Spring Recap from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative

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Hello,

It has been a crazy few months for cryptocurrency — 60 Minutes did a segment on Bitcoin, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and President all commented on cryptocurrency in a week, and Facebook is adopting the language of decentralized cryptocurrencies to launch a mobile payments system. Some of our government officials have done an admirable job getting educated on these topics and asking probing questions of experts, including DCI advisor Gary Gensler at the House Financial Services Committee.

We at the DCI are honored to continue to be asked for our neutral analysis and explanations in these venues. Part of our work is making cryptocurrency more legible to multiple disciplines — join us October 5–6 in Cambridge, MA for a kickoff event on our new conference and journal to steward the field of #CryptoResearch.

We are continuing to address the fundamental challenges to keep cryptocurrency tech from being ready for billions — check out Tadge’s work on making it easier to run a validating node, Madars’s work on a new zero-knowledge proof primitive, and more below.

Thanks,
Neha

Projects and Research

We’ve officially announced our Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit, Oct 5–6 at MIT. We’re building a new academic field by gathering 400 top researchers in academia and industry across computer science, economics, and law. Apply to attend/speak here.

We submitted 2 research papers this last quarter:

• Tadge Dryja released the full paper on Utreexo: A dynamic hash-based accumulator optimized for the Bitcoin UTXO set
• Sunoo Park (with Adam Sealfon) published Repudiability and Unclaimability of Ring Signatures (to appear in CRYPTO 2019)

Other updates:

• As part of our Crypto Security Initiative, we’re excited that SECURITY.md was added to GitHub and has been added to the bitcoin-core and geth Github repos. (Please add SECURITY.md to your repo!)
• James Lovejoy’s tool to detect 51% attacks found $5,500 worth of double spends on Litecoin Cash.
• We released the 3rd issue of Cryptocurrency Research Review(subscribe here), featuring reviews from Cathie Yun, Rob Ali, and Willy Vasquez.
• Wladimir J. van der Laan just passed 5 years as lead maintainer of Bitcoin Core. Thanks Wladimir!

Education

Neha, Rhys, and Joi Ito are co-teaching a Crypto Ethics class in fall 2019. If you’re interested in following along, check out this reading list or join our mailing list here.

In the spring semester, our students (in-person and online) consumed a total of 15,000 hours of learning (14,895 to be exact).

• Neha and Tadge’s Spring 2018 course, Cryptocurrency Engineering and Design, has been posted through MIT OpenCourseWare. See all of the videos and transcripts here.
• Michael Casey continues his weekly Coindesk column, including this awesome article on the tension between privacy and transparency: Perverse Outcomes: FATF, Bitcoin and Financial Exclusion
• Thanks to Dan Cline (OpenCX) and Cole Vick (CBDC) who completed their internships this term!
• We interviewed Rob Reich, Larry Lessig, and Caitlin Long for our Grey Mirror podcast, which now has over 100,000 listens.

Events and Presentations

Gary Gensler was one of 5 experts called to testify on Libra for the US House Committee on Financial Services. Check out the video here and his written statement here.

A quick smattering of events that we attended, spoke, or co-organized:

• Ron Rivest’s 20-year-old timelock puzzle was solved. As part of the celebration, we co-hosted MIT VDF Day with CSAIL and Simon Pfeffer. Attendees included folks from Protocol Labs, Chia, and the Ethereum Foundation. See videos here.
• We helped host the first Boston Bitdevs meetup along with a great Boston crew. (Join the Meetup group here.)
• Neha → a16z regulatory summit, SEC regulatory summit, CAA Convene, Les Rencontres Economiques d’Aix-en-Provence (on a panel with Nouriel Roubini, notorious blockchain skeptic)
• Gary → Keynote at Harvard law, Fintech talks at MIT + CBInsights, and like 10 other events without video :)
• Madars → zkProof workshop (talk on zk-SHARKs)
• Tadge, Cory, Wladimir → Bitcoin Core Dev (transcripts)
• Tadge and Wassim → Breaking Bitcoin (panel on risks with Wassim)
• Check out all the videos from the Business of Blockchain. For some spicy debate, we especially recommend this roundtable on regulationwith Gary Gensler, Caitlin Long, and Peter Van Valkenburgh.
• On two separate WhatBitcoinDid podcasts, Neha discussed Security and Ethics, while Tadge discussed UTreeXO.

Catch us at these events in summer/fall 2019:

• ETHBoston. Sep 6–8. Boston, MA.
• Scaling Bitcoin. Sep 11–12. Tel Aviv, Israel.
• Cryptoeconomic Systems Field Building Symposium. Oct 5–6. Boston, MA.

Last but certainly not least, Neha was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for a recent cryptocurrency episode of 60 Minutes. Check out the videos here.

Finally, we’d like to say goodbye to Alin Dragos, our previous Head of Strategic Partnerships. Alin is moving with his family to Seattle. Thanks for helping DCI over the past two years Alin! This recent interview with Alin gives a good overview on why Alin was a great fit for the DCI. If you’d like to contact Alin, please reach out at alin.dragos@gmail.com.

Also, we’d like to welcome Wassim Alsindi the Managing Editor for the Cryptoeconomic Systems journal. Welcome Wassim!

Thanks as always for your curiosity and a special thank you to our member companies for their support. Please let us know if you have any feedback, questions, or if we can help you in any way. We’d love to hear from you!

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