Opening Remarks
Transcript By: Bryan Bishop
Category: Conference
Opening remarks
https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1137273436332576768
We have a nice six second intro video. There we go. Woo. Alright. I think I can display my notes here. Yay. Good morning. First thing I need to tell you is the wifi password if you want to use the venue wifi. So, outside of that, thank you all for coming. This year we have a little fewer people than usual, but that’s bear market and all. So we have to change our size of conference depending on the price of bitcoin. There is also training going on. I was asked during the speaker dinner yesterday, what is breaking bitcoin? It’s not clear to everyone.
Breaking Bitcoin believes that bitcoin is critical software. We really like bitcoin as this censorship resistant form of money that has no other competitors. This is the only one that works as well as it does. We want to focus on making this work. This is not about scaling, mainstream, or price pumping. Bitcoin is still a work in progress. It’s been 10 years of bitcoin development, but we still have a lot of things to cover. Breaking Bitcoin is meant to help everyone including developers to understand the limitations around bitcoin and what there is still to do at the protocol level and at the network level and things around it. It’s not just about software, it’s about everything around bitcoin. It’s still really technical. If you are non-technical then this might be a tough conference for you.
I have some bad news. luke-jr and Bob Mcelrath couldn’t make it for various reasons. This is pretty sad. I was looking forward to both of their talks. I had personally asked luke-jr to submit a talk around small blocks because I keep reading on twitter about his rants on it but I have never had a chance to talk with him about it. I would have liked him to be here to be able to answer our questions live. It couldn’t happen in the end, we’re all very sad about it. To replace luke-jr, I don’t have a plan yet so I will come up with something. If someone has a really good idea or they want to do a quick panel, please talk with me. The slot is in the afternoon. Tomorrow, Ruben Somsen is doing a talk on statechains instead of the talk from Bob. That’s super last minute so thanks Ruben.
Rules: no pictures of attendees, ask them before any photography. No room exploration. Please don’t do that. No irresponsible disclosure of vulnerabilities or exploits. In the past, we had some past experience about that so let’s not do it again.
Our twitter hashtag is #breakingbitcoin. We have a telegram breakingbitcoin2. We will also announce the location for the party this evening, in there. If you don’t have telegram, stick around with someone who has it so that you’re not left out of the party tonight.
I wanted to talk about GPG. I believe it’s important. In your bag, you probably have a flyer with GPG keys of fingerprints of quite a few speakers. What we’re trying to do here is the verification of this GPG key in person. Some of the speakers will have their GPG fingerprints on their slide. Tick the box on their flyer if you think it’s the right fingerprint. GPG is used to verify software. You’re not supposed to just download software, you should verify the signature on the software. Anything can be compromised. Please verify your software signatures. To do that properly, you have to do it from multiple sources. PGP is also useful for talking privately. If you want to do responsible disclosure, please encrypt your email. Do not send cleartext over the internet, way too much money in the game.
You need to verify the key first. A signature is meaningless otherwise. It’s best to verify keys right now, not when bitcoin is banned by some government or whatever. If bitcoin gets banned, these speakers may not want to fly to conferences. We’re so lucky to have speakers willing to show up at these international conferences.
Kevin Loaec, 9EA0 7C83 E962 C69C 188B 4B68 D3F2 1FDC 628F 94B6