Conference Speakers & Presentations

We are pleased to provide this list of international speakers and presenters at this first, The Future of Bitcoin Conference, being held in Arnhem, The Netherlands. Researchers, developers and representatives from the development community will share knowledge, research and showcase multiple implementations, providing uniques views for The Future of Bitcoin.

In 2009, prior to discovering Bitcoin, Jihan worked as a private equity fund manager and a financial analyst. But after the Bitcoin “AHA!” moment, he became not only one of the first Bitcoin enthusiasts in China founding the Chinese Bitcoin news portal 8btc.com, but also the first person to translate the Satoshi whitepaper into Chinese. Subsequently in 2013, Jihan saw the immense opportunity in the nascent Bitcoin mining industry and co-founded Bitmain.

In May of 2016, Antminer S9, the world’s first consumer-grade and most power-efficient bitcoin miner based on a 16nm process ASIC chip was released by Bitmain. The company is the proud owner of several brands, including Antminer, Antpool, and Hashnest, which are ranked number one in their respective fields. Bitmain is headquartered in Beijing, with offices in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Qingdao, Chengdu and Shenzhen.

Rob Mitchell became enthralled with Bitcoin in early 2013 and is the podcast host for The Bitcoin Game which he started in 2014 on the LTB Network. Rob also designed an iconic Bitcoin keychain, which has been used frequently in media to visually represent Bitcoin and he created some of the earliest Counterparty assets linked to physical goods, digital tokens redeemable for Bitcoin and Litecoin keychains. Rob was honored to MC the 2015 State Of Digital Money, and is excited to be moderating the Scaling Bitcoin panel at this year’s SODM.

This presentation will provide an argument that the best way for Bitcoin to facilitate cooperation, and minimize coercion, is to embrace a system where investors guide the rules of the system, with the goal of maximizing Bitcoin’s price. Tying together ideas about reciprocal altruism, and public choice theory, Antony Zegers will argue that this approach offers the best chance of increasing the Bitcoin’s cooperation-enabling properties, and avoiding potential coercive takeover.

Antony Zegers holds a Bachelor degree from the Royal Military College of Canada, and an M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto, both in Electrical Engineering. He worked for Defence Research and Development Canada for twelve years doing Operational Research and Analysis. During that time, he studied theories of complex systems and Austrian School economics which led him to an interest in Bitcoin. He has written articles about Bitcoin under the pseudonym “Mengerian”.

Using charts and data from Blockchair.com, Nikita Zhavoronkov will make the case for why Bitcoin needs a scaling solution. Charts of different block chain metrics will be used to highlight pressure on different use cases for Bitcoin, and to show which uses may have already migrated to alternative systems.

Nikita Zhavoronkov is the CEO of Blockchair.com, a blockchain search and analytics engine. He is also a lecturer and a researcher at NRNU MEPhI (Moscow, Russia) where he teaches a course on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.” He specializes in information security and AML/CFT.

In this presentation, Tomas van der Wansem will explain how Bitcrust uses the spend tree function as a way to fully parallelise verification, and how it can aid in Fraud Proofs. He will cover some of the differences in resource usage and performance between Bitcoin Core and Bitcrust, explain the problem of Fraud Proofs, and briefly touch on how the spend tree can be used to make Fraud Proof SPV nodes. He will also discuss scaling with this and other methods, and the further plans for Bitcrust.

Tomas van der Wansem is an expert developer and mathematician, specialized in high performance data processing solutions.

After previous successes as lead engineer for startups such as bliin, OpenCarData and Grecco, and after enthusiastically following Bitcoin since 2011, Tomas started Bitcrust this year to research Bitcoin technology and develop competitive node software in Rust.

With Bitcrust, Tomas is exploring new methods of indexing and synchronizing blockchain data that could solve the challenges of securely scaling Bitcoin.

Ryan X. Charles will describe the technology behind Yours. Yours is like Medium with a pay wall - it’s a social content site where users can post articles with embedded videos, images, and audio and can place a pay wall inside their content at a location and price of their choosing. The technology is based on payment channels and, unlike lightning network, it is not dependent on SegWit and works on bitcoin today.

Ryan X. Charles is an ex-astrophysicist who entered the blockchain space in 2011, has written many open-source blockchain tools, and worked for influential companies in the space, including BitPay, reddit, and BitGo. He is the founder of Yours, a blockchain-based content sharing application.

The presentation will give a brief look into the parity-bitcoin implementation. It will describe how we levered rust in the project. We will also cover step by step the process of writing a full bitcoin node, what resources we have used and what was their impact on our implementation. Next, we will go through pbtc architecture and compare it with other bitcoin implementations. At the end, we will present Parity's vision on going forward.

Marek Kotewicz got introduced to Bitcoin in 2013. In 2014-2015 he was core developer working on Ethereum software collection. During this time, he designed and implemented the comprehensive end-user API used ubiquitously for Ethereum decentralised applications. Since joining Parity Technologies he worked on parity-ethereum and parity-bitcoin clients written in rust language.

John Swingle will make the case that that sound money is crypto currency’s “killer use case”, and that smart contracts are largely overhyped and as such, advanced smart contract functionality does not belong in a crypto currency’s base layer. Drawing on his background as an attorney, Swingle will look at all of the general problems that are encountered in the ordinary world of contracts and explore which of these (if any) smart contracts are likely to help with.

John Swingle is an attorney who focuses his practice on patent law, as well as other areas of intellectual property law. John received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Duke University before going on to receive his law degree from Harvard Law School. Since first being introduced to Bitcoin in 2012, John has followed the space extremely closely. He is particularly fascinated with issues relating to Bitcoin’s governance and monetary theory. John gave a well-received talk on hard vs. soft forks at the September 2016 “Satoshi’s Vision” conference in San Francisco.

The shortage of developers affects negatively the growth of Bitcoin and the key to improve the the protocol is to include more developers as well as layer 2 technologies and solutions for users and companies. Bitprim focus most of his effort to make Bitcoin more attractive for more developers. From an implementation of Bitcoin protocol to easy to use interfaces and API and ready to use modules to develop the Future of Bitcoin. The vision and mission of Bitprim and how it materialize in real world solutions to make developers life easier.

Juan Garavaglia is a pioneer of Bitcoin, he started in Bitcoin mining and has dedicated the last two years to his Bitprim project. In the last two years, Bitprim has focused on providing a more user-friendly development environment for developers. Including an implementation of the Bitcoin protocol and a family of projects more friendly to developers. Previously, Juan created several companies, some of which were sold to Microsoft and NTT Japan.

Dr. Peter Rizun will present the case that coins resulting from SegWit transactions have different properties from current bitcoins, and thus should be considered as a separate coin. He will argue that the implications to Bitcoin's game theory of "segrating the witness" are largely unstudied, and that SegWit coins have a strictly weaker security model than traditional bitcoins.

Dr. Peter R. Rizun is a physicist and entrepreneur living in Vancouver, Canada, and is co-founder and co-managing editor for Ledger. His main research interest is developing analytical theory that explains properties and emergent phenomenon of the Bitcoin Network.

He was the recipient of the $105,000 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) CGS Doctoral Award and was recognized as a “Leader of Tomorrow” by the Alberta Science and Technology Foundation (ASTech). He holds a B.A.S.

Piotr Narewski will explain why Gocoin has a certain architecture, how is it different from the bitcoin core approach. He will provide a demonstration of Gocoin’s operation and a walk through of some of its features. He will also talk about what he has learned from developing Gocoin from scratch and maintaining it for over 4 years, and what advice he has for other developers.

Piotr Narewski was born in 1976 in Poland. At 20 years old he started to study Computer Engineering at University of Zielona Góra, finishing the school with the masters degree in 2003. In 1997 he started his career at a company manufacturing set-top-boxes for digital television. Mostly embedded programming with real time operating systems. In 2006 he moved to The Netherlands to work for a company providing content protection systems for digital television. Some of this work involved programming secure devices, like smart cards. In 2011 he discovered Bitcoin and got himself pretty much involved with it. Since the beginning of 2013 he has been completely involved in Bitcoin and did not return to the digital TV business. These days he has a little place in Poland where his development office is and where his cats stay while he goes and travels the world.

Dr. Nicola Dimitri will present a simple game theoretic framework with complete information to model the bitcoin mining activity. It formalizes the activity as an all-pay contest, a competition where participants compete to win a prize by investing in computational power, and victory is probabilistic. The framework shows that the intrinsic structure of the mining activity seems to prevent the formation of a monopoly, because in an equilibrium with two miners, both of them will have positive expected profits for any level of the opponent’s costs.

Professor Nicola Dimitri holds the Corvers-Endowed Chair in Innovation Procurement at the Maastricht School of Management. Nicola is also a professor in economics at Siena University, a Life Member of Clare Hall College (Cambridge-UK) and lecturer at IMT Lucca. He was formerly Deputy Rector of the University of Siena and has been Fulbright Student, Chevening Scholar and Fernand Braudel Fellow (EUI)

BIP100 was a popular scaling solution amongst miners when it was proposed in 2015. But it was never implemented and soon enough the debate went on. Recently updated and now implemented, BIP100 has resurfaced and is being signalled by major mining pools.

The talk will cover what BIP100 is, it’s origin, and recent updates to it. It will look at how it works, how it fits in the current ecosystem, and its current adoption.

Dagur Valberg Johannsson holds an MSc from Norwegian University of Science and Technology and has has worked as a software engineer at start-ups and small businesses in Norway. He currently works on developing optical measurement systems for machine tool automation. He started with Bitcoin development in 2015 to contribute to scaling efforts at the time when XT implemented BIP101

FSH blocks is an extension block technology that can be deployed without miner permission in a "federated" mode and then transition to bitcoin's soft fork security model (anyone-can-spend, but miner rejects invalid spends) and then to a bitcoin's security model today via a hard fork without a new software release. Andrew will also discuss work on an experimental extension block

Andrew Stone is the developer of Bitcoin Unlimited, has been an investor in Bitcoin since early 2012 and is currently the elected Developer of the Bitcoin Unlimited client software.

Jameson Lopp will discuss “coopetition” - the idea that participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem are competing and cooperating. Miners are competing 24/7/365 to find the next valid block and yet simultaneously they are cooperating to secure and extend the same blockchain. This coopetition also extends to other areas such as development, Bitcoin business, crypto society, and cypherpunk ethics.

Jameson Lopp is a software engineering team lead for BitGo, an enterprise digital asset security service based in Palo Alto. He is the creator of Statoshi, a fork of Bitcoin Core that analyzes statistics of Bitcoin nodes, founder of Mensa’s Bitcoin Special Interest Group, and founder of the Triangle Bitcoin & Business meetup. In his spare time he waxes philosophical upon the nature of Bitcoin.

Based on the principle that Bitcoin is secured by both using computing resources and by economic incentives, this talk will seek to shed light on the behaviour of various actors in the space. The presentation will also use this principle to explore some seemingly intractable questions in the Bitcoin space.

Amaury Sechet is a former software engineer at Facebook, LLVM committer and the main developer of the D compiler SDC.

He learned about bitcoin in 2010 and got involved as early as 2011 but mostly, quietly. Seeing Bitcoin failing to scale, he decided to take matter into its own hands and decided to apply his experience of large scale systems to Bitcoin.