After Zurich I stuck around Europe, visiting a number of places in the Netherlands, as well as Milan. Ended up being a very busy trip - I wasn’t exactly sightseeing! - and among other work I gave three talks and taught a Bitcoin developer workshop. I also found out that sixty year old Italians are way better than me at football, but that’s another story…

I think the most interesting is from when I visited BlockchainLab.it in Milan. I talked about the work I’m doing on Dex, a deterministic expressions language I’m developing based on research commissioned by Christopher Allen of Alacrity Software to further Smart Signatures, as well as prior research I did for my Proofchains work. I didn’t have a specific time limit - or any preparation for that matter - so I wound up giving a fairly comprehensive ground up overview of how deterministic expressions could be used as a building block for better ways to build digital identities and signatures. Secondly, I talked about how Dex could be used to define and validate client-side verified transactional state-machines. This research is working towards making so-called “smart contracts” possible using decentralized consensus systems like Bitcoin for anti-replay, without putting all the “logic” in the consensus system itself - think telephone vs. the internet. I also believe this approach has a good potential for scalability, both in centralized and decentralized environments (e.g. treechains).

I was hoping to do a better writeup to accompany the talk, but I’ve been pretty sick for the past few days, so I’m just going to put it up as-is. My apologies for the poor video quality!

Second is the Bitcoin Developer workshop I taught in Baarn. Pretty much the whole thing was filmed, as well as streamed live, and they’re just beginning to put up high quality video of it. Not sure what their release schedule will be, but here’s the first video:

At Bitcoin Arnhem I did a fairly introductory talk about the various options we have available for scaling Bitcoin; someone in the audience took this rather shaky video. I also did a repeat of this talk for Bitcoin Milano, but AFAIK no video exists of it.

Finally next week I’m giving a hands-on talk for developers about using CLTV and CSV at the Toronto Blockchain Training Conference - a little closer to home!