Institutional Reform in the Age of Cryptography

Look at any review of the past decade and you will find Bitcoin standing strong as the one experiment that defined information technology for the past ten years. Such is its global relevance that 2019 marked the first time both the President of the United States of America and the President of the People’s Republic of China, referred to blockchains directly in their words. While Mr. Trump praised the might of the US Dollar as the leading global reserve currency, President Xi arguably contributed to hit the market hard when one of his speeches about blockchain technology inadvertently prompted BTC to go from a monthly low to a monthly high in less than one hour. Searches for the word “blockchain” on WeChat went from a 750,000 daily average up to 9 million, impacting the price of bitcoin on a 42% upward rally. The day Xi spoke was exactly 24 hours after Mark Zuckerberg testified to the US Congress on the merits of his corporate cryptocurrency, Libra. The growing geopolitical relevance of these networks is hard to deny. This talk will cover how cryptographic protocols will impact democracy in the coming decade.

SPEAKERS Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin.co -- An blockchain-based network for growing open source software with incentivization mechanics. He has a BS in Computer Science, 10 years of engineering leadership experience in startups and Open Source Software, and is a community organizer in the Boulder Colorado Tech Scene. Kevin believes strongly that Open Source Software Development should be sustainably funded. Gitcoin a one-stop shop that gives Software Developers the skills & connections to survive and thrive in this new blockchain ecosystem. You can find out more about Gitcoin at https://gitcoin.co and Kevin at https://owocki.com

Santiago Siri is founder of Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization backed by Y Combinator and Templeton Foundation building open source censorship resistant digital democracies. Also co-founder of Partido de la Red, a political party that ran for elections with candidates committed to people’s will online in 2013. Partner of Bitex.la, leading bitcoin exchange in South America operating from Buenos Aires since 2014. Author of “Hacktivismo”, published in 2015 by Random House. Argentine.

Jason Smythe is a proponent of the Blockchain technology and Software Engineer from South Africa. He started his blockchain journey ConsenSys as a blockchain engineer then he went on as a founding member of Adhara, where he helped build Project Khokha, a RTGS (real time gross settlement) system for the South African Reserve Bank (SARB). Prior to this he worked on a number of other early stage Ethereum projects, including building the withdraw DAPP, monitoring system and oracle for the Crypto20 project, which was the first tokenised index fund to go into production on the main Ethereum network. Now he is focussing his attention on Wildcards.world a fun and engaging platform that connects users to wildlife organisations via novel economic mechanisms. Jason is fascinated by radical economics, governance mechanisms and community currencies; and strives to engineer and build systems with new technology that solve problems of coordination, openness and transparency."

Michael Zargham is Decision Scientist, Research Engineer, Mathematician, Entrepreneur, Educator, and Founder. Focus 1) Academic grade R&D on Complex Adaptive systems, Swarm Intelligence and Algorithmic coordination. Primary objectives are simple local algorithms with provable relationships to desirable well-defined global properties using the weakest possible assumptions about agent behavior. Focus 2) Developing a rigorous & ethical engineering practice for design, testing, deployment, measurement and stewardship of social and economic systems; this takes a sustainable design mindset when considering flows of information and financial value.