/ Tim Kindberg - Blockchain for sceptics

Lately, as a former scholar of distributed systems, including consensus protocols, I’ve become fascinated by the debate surrounding digital currency Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems such as Ethereum. In this talk I will explain why I'm sceptical about the technologies that underlie them, summarise the case against the hype, and look at what needs to be done.

/ About Tim

Dr. Tim Kindberg (http://champignon.net) is a computer scientist and founder of digital technology company matter II media (http://matter2media.com) whose products include social video platforms Vorb (http://vorb.me) and Nth Screen (http://nthscreen.tv). He is based in Bristol's Pervasive Media Studio. He is co-author of the textbook Distributed Systems - Concepts and Design (http://cdk5.net) and has been visiting professor at the University of Bath and ITU Copenhagen. He has many years of experience of industrial R&D in distributed, mobile and pervasive computing, and was a senior researcher at HP Labs in Palo Alto and Bristol for ten years.

/ John Hardy - What is money and why is Bitcoin so revolutionary?

92% of the world’s money is now held as digital records as opposed to physical cash. Since Bitcoin is also a digital record - what makes it different? 
For something so deeply ingrained in society, we rarely question what money even is. To understand Bitcoin we need not only understand how it works as a technology, we must also answer the deeper social question of what money is and what gives it its value. This talk will attempt to establish just that.

/ About John

John Hardy has been a self-confessed Bitcoin fanatic since 2011. A background in both finance and software development puts him in the unique position of being able to recognise the value of Bitcoin from both a technical and economic perspective. He has been committed to advocating Bitcoin through his blog SeeBitcoin.com, and also to developing new ideas to help Bitcoin realise its potential.