Anton Yemelyanov

Introduction

slides: https://tokyo2018.scalingbitcoin.org/presentations

Welcome to scaling bitcoin. This is an international conference. We run the event every year in a different geographical location. We run this event as a strictly academic and engineering conference. The mentality that we take behind the event is think global, act local. It's a well known bitcoin additive. Our goal is to stimulate the bitcoin ecosystem. The best way to do this is to stimulate the engineering community, because that's what drives this magnificent technology for the last almost 10 years now.

What we're trying to do is have through this stimulation of the ecosystem, we're trying to get all the local developers together in one place. We try to bring developers from all around the world to encourage and build new bridges of cooperation and relationships.

I'd like to open the conference. There's one important note. Please familiarize yourself with the code of conduct on the website. There are no photographs allowed at this conference. You may take pictures of the presenters, though. The event is livestreamed on youtube. Media is allowed to take pictures from the rear of the conference with the strict instruction that there are no faces and no content on computers, just overview pictures. Other than that, please don't use your phones.

Every year, we're hosted by a local bitcoin community. This year our host is DG Lab, which is a magnificient company doing really amazing work in bitcoin and layer 2 and application development based on blockchain technology such as lightning and a lot of really interesting and amazing people throughout the organization of this event that I got to meet. It's one of the strongest geographical location or countries in bitcoin. Japan is itself as a country is one of the most progressive countries has very high rate of adoption of technology and a lot of research. If you look at some of our sponsors, there's really a large number of companies who are heavily involved in cryptography and development of this technology.

Without further delay, I'd like to introduce Taro Watanabe, who is the chair of this conference. If you have any questions with regards to the ongoing conference, then please ask him.

Hi. I am Taro Watanabe from DG Lab. We at DG Lab are honored to be here. It's a pleasure to welcome you to Japan. I am so excited that this day is in Japan. I hope we have great proposals today and discussions.

I am Shinichiro Matsuo. I will give a quick report from the program committee chair. The two chairs are myself and Elaine Ou. Unfortunately she could not be here.

"Kaizen" is a Japanese word registered in the Oxford dictionary and US version of Wikipedia. It represents Japanese culture on precision engineering.

This year the program committee there was a 50/50 mix of academia and engineering. We had 20 program committee members.

This year the selection process was more academic style, with double-blind submission and review. We managed all conflicts of interest. We had 3 reviewers per proposal. We had scoring and then discussion among all PC members. We also gave feedback to all proposals.

Statistics: the submission deadline was 2018-07-01 and this was extended to 2017-07-10. The author notification was by 2018-08-15. We had 40 submissions, 39 for regular presentations (33 last year), 1 for a sub-workshop, and 20 accepted proposals. So our acceptance rate is 51.3%.

We have a number of regular sessions today, including current state of bitcoin, on-chain scaling, and others.

We have a keynote talk today from professor Jun Murai right after this introduction.

If you have any interest in hosting a workshop then please email us contact@scalingbitcoin.org, the deadline for that is tomorrow.

Thank you for all proposers, program committee members for their great jobs. We would also like to thank our sponsors and their staff.