The Third Web

In Brief: In spite of the tumultuous public life of it’s founder, the sharing economy project is evolving and moving forward rapidly. We’ve just seen the end of a successful token launch and an all star advisory board informing new leadership fronting a strong dev team. Arcade City is back on the road. Three members of the post-Chris David team: Bernd Lapp, Michael Thuy, and Stephan Ponnet discuss the status and future roadmap of Arcade City. What was once thought of only as a ride sharing App has been reimagined as a network of services modeled after games, all using the ARC token.  Content: Bernd Lapp, Michael Thuy, Stephan Ponnet, Arthur Falls Subscribe on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-e%E2%80%A6id899090462?mt=2

In Brief: Round 2 of the biggest hackathon in blockchain is nearing it's apex. On the 22nd of December a winner will be announced. Today the man behind the hack.ether.camp virtual accelerator, Roman Mandeleil looks back over the last two months of competition and explains how the platform operates. Then we hear from some of the leading contestants: Once artchain has been established, the art market can be securitized, which has heretofore been an impossibility. This is the Blockchain Revolution. Together, with the new consensus artchain can provide, we can build a coalition of art industry professionals and participants facing the future of mutual self-regulation of transactions and provenance. The art industry is rife with undetected fraud. Currently, the art market suffers from incompleteness of information due a lack of trust among its participants. Establishing the authenticity of art assets is expensive and often disputed which leads to artificially raised costs of conveyancing in an attempt to protec

In Brief: Tezos is a blockchain based smart contract platform that incorporates protocol level governance, modular design, and a functional scripting language. Pretty much the shopping list of features the Ethereum community is looking for. Yes, Yes, I know this is supposed to be a show about Ethereum, but examining emerging platforms is the best way to understand what the people with the deepest understanding would like to see changed in the protocol. Tezos is modular, designed to enable drop in replacement of most components without hard fork, it has a built in governance mechanism, and it uses a functional scripting language. These three elements are emerging as the most desirable traits missing from the Ethereum protocol. With EIP#86/EIP#96 Ethereum will move closer to what Tezos aspires to be. For now though these younger, more nimble upstarts can help show is what is possible with blockchain based smart contract platforms. Content: Kathleen Breitman, Arthur Falls https://twitter.com/breitwoman http

In today's episode we compare two books by William Mougayar: Opening Digital Markets (1997), and The Business Blockchain(2016). We also discuss the Steemfest conference which took place in Amsterdam last month. William Mougayar is an entrepreneur, venture advisor and angel investor, who previously held senior positions at Hewlett-Packard and Cognizant. He is the founder of Startup Management (http://startupmanagement.org/) where he blogs and curates on start-ups and the cryptocurrency economy. http://steemfest.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Digital-Markets-Strategies-CommerceNet/dp/0070435421/ https://www.amazon.com/Business-Blockchain-Practice-Application-Technology/dp/1119300312/ https://twitter.com/wmougayar Content: William Mougayar, Arthur Falls Subscribe on iTunes (https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fthe-ether-review%2Fid899090462%3Fmt%3D2) & Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls)

In Brief: Melon is a protocol and asset management software suite for setting up and managing portfolios containing cryptocurrencies. It achieves this through the use of the Polkadot blockchain network. Raison D’etre: Polkadot, designed by Gavin Wood, is like an internet of blockchains. It is the communication protocol that Melon needed to manage digital assets across multiple blockchains.  Right now there is no safe way to give the ability to secure and manage digital assets to another entity. Evidenced by the ongoing occurrence of hacks on digital asset exchanges - $70M in the Bitfinex hack alone. There is also no sure way to determine the performance of portfolio managers in the digital asset space. Melon solves these problems: by allowing portfolio owners to maintain control of the digital assets contained therein, while allowing a manager to adjust the exposure to each asset. By tracking the performance of individual asset managers using the provability, provable history of the Polkadot protocol. Wha

In Brief: The DAO hacker and Geth attacker have left a trail of evidence that can provide high quality identifying information about their persons. Bok Khoo is an actuary in the finance industry and software enthusiast. Recently Bok has turned his interest toward blockchain forensics. In particular tracing malicious actors on the Ethereum network. https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/100-tricky-stick-puzzles-disrupt-the-ethereum-devcon2-conference-in-shanghai/ https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/the-ongoing-ethereum-attacks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/58hhry/the_ongoing_ethereum_attacks_work_in_progress/ https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/the-dao-hackers-booty-is-on-the-move/ Content: Bok Khoo, Arthur Falls

**In Brief:** Chinese multinational, Wanxiang Group, has purchased over 700 hectares of land on which to build a smart city where it plans to experiment with blockchain based systems. Wanxiang Group is a Chinese multinational focused primarily on automotive parts manufacturing. Recently Wanxiang has been moving into finance and agriculture. Now, with the establishment of the Wanxiang Blockchain Labs research organization and Fenbushi Capital investment fund, Wanxiang is making big moves into the blockchain space. To add to the intrigue, the group recently purchased 770 hectares of land in the Chinese province of Hangzhou where it plans to build a “smart city”. The goal is to house it's many employees in a setting that makes use of it's technological portfolio. Andy Dan, Project Manager of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs joins to discuss what is quickly becoming the most epic of blockchain stories. http://www.blockchainlabs.org/ http://fenbushi.vc/ Content: Andy Dan, Arthur Falls

Sometimes the urge to layer in-jokes into a podcast title is impossible to resist. . . and then 24hrs later you change it. The effort to understand the significance of type based and functional programming languages led me to the Urbit project. This attempt to re-design the internet is one of a number of technologies that have evolved alongside blockchain and address some of the same problems. The Urbit developer's focus on mechanical perfection is a sensibility worth observing. The first title was in reference to Mike Goldin's tweet about deterministic finite automata: https://twitter.com/voidsnax/status/712044031090540545 This from the Urbit website: "We believe controlling your own data, code and identity is the definition of digital freedom. We believe everyone needs digital freedom, not just a few hackers. We believe the only tool needed to solve this problem is a general-purpose server made for human beings. Your urbit is your cryptographic identity, personal archive, application platform, and devic

In many ways still a frontier nation, Australia's style of innovation is practical and direct. Three of the startups covered in todays interviews come from industries outside of tech, each looking to blockchain to solve a problem unique to their industries. Finhaus Labs, a research and consulting team offers supporting services and friendly advice to these, and the rest of the local blockchain business community. Interviews: Nick Addison, Finhaus Labs Connor Svendsen, independent Emma Weston, Full Profile. Full Profile is a first purchase agricultural finance provider using a blockchain rail to minimize first payment counterparty risk for producers. Tim Lea, Veridictum. Veridictum is a video piracy prevention tool focussed on the theft of content on social media. Tim Lea is the author of Down the Rabbit Hole: Discover the Power of the Blockchain John Pellew, Othera. The team at Othera aim to enable the sale of credit backed tokens on the Ethereum public blockchain and provide tools for tracking the proven

Core samples from oil wells can be worth more than gold. BHP Billiton, one of the largest mining companies in the world, is piloting a program to track their custodianship and provenance using IPFS and Ethereum. Not only is this an interesting use case, but it is also the first time we have seen a production deployment of both IPFS and Ethereum. If you would like to contact Tyler, please email me at the address mentioned in the podcast. https://twitter.com/FreeMyVunk https://twitter.com/arthurfalls Content: Arthur Falls, R. Tyler Smith PHD Subscribe on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

Dominic Williams is a cryptographic researcher focussed on scaling and the representation of real world assets in digital form. Dfinity, Dominic’s infinitely scalable virtual machine, is simple, and extremely powerful. This is the third time I’ve interviewed Dominic. The first was for the final episode of Beyond Bitcoin. Dominic enters at the 1hr 32min mark to explain Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. The second was in February 2016 on The Ether Review to discuss his work on synthetic digital assets. Today, we hear about the aforementioned Dfinity. http://dfinity.network/ https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/beyond-bitcoin-27th-and-final-an-architecture-for-the-internet-of-money https://www.etherreview.info/2016/02/16/ether-review-16-dominic-williams-synthetic-assets/ https://twitter.com/dominic_w https://twitter.com/arthurfalls Content: Dominic Williams, Arthur Falls Subscribe on iTunes: https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fthe-ether-review%2Fid899090462%3Fmt%3D2

What is the Ethereum Virtual Machine, what design trends and decisions influence its operation and what does that mean for Ethereum the platform? Today we dive deep. There is a debate around whether the flexibility of the imperative paradigm of programming language design or the verifiability of the functional paradigm are more appropriate for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Martin is in the functional camp which he believes can make Ethereum a more robust and powerful platform. The EVM itself is often overlooked as a black box, but is one of a tripartite of technologies including the consensus mechanism and the distributed ledger, whose design is interdependent. Exploring the relationship between these components is an interesting way to gain a deeper understanding of everyone's favourite world computer. Content: Martin Lundfall, Arthur Falls Subscribe on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

Between August 24th-26th, a group of leaders in blockchain thought, business, and advocacy met at the Tapscott’s lodge in Muskoka, Canada. The goal of the meeting was to discuss strategies of stewardship and governance of the blockchain space. Currently, the Chamber of Digital Commerce is the most prominent advocacy group. Founder & President, Perianne Boring joined Don and Alex Tapscott, on the eve of the event to discuss their goals. http://www.muskokagroup.org/ https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_how_the_blockchain_is_changing_money_and_business http://blockchain-revolution.com/ http://www.digitalchamber.org/ Content: Don Tapscott, Perianne Boring, Alex Tapscott, Arthur Falls Be sure to subscribe on iTunes: exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fit…Fid899090462%3Fmt%3D2

In Brief Zooko Wilcox has more than 20 years of experience in open, decentralized systems, cryptography and information security, and startups. He is recognized for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko's Triangle”, Tahoe-LAFS, BLAKE2, and SPHINCS. He is also the Founder and CEO of Least Authority. He sometimes blogs about health science. . In recent years, progress in the area of zero knowledge proofs has made it possible to construct a blockchain whose miners can verify transactions, or state changes, without seeing the information contained in those transactions. Many of the individuals developing these tools have joined Zooko to form the Zcash company. Zcash aims to be a truly anonymous cryptocurrency, but more than just a currency, it is the first step toward managing privacy on public blockchains. Recently, at the Cornell University blockchain hackathon, Zcash team members participated in a successful effort to include an implementation of zero knowledge proofs known as ZKsnarks into an ethe

In Brief Blockchain is a recent innovation, cryptocurrency is not. From the mid 80s to the end of the Dot Com Boom in the late 90s, cryptographers and developers tackled many of the problems we are encountering today in this new era of digital currency. Pelle Braendgaard is a veteran search engine webmaster (AltaVista) and participant in the cryptocurrency space of the early nineties. Back then, the Crypto Finance Conference, held in Aguila was the epicenter of the community. A tremendous amount of progress was made but the Dot Com crash and terror attacks of 9/11 caused a halt to almost all progress. It was not until the emergence of Bitcoin that the wheels again began to turn. Pelle takes us on a tour of forgotten knowledge and reaffirms some basic principles which the Ethereum community has lost sight of: What is a contract really? “It’s something that came out of - you could call it an open source community of business people over thousands of years . . . It’s not a piece of paper, it’s not a piece o

Jaan Talinn is the founder of Skype and Kazaa and long time angel investor. More recently, Jaan has concerned himself with preventing the destruction of humanity. Strong Artificial intelligence is the least understood of threats and this is Jaan's chief concern. slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy cser.org futureoflife.org etherreview.info Content: Jaan Tallinn, Siri, Arthur Falls

Crypto guru Emin Gün Sirer wraps up the DAO hack and hard fork. While the entire episode is over for the main Ethereum chain, some questions remain unanswered. After speaking with Emin, the intrigue seems to have only deepened. Note: River Keefer is in fact in his final year hackingdistributed.com initc3.org twitter.com/el33th4xor twitter.com/arthurfalls etherreview.info Content: Emin Gün Sirer, Arthur Falls

Lucius Gregory Meredith, chief technology officer at Synereo is a mathematician and cryptocurrency expert. The Synereo platform began as a decentralized social network but out of a need for smart contracts, high scalability, and concurrent transactions, the project has become something much more than a replacement for facebook. Greg’s work is fascinating and novel, and frankly I don’t do it justice in this interview. Interested listeners should follow up on the provided links. What lead me to Synereo however was not the tech, but the idea that conversations about the direction of development could be conducted by users, on the platform in question itself. This would filter the noise of open forums like Reddit and Twitter, where uninvolved parties have equal voice. After we’ve heard from Greg, Jake Brukhman of CoinFund discusses investment in the cryptocurrency space. The CoinFund blog is one of the most insightful and impartial out there, driven by the research their team conducts. We occasionally syndicate

The threat of Ethereum regulation as a result of the DAO fiasco raises the question: At its core, is blockchain a financial technology? The Crypto project is viewed by many to be an effort to safeguard mankind's future. Vinay Gupta says it’s time to realign the crypto project with human survival rather than human greed. Topics Covered: Will Ethereum become regulated and merge with Fintech? Is this a bad thing? In the event of a global financial collapse, have we built an infrastructure which will benefit the many, or enable the few to hide their wealth? Is the anarcho-capitalist/crypto-anarchist dream fading in favor of more pragmatic views? Rather than finance, should we focus on problems like climate change and global popular representation? And what about provably fair online dating? https://twitter.com/leashless https://twitter.com/arthurfalls Content: Vinay Gupta, Arthur Falls

Julian Zawistowski, of Project Golem explains the distributed computing platform he and his team at Imapp are producing. The first alpha, Brass Golem will be released in weeks. The Imapp organisation itself is an interesting organization worth having a look at. Before we get to Golem however, Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long explains what blockchain can offer to financial institutions, regulators, and the Wall St as a whole. https://caitlin-long.com/ http://golemproject.net/ http://imapp.pl/en/index https://twitter.com/caitlinflong https://twitter.com/julianofimapp https://twitter.com/arthurfalls Content: Caitlin Long, Julian Zawistowski, Arthur Falls