MIT Bitcoin Expo 2020: Building the Stack

Hugo Uvegi

Published in

MIT Bitcoin Club Blog

3 min readJan 3, 2020

Join us March 7–8 at MIT!

Expo tickets: bit.ly/mitbtcexpo

Hackathon registration: bit.ly/mithackbtc

It feels like just yesterday we were mourning the death of Bitcoin. Crypto winter claimed its casualties, and unfortunately, Bitcoin was to be no more.

Psych!

Last year, we celebrated 10 years of Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency.

This year, the the MIT Bitcoin Club is excited to announce the 7th Annual Expo — MIT Bitcoin Expo 2020: Building the Stack!

Background

The MIT Bitcoin Club is a student and blockchain-enthusiasts run club at MIT, whose mission is to increase awareness and use of cryptocurrency and to provide forums where blockchain-related ideas, projects, programs, and businesses can be studied, discussed, and developed. The club has also organized the MIT Bitcoin Expo every year since 2014 — a two day conference focused on all things blockchain.

The club meets on a weekly basis to discuss the technology — both its merits and its challenges — and work on various projects. Lately, we’ve focused on improving our programming and cryptography skills, working through exercises in Jimmy Song’s Programming Bitcoin and learning about new scaling technologies like UTreeXO. Learning through experience speaks to the heart of MIT’s motto: Mens et Manus — “mind and hand” — and is one of the reasons we’re so excited for this year’s Expo.

7th Annual Expo

We are excited for you to join us in Cambridge for the 7th Annual Expo, to be held on March 7th and 8th, 2020 at MIT!

Last year was both a retrospective on the previous decade as well as a call to what the future may hold.

This year, we focus on the state of the art of the emerging protocol stack.

From efforts to optimize base-layer protocols and sustained interest in privacy integration to second-layer development and standardization, the past year has brought both incredible innovation and increasing scrutiny.

We were excited by the Taproot/Graftroot/Schnorr soft fork proposal; we are ever-anxious for the ETH2.0 hard fork; we love the existence of varied, yet standardized lightning implementations; and we continue to be intrigued by the precedent-setting SEC actions against a handful of ICO companies.

Still, with a growing developer- and user-base, it is important we build consistent, accessible, and clean tools and experiences. Constructing a distributed, censorship-resistant digital world requires intuitive structures be adopted and implemented.

Current infrastructure (such as HTTP over TCP/IP) communicates seamlessly and allows the common user and front-end developer alike to operate without necessarily understanding the intricacies of sending packets over the internet.

In Bitcoin and other public blockchain implementations we should strive for similar standards where developers can focus their efforts and users can operate under the assumption that other parts of the stack will work.

Recent articles (1, 2) focusing on the growing stack have spoken to what we see as central to the emerging Bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem. So we’ve decided to build a conference focusing on exactly that.

Join us in Cambridge, March 7–8!

This year’s expo is sure to be an exciting one. It will feature:

Many of the most interesting people from the bitcoin and blockchain space speaking on technically interesting topics!
A 24-hour hackathon, during which hackers will learn and build amazing projects!
The inaugural Cryptoeconomic Systems Conference (CES ‘20), co-located with this year’s expo!

To learn more and subscribe to our mailing list, visit our website at mitbitcoinexpo.org.

A big thank you to our early sponsors Castle Island Ventures and Sia for pledging to support this year’s Expo!