorry and will prevent this in the future.
To get your head around zero knowledge proofs and zcash even better we also recommend two episodes recorded by our fellow podcasters Meher & Brian from a different podcast Epicenter: Ep116 with professor Eli Ben-Sasson and Ep122 with Zooko
Towards the middle of the podcast we talk about a practical way of making a nice and useful zcash node, which we intend to make IRL and will shortly publish some basic specs for it.
This episode was recorded 2016-12-29 in Hamburg. We had a short chat with Ryan Taylor (@AdjyLeak), zooko (@zooko) and Meredith L Patterson (@maradydd) at 33c3.
In this short episode Zooko tells us a cute story of practical love letters hidden in blockchain transactions, Meredith highlights the importance of compilers in the world and Ryan mentions Alexandria library. It’s a bit of a teaser for the 2017, as some of it we will be covering in detail in 2017 on Oktahedron.
Thanx to Tim Pritlove for recommending Sendecentrum, instead of dragging all our audio equipment all the way to the Congress from Berlin, thanx to Chistopher who was so patient & helpful, and other guys at Sendecentrum . And a great big thanx to our wonderful sound guy in particular.
We discuss computational models and how they relate to blockchains.
Do we want Turing-completeness, or is a weaker model more suitable?
Would a dumber (not a Turing complete) language would make smart contracts smarter (easily verifiable)? We talk about total functional languages and alternatives to accounts-based model. Should we look at the blockchain as a pure data store, possibly equipped with primitives such as map/reduce or similar?
Jack Pettersson and Robert Edström (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) present on a dependantly typed functional language for smart contracts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uwUdzVD9I
In this episode @heckerhut, @dirkjaeckel and @j32804 amongst other things discuss legal stuff in the universe of blockchains. Non of it can be considered legal advice. As an anonymous friend of mine put it: blockchain is a hot new cool thing for borderline legal shenanigans. Is it?
Some time passed after the DAO has goxed. We will need to mention it again, because it raised a lot of legal questions. What has happened since?
We also discuss crowdsales, smart contract which went bonkers (not the DAO one), reference to other podcasts touching on topics of law and regulations (see links below) and making predictions without regard to the possibility of danger involved in it. Here is a selection os links to articles and topics we have mentioned:
Sian Jones gave some regulatory update on Epicenter Bitcoin. EU regulations are not so restrictive towards fintech / virtual currency businesses? But what about crowdsales?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F-Z3rlOapk
Our guest Florian Glatz has also appeared on Epicentre defining a legal framework for DAOshttps://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/125/we tried not to repeat what was discussed on Epicentre and recommend that episode to anyone who is interested in law and decentralisation
We have also mentionned that it might be safer to use other than Turing complete languages for smart contracts, because Turing complete ones are inherently undecidable, which makes it impossible to know what a “smart contract” will do before running it.
This year EU Parliament published some stuff on virtual currencies. They are usually little bit behind the curve – while people are discussing the DAOs they are getting their heads around bitcoin. But hopefully EU people will be catching up fast.