Stay ConnectedEpicenter brings you in-depth conversations about the technical, economic and social implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Every week, we interview business leaders, engineers academics and entrepreneurs, and bring you a diverse spectrum of opinions and points of view.
Epicenter is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy and Felix Lutsch. Since 2014, our episodes have been downloaded over 8 million times.
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Amaury Séchet is the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, the largest client for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Amaury first got started with Bitcoin in 2010 and closely followed the Bitcoin block size debate as it progressed through the early years of Bitcoin. Predicting the eventual failure of SegWit2x, Amaury was part of the original team that helped coordinate the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, timing it with the activation of SegWit on the main Bitcoin blockchain. We discuss with Amaury the roadmap for Bitcoin Cash, especially with regards to their approach to scalability. We cover many of the novel features the Bitcoin Cash development teams are innovating on such as Canonical Transaction Ordering and Avalanche Pre-Consensus, as well as cover some of the more juicy drama that plagued the Bitcoin Cash community in late 2018, leading to split off of Bitcoin SV.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/276
Artificial Intelligence is often misunderstood. And much like blockchain, those who fiercely stand by the technology believe it will change the world for the better. Others fear the negative repercussions it could bring it and would rather see it disappear.
We’re joined by Ben Goertzel. Ben’s interest in AI and robotics date back to his childhood and he has made these his life-long passion and work. He is the CEO of SingularityNET, a company building a marketplace for AIs which leverages blockchain. He is also Chief Scientist at Hanson Robotics who has brought us the now famous Sophia robot. When he’s not building blockchains and robots, he leads the OpenCog open-source AI framework and is Chair of Humanity +, an organization which focuses on technology and ethics.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/275
We’re joined by Alexey Akhunov, an independent Ethereum researcher. Alexey has been working on an ambitious project called TurboGeth. As the name implies, it is a version of Geth which features a number of speed and performance optimizations.
Alexey also leads the state rent working group of the Ethereum 1.x project. Ethereum 1.x came out of Devcon when core developers began to realize that the full migration to Serenity would likely take several years. The team hopes to bring progressive improvements to Ethereum in parallel to the development of Serenity.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/274
When the Lightning Network (LN) was conceived in 2015, it was quickly embraced by the Bitcoin community as the way to dramatically scale Bitcoin’s capacity. There was an expectation of LN being available quickly. Instead, development proceed more slowly in the background with different teams contributing to a standard specification. That spec is now almost ready and last year interest and early activity on the LN increased dramatically.
We were joined by Christian Decker, a core engineer at Blockstream, where he works on their LN client. We discussed the history and progression of the LN and what remains on the road to scaling Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/273
We’re joined by Jameson Lopp. Jameson is the CTO of Casa, a company providing key storage solutions. Previously, he was an early engineer at BitGo. However, to most people, he is perhaps known for his Twitter presence and his excellent writing. Over the years, Jameson has written extensively about Bitcoin development, cryptocurrencies, and personal operational security. A self-proclaimed “Professional Cypherpunk,” aligns with the ideas of libertarianism and volunteerism.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/272
The concept of DAOs has been captivating to many in the crypto space for years. When “The DAO” was created in 2016, in the few weeks of its existence and despite obvious flaws, it gather tremendous momentum and amassed 14% of the entire ether supply. Since then the technology has matured and Martin and Matan argue that the time for DAOs has finally arrived.
We were joined by DAOstack Founder Matan Field and Gnosis Founder Martin Köppelmann. We talked about the decentralized exchange protocol DutchX. We also talked about how the two projects together created the dxDAO, which will manage the DutchX protocol, but could go onto its own path. A path that could even lead to being the DAO for all of DeFi.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/271
Epicenter turned 5 years old this month – that’s a long time in the blockchain space! When the podcast began in January 2014, the entire ecosystem was made up of only Bitcoin and a handful of altcoins. Soon after, the Ethereum white paper was published which ushered in a new era of crypto assets and decentralized applications. Since then, we have released 270 episodes and interviewed some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and engineers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Needless to say, we have learned a lot about the blockchain industry, but also what it takes to run a successful podcast in this space.
This week, we look back on the early days of Epicenter and how the podcast has evolved over the years. We also answer your questions in our first ever AMA. Finally, we take stock of 2018 and the trends that marked this past year.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/270
We’re joined by Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys. Joseph founded ConsenSys as an Ethereum development studio on the heels of the Ethereum crowd sale in 2014. The company has since grown to a distributed organization of over 1,000 people. Over 50 companies and projects have emerged from ConsenSys, including Metamask, uPort, Gnosis, and GitCoin, to name only a few. Today, the company continues to invest in growing the Ethereum ecosystem by funding projects, and through consulting services for companies and institutions.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/269
When token sales and ICOs took off in 2017, most projects chose to push ahead despite large regulatory risks. One of the few that went the other direction and put compliance first was CoinList. The platform made its debut by running the massive Filecoin token sales in which $205m was raised from accredited investors. CoinList also played a major role in popularizing the SAFT and creating tools to efficiently and legally raise in the US.
We were joined by CoinList President and Co-founder Andy Bromberg to discuss the history of CoinList, token sales, securities regulation and the potential of security tokens.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/268
Lending is one core pillar of the economy, enabling one person or company to be entrepreneurial with someone else’s capital. However, in the traditional banking system processes in lending are often opaque and the barrier to entry into this market is high. The emergence of easy to use Decentralized Finance is one of the hallmarks of 2018: To date, DeFi has brought us crypto-collateralized stable coins, decentralized exchanges, tokenized credit default swaps, trustless derivatives, and decentralized margin lending.
We’re joined Nadav Hollander, co-founder and president of Dharma. Dharma is a decentralized protocol for credit products which connects debtors with creditors through a transparent mechanism. The protocol itself is agnostic towards the collateral and terms used, however, the team recently introduced a crypto-collateralized margin lending application running on top of the Dharma protocol, Dharma Lever.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/267
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