DefCon and Crypto 2022

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from beautiful and coastal santa barbara today is august 14 2022 and i am here at crypto is an annual conference that's been going on for quite some time i think now three four decades at university of california santa barbara and it's the largest and most prominent cryptography conference in the entire world contending with eurocrypt and the rest of the gang at least for iacr events so we have a long history as a company attending this event because this is actually the first event that we rolled out orophorus the original auroboris protocol or boris classic back in 2013 2017 [Music] and actually we're here to talk about useful proof of work alongside some other interesting advancements that the team has been slowly but surely chipping away at so it's one of my favorite events to attend and like many things in life that are events that are physical it was taken away by covid and i believe it was remote for a little while and this is the first time i've had a chance to attend post covent previously i was just at defcon defcon is one of those events that everybody talks about it's one of the largest aggregations of hackers black hats white hats and everything in between in the entire world and usually held i think in las vegas this time around it was a kind of a strange event it was split between caesar's forum blink and the flamingo and they just had a bizarre mask mandate which didn't make a lot of sense i know some of you everybody listening at this point has made up their opinion the matter i have two there's really no science behind any of these things the cdc doesn't recommend it so you say trust the experts the experts don't request it the state health department of nevada doesn't request it every casino and play and circus olay and all these things densely packed 60 000 people the las vegas raiders games don't require it but i guess the conference organizers of defcon know more about epidemiology than the central centers for disease control or all the state people and security theory are all around a disease more contagious than measles is apparently going to be thwarted by a cloth mask okay but thank you twitter warriors for all your magical knowledge about these things but that aside and the meanness behind some of the organizers about it i was kind of hoping for a conference that was a little bit better put together it was quite chaotic and hard to navigate and hard to know what was going on where badges were really cool and there were some interesting presentations unfortunately a lot of them were phoned in there were some people presenting in person but a lot of presentations were remote so i wasn't too turned on or happy about the event i really like ctrsa and some of these other infosec events so maybe better luck next year with defcon i don't know physical events are still a little challenging these days in the post covert era nobody knows what to do or how to behave and there's a myriad of opinions and i guess everybody's just trying to get back into the swing of things that said i do attend these things because i i'm always interested in information security the latest and greatest in physical security hardware based security software security these types of things as well as the practical implications of what we do crypto is a theoretical conference mostly when you go to it's a lot of math it's a very involved thing and there's people talking about the nuances of multi-party computation and the latest post-quantum algorithm and having ideas about how to use lattice-based crypto for zero knowledge proofs and these types of things are are quite quite deep information security is where the rubber hits the road where you take this type of knowledge and you try to make it practical in one way or another and you try to figure out how do you in some form or fashion i'll get things to work in real life use cases meaning on your phone make it work on your laptop and so we're obviously quite interested because at the end of the day when you look at a cryptocurrency it goes all the way from the deep theory to formal specifications to actual implementation to actually running with human beings who are subject to social engineering and other factors which can make things fail fast and often so it's good to have a mixture of conferences of the black hat white hat everyday information security and to the theoretical where you actually get to talk about the math and science behind the art of cryptography and the science of cryptography so these are events i look forward to and i'm glad i'm here in santa barbara to actually hang out and talk with some of the elite cryptographers and see what they're thinking about later in the year later in the month excuse me i'll be at stanford for the opening of our lab at stanford which involves it's a cryptocurrency and cryptography lab for d5 protocols and for all kinds of different cryptocurrency areas like consensus and so forth and we'll have more to say at the end of the month about that but i believe the opening is going to occur august 29th and we've been working real hard putting those pieces together so i'll be in california more than once kind of traveling all around these days vossel is looking good it's kind of funny when i go to all these events people seem to think on the internet that everything just gets put on hold and nobody's working it's as if the 700 people the company just go on vacation or something like that turns out when you have an organization with a group of people people do things in parallel go figure so 135 3 is out and that's probably going to be the node unless something is discovered that the hartford combinator event is pushed for so it's being rapidly adopted and tested and played around with by the community and there was a mid-month a month update that was done and things are looking pretty good as mentioned vassal was one of the hardest and just most involved updates because it touched a lot of different things there were a lot of new features there was a strict adherence the sip process there were consensus related upgrades and a lot of upgrades related to pluto's with actual apps deployed and more than 200 exchanges have to upgrade and believe it or not twitter i i know you don't think that there's any daps on cardano but there's actually a lot of code that's been deployed and because of that you had to make sure everything was backwards compatible and things were working properly so we worked through it as an ecosystem and i'm pretty happy with 135.