The Roundtable Roundup
Satoshi Roundtable II concludes.
Satoshi Roundtable II concluded last night with a few cheers, flights and a rounds of drinks.
Before the post I want to extend the most heart felt thank you to so many people who turned out to the event. We were better represented by developers this year and also had excellent CEO and other representation.
This weekend was interesting in a few ways, the participants were more diverse and a solid representation of the blockchain industry.
One difference with this Roundtable from the previous one was that the Bitcoin capacity and consensus issue was on the forefront of many people’s minds. This presented some unique opportunities and challenges. Ultimately there was a greater amount of understanding of all sides and broad agreement that capacity must be increased and that how human interaction is made in this industry should be improved.
Originally (and still really) the Roundtable came about from a shared desire for friends in this industry to get together, meet some new friends and discuss this technology we all love so much.
Last year we had many short talks and demos and a couple great guest speakers: Josh Rushing of Al Jazeera and Jeffery Tucker of Liberty.me.
This year we wanted to emphasize what people liked most last time: the sidebar discussions and the open Roundtable format. The challenge with this is that the majority of the participants wanted to discuss blocksize. This led to additional challenges as not all people had equal knowledge or ability to move the discussion forward.
We started Friday with a fun cocktail party and opening dinner. The goofy photo booth was a nice ice breaker and the Viking helmet and knight helmets were the most popular.
Saturday morning we began the main sessions. We had a round the room intro with the who’s who of the industry: developers, CEOs and other leading voices introducing themselves. Our first speaker was Patrick Byrne, PhD, CEO of Overstock who discussed the settlement market and Wall Street.
Following Patrick was Jake Mazeluwicz PhD, a human error expert with JMA Associates. Jake discussed his research and work in areas such as aviation and nuclear safety where no amount of error is acceptable. The Bitcoin industry has had costly errors and will no doubt have them again, perhaps a focus on human error will help some errors be avoided.
After the first two guest speakers, the aim was to have a very short, perhaps 10–15 minute, development of a list of central principals about what Bitcoin is. The goal of this was too quickly remind us how much we have in common and how we can agree. Unfortunately, with so many people in the room and varied opinions on wording this ended up being a bit of a time drain so we moved to alternate ideas and formats.
After this we had a large group discussion, Bobby Lee moderated, then we broke for smaller groups, then had lunch, returned and continued the discussions. In the late afternoon the group broke and former M1 Heavyweight Champion of the World, Deuce Garner and his team came during the break as a special guest and led some demos, stretching and sparring.
After a few punches and continued discussion, most people congregated for drinks and more discussion until dinner. After dinner we had working groups a poker game and a group who played the board game Resistance.
On Sunday we opened with guest speaker Samy Kamkar who discussed his hacking career in an amusing and engaging way. Michael Perklin updated the group on the upcoming Bitcoin Foundation DevCore event in Toronto which will again be cooperating with C4. Jason King did a quick demo of his new app, Unsung, which helps people donate unused food to homeless people.
Around mid morning a smaller group of some of the leading voices on various sides of the capacity discussion convened in a meeting room and the majority of participants joined in a set of panel discussions led by developers and CEOs and moderated by Craig Sellars. A non-financial blockchain group formed and a non-Bitcoin financial group formed for more specialized discussion.
The day concluded with a larger panel discussion which highlighted much of what all major sides agree on: in general, most of the well known voices on the capacity matter want more capacity, they also generally want larger blocks. We also discussed ways to make future technical debates more productive. We drafted a basic statement of standards for how we treat each other in the space and agreed by a show of hands to follow this code. The written version will be circulated presently.
We closed with a review of some of the general central principles to Bitcoin and am agreement to strongly consider having two of these Satoshi Roundtable events annually.
Satoshi Roundtable II Participants included (in alphabetical order):
Gabriel Abed, CEO, Bitt
Charles Allen, CEO, BTCS
Gavin Andresen, MIT / Bitcoin Foundation
Brian Armstrong, CEO, Coinbase
Adam Back, President, Blockstream
David Bailey, CEO, yBitcoins
Mike Belshe, CEO, BitGo
Patrick Byrne, CEO, Overstock / T0
Michael Cao, CEO, zoomhash
Dave Carlson, CEO, Mega Big Power
Daniel Castagnoli, CCO Exodus
Sam Cole, CEO, KNC Miner
Matt Corallo, Core Developer
Luke Dashjr, Core Developer
Anthony Di Iorio, CDO-Toronto Stock Exchange, Founder-Ethereum/Decentral/Kryptokit
Jason Dorsett, Early Adopter
Evan Duffield, Founder/Lead Scientist, Dash
Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, Partner/ Co-Founder, Tally Capital
Thomas France, Founder, Ledger
Yifo Guo, Tech Developer/ Early Adopter
David Johnston, Chairman, Factom
Samy Kamkar, Super Hacker
Alyse Killeen, Partner, Venture Capital Investor
Jason King, Founder, Unsung
Mike Komaransky, Cumberland Mining
Peter Kroll, Founder, bitaddress.org
Bobby Lee, CEO, BTC China, Vice-Chairman of the Board, Bitcoin Foundation
Charlie Lee, Director of Engineering, Coinbase/Founder of Litecoin
Eric Lombrozo, Founder, Ciphrex Corp / Developer
Marshall Long, CTO, Final Hash
Matt Luongo, CEO, Fold
Jake Mazelewicz, Ph.D. JMA Associates (guest speaker) Human performance researcher
Alex Morcos, Hudson Trading/ Core Developer
Neha Narula, MIT, Director of DCI — Digital Currency Initiative
Dawn Newton, Co-Founder, COO, Netki
Justin Newton, Founder CEO, Netki
Stephen Pair, Co-Founder/CEO, BitPay Inc.
Michael Perklin, President, C4 — CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium / Board Member, Bitcoin Foundation
Alex Petrov, CIO, BitFury
Phil Potter, CSO, Bitfinex
Francis Pouliot, Director, Bitcoin Embassy, Board Member, Bitcoin Foundation
JP Richardson, Chief Technical Officer, Exodus
Jamie Robinson, QuickBt
Jez San, Angel Investor
Marco Santori, Partner, Pillsbury
Scott Scalf, EVP/Head of Tech Team, Alpha Point
Craig Sellars, CTO, Tether
Ryan Shea, Co-Founder, One Name
Greg Simon, CEO & Co-Founder Ribbit! Me / President, Bitcoin Association
Paul Snow, CEO Factom, Texas Bitcoin Conference
Riccardo Spagni, Monero
Nick Spanos, Founder, Bitcoin Center NYC
Elizabeth Stark, Co-Founder & CEO, Lightning
Marco Streng, CEO, Genesis Mining
Nick Sullivan, CEO, ChangeTip
Paul Sztorc, Truthcoin
Michael Terpin, CEO, Transform Group
Peter Todd, Core Developer
Joseph Vaughn Perling, New Liberty Dollar
Roger Ver, CEO, Memory Dealers / Bitcoin.com
Aaaron Voisine, CEO, Breadwallet
Zooko Wilcox, CEO, Z Cash
Shawn Wilkinson, Founder, Storj
Micah Winkelspecht, CEO, Gem
also, representatives from Blockchain, Bain Capital Ventures, Mycelium, Fidelity Investments and others.
