Some random notes from the Baltic Honeybadger conference that took place on 25-26 Nov 2017 in Riga:
Bitcoin, not blockchain (Giacomo Zucco, @giacomozucco)
Bitcoin can exist without a blockchain:
- networks like Lightning/drivechains
- financial instruments like ETFs/futures
- bank-like services like Coinbase
- blockchain is a “necessary evil”, but it’s the only way we have now to achieve decentralization and and trustlessness
Blockchain can exist without Bitcoin:
- using blockchain for data purposes (notarization/timestamping, proof of publication)
- new coins made for a specific purpose (altcoins, fork coins, “blockchain as an excuse”)
"You don't need a blockchain for that"
“Imagine you have a nuclear power plant programming language. It can do uranium up and uranium down. Then someone comes along and makes a turing complete language and invites JavaScript developers” (about Turing-complete smart contracts)
What's lacking (Roman Snitko, @romansnitko)
Ideas for services we need to develop:
- payment processing like BitPay, but more decentralized/trustless (not easily profitable, high fees and confirmation delays, KYC requirements, processors hold BTC)
- ideas: bootstrap as part of an exchange, use 2nd layer
- distributed rating/reputation system
- wallets: managing distribution of multisig keys, notify trustees when they need to take action
- escrow and dispute resolution/mediation
“Just hodling Bitcoin won’t change the world, we need to get our hands dirty”
Andreas M. Antonopoulos, @aantonop
First, do no harm: some things are “more than useless”
A lot of practices we do today are only based on superstition and pseudoscience (like bloodletting before the age of modern medicine). For example, financial monitoring and AML practices - we assume that we can stop all crime by arbitrarily deciding who is bad and preventing them from using money.
The requirement that identity is required for any financial transactions locks billions of people out; Bitcoin is for the other 6 billion.
(And banks launder money all the time anyway, they just have a license for that.)
Financial monitoring: there is a totalitarian surveillance system where every transaction you make through a bank account or card gets sent to all intelligence agencies.
What happens when people can transact anonymously? Nothing, we had such system for thousands of years and it worked fine, and suddenly sometime in the 20th century we decided it's dangerous.
We better fix anonimity/privacy before this thing gets too popular - privacy should not be a niche, it should be the default. "If you are the only one doing anonymous transactions, you are not anonymous”. We didn’t get this right with the Internet, and we’re now paying the price.
The only way people learn the lesson about ponzis, scams etc. is when they (or their family) lose money, people don't want to listen that something they’re investing in is a scam; the reason Americans are more careful about it than Chinese is that they have decades of experience with this with the stock market.
To be used as currency Bitcoin needs to be used for payments and earning, not just as an investment; people will get to crypto by earning it, not buying it.
How do we get there? We make it better, carefully; Bitcoin right now doesn't scale, but it will. Electrification and popularizing cars seemed just as impossible at first.
Complex technology can create simple solutions, even though it's unimaginably complicated and most people don't understand it (do you understand how BGP works?).
The reason you can Skype from a remote village isn't because we made the pipes larger, it's because we made videos compressible much better.
"You think we have a lot of volume in Bitcoin right now? Ha ha" (about futures)
"What if everyone could 3D-print a weapon, strap it to a drone and make it fly around shooting people?"
Rich people have always had a way to not pay taxes, suddenly this just got democratized and we'll have to figure out how to live with it.
If you don't care about privacy now, in 2 years you might end up in a fascist country that still has your browser history; see "Let a thousand flowers bloom"
Who gets your bitcoins when you die (Pamela Morgan, @pamelawjd)
Without a legal plan, you can't be sure who gets your coins when you die
Without a tech/ops plan, you can't be sure anyone does
Right now very few lawyers understand any of this stuff
Just because you don't think about death, it doesn't mean it won't happen
Cryptocurrency Inventory - a list of what you have and how to access it
Letter to Loved Ones Template
Role play: pretend you're them and see if you can follow all steps (or get them to do it)
Include the tech plan in the legal plan (will etc.)
Multisig / deadman switch is a too new and unproven approach to test it on something as important as this
Make sure your loved ones get your coins and not have to fight over it or give a lot of it to the lawyers/state
https://medium.com/@pamelawjd/humans-die-cryptocurrencies-dont-d392627bb15c
https://medium.com/@pamelawjd/inheritance-planning-for-cryptocurrencies-3-steps-in-3-minutes-83ebb3e916a2
https://medium.com/@pamelawjd/cryptocurrency-inventory-start-here-for-for-inheritance-planning-5fa295fb975
Open Timestamps (Peter Todd, @peterktodd)
Timestamp proof: proof that message M existed before time T
Commitment operation: proof that message M1 existed before message M2
Doesn't solve all problems - e.g. it doesn't prove that something existed after time T, or that a contradictory message didn't also exist (you can create two contradictory predictions and then only reveal one)
Hardware wallets (Pavol Rusnak, @pavolrusnak)
Data theft or loss happens, but in the crypto world it means unrecoverable financial loss
Hardware wallet = single purpose mini computer that safely stores some keys, returns a signed transaction when requested by the computer
Can also be used to prove identity, e.g. for 2FA
Hundreds of thousands of Trezors made since 2013, no VC funding
RSA identity tokens - centralized production, producer creates the key pair on their server
Hardware wallets - manufacturer has no access to the keys because they're generated on the device
Lightning Network (Elizabeth Stark, @starkness)
Mostly the same as this one:
“100% of machines are unbanked, Lightning will change that”
Panel: Bitcoin’s current challenges
The biggest cost of attacks is distraction and losing time - we feed the drama by paying attention to it
Let them attack, it only makes us stronger
We can’t stop attacks from happening, the best we can do is learn from them and keep building better stuff
Without them we might have become complacent
The sneakiest kind of attack is discretely pushing Bitcoin towards centralization
Bitcoin is “an assembly line of black swans”
"I've been working with blockchain for the last year, and I've just discovered Bitcoin" - some people from the financial sector
Over the next few years we'll have ~40M new users, and most of them don't speak English
There's a whole generation of young people living in a digital world for whom Bitcoin intuitively makes perfect sense and is something that was missing
Social/legal stuff is also important, we can't overcome everything with technology
Economics panel
Andreas on ICOs: They will try to regulate a global phenomenon based on local jurisdictions and they will fail. Every single technological invention has broken the law, because laws are written based on the status quo, and that’s what technology wants to change.
Andreas: Bitcoin will absolutely be used on black markets - if it's not used on black markets, it means it's not useful as a currency.
But: illegal != immoral - it's completely moral to e.g. buy illegally imported insulin that you need to survive because it’s too expensive in your country.
“If you base your morality on what is legal, I question your morality"
"Bitcoin is fundamentally an act of resistance"
Eric Lombrozo on forks: "It's basically a DoS attack on developers"