devcon 5 / decentralizing ethereum data with vulcanizedb
Duration: 00:31:52
Speaker: Rob Mulholand
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Invalid Date
Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor
I will share lessons learned during Tor's twenty years as free software fighting for privacy and human rights. We'll talk about distributed trust and privacy by design, how to help people understand the good uses of your tech, getting allies in both cypherpunks and government, why transparency and community-building are so essential to trust, and successes from other spaces. It may seem like the crypto wars never really end, but we all have a part to play in saving the world.
Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados
The Tornado Cash sanctions and criminal prosecutions have challenged longstanding assumptions within crypto about the limits of money transmission licensing, money laundering statutes, and sanctions laws. They've also revealed a longstanding assumption from some in policy and law enforcement circles: that blockchains have always been and must remain transparent. Neither assumption has served us well and the time has come for legal certainty. This talk is about how we get there.
Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem
This presentation will discuss the findings of the academic paper "Tending the Infinite Garden: Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem" by Dr. Paul-Dylan-Ennis and Ann Brody. Our study examines the decision-making processes fundamental to Ethereum's protocol governance, drawing on interviews with Ethereum's core developers. We identify a central worldview in Ethereum known as the "Infinite Garden" and discuss how Ethereum's social layer is crucial for upholding cypherpunk values.
KeySpace: End-to-End Encryption using Ethereum and IPFS
One of the interesting side effects of the number of developers coming into the blockchain space is that as more engineers come to understand & play with cryptographic tools, they are more likely to come up with solutions to new user experience issues by creatively applying these cryptographic primitives. At AirSwap we wanted to enable conversational, messaged-based trading for users, and support dependable message delivery, without compromising their privacy. Since we knew that all dApp users have access to a persisted public-private key-pair through their wallet, we built a system that allowed them to derive secondary PGP keys which were deterministically tied to their address, and allowed for encryption & decryption of messages, and also signatures and signature verifications. (more detail here: https://medium.com/fluidity/keyspace-end-to-end-encryption-using-ethereum-and-ipfs-87b04b18156b)In this workshop, I’ll help participants walk through the creation of their KeySpace key pairs using their Ethereum wallet of choice (Trust, Coinbase Wallet, Ledger, Trezor, etc) via the functionality provided in the AirSwap.js library (https://github.com/airswap/AirSwap.js). Afterwards they will be able to validate identities in decentralized messaging systems, encrypt & decrypt messages sent over IPFS (via OrbitDB), and build the foundation for permissioned, off-chain applications.Participants will need a laptop, understanding of git, and basic javascript development skills (installing from NPM, writing code in an IDE of choice).
Network level privacy with HOPR - fixing Ethereum's Achilles' heel
Multiple projects currently focus on on-chain privacy but at network level, Ethereum utilizes broadcasting of messages in a P2P setting which is known to have inferior privacy-guarantees compared to mixnets. Beyond the core layer, dapps running on top of Ethereum or users interfacing these dapps and communicating with one another need a go-to protocol that allows them to exchange data without leaking private metadata that allows for de-anonymizing them while using a dapp.In this talk we highlight some attacks that collect network metadata in order to de-anonymize senders of a transaction. We then show how a mixnet like HOPR can be used to establish network-level metadata privacy. HOPR is a mixnet that allows participating nodes to earn ETH for relaying messages and thereby provide privacy. As HOPR requires cooperation of downstream nodes to unlock a payment, traditional payment channels would lead to race conditions that allow relayers to exploit the network. We will present an alternative to common payment channel implementations, building on commutative properties of elliptic curves for efficiently closing payment channels.
Path to Seedless Recovery
Private key management is one of the key issues to be solved on the road to mass adoption of blockchains like Ethereum. Smart contract based wallets like the Gnosis Safe are laying the foundation to solve this problem by allowing different types of access control. The talk gives an overview of the different approaches developed to allow account recovery beyond seed backups and explains how to implement social recovery to ensure recoverability without compromising privacy.
You Too Can Build a Ethereum Mixer!
Cryptography is maths, and maths is scary. There's information overload, you don't know where you start, there's smarter people telling you how your solution(s) isn't perfect and how it has a theoretical limit / flaw / weakness, and how it's not "safe" to do xyz.So how can one with no academic background in cryptography start building cryptographic protocols to be then ultilized in higher-level applications? This talk will focus on my anecdotal process of building a Heiswap, Ethereum Mixer, with a Research vs Engineering perspective.
Zerochain: Using zk-SNARKs for an account based privacy-preserving blockchain
Zerochain is a privacy-protecting layer on top of any smart contract platforms like Substrate and Ethereum. As a high-level overview, Zerochain is based on Zether protocol(https://crypto.stanford.edu/~buenz/papers/zether.pdf) which is privacy-oriented payment protocol on top of smart contracts. Though this original specification uses Sigma-bullets as zero-knowledge proving systems, instead we use zk-SNARKs for the efficiency reason. I would like to talk about how it works, how we can integrate privacy into the account-based approach.Currently supported for the only Substrate, but it can be supported for Ethereum as well because Zerochain and Zether protocols can be compatible with any smart contract platforms. Here is our GitHub page: https://github.com/LayerXcom/zero-chainand blog post: https://medium.com/layerx/announcing-zerochain-5b08e158355d
Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy
The Web3 revolution seeks to address the sins of Web2. However, in doing so, it’s created an even worse outcome for users - users’ data is publicly available and makes them vulnerable to state-level censorship and adverse actions. This talk will address the philosophical as well as practical considerations of privacy in Web3. Privacy is an industry-wide issue and sits at the heart of all that is Web3. Understanding why privacy matters involves recognizing that it is not an isolated concept bu
Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software: Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation
It can be challenging to properly open source software: there are licenses, IP, security reporting, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In this talk, we will discuss the best practices for open source software development learned from almost 25 years of experience at the Linux Foundation. Attendees will learn about how to set up their projects for a variety of potential goals, including things like maximizing security and community building.