Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #49 [2018-11-09]

A brand new technical conference is hitting the bitcoin space this week.

Loosely inspired by the well-known Scaling Bitcoin workshops, the French bitcoin community will host the Breaking Bitcoin conference in Paris, on September 9 and 10. The conference has an explicit focus on security and is targeted at an audience with an understanding of the technical aspects of bitcoin.

“All of the talks and panels will have different angles that all tie in to this theme,” co-organizer Elizabeth Stark told bitcoin Magazine.

The Breaking bitcoin conference was born out of discussions on the CryptoFR Slack, a discussion platform for the growing developer community in France. A group of volunteers, including French bitcoin community member Pierre Lorcery, Chainsmiths managing director Kevin Loaec and Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca, as well as California-based Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark, decided to organize the technical event.

“The idea was simple,” said Stark, who has previously been involved with organizing Scaling bitcoin workshops. “We made a weekend out of the types of talks we see at developer meetups around the world and invited some of our favorite speakers to Paris.”

Breaking bitcoin’s focus on bitcoin’s security is unique in the space. Where Scaling bitcoin mostly focuses on how to improve the technology in a number of ways, including scalability, fungibility, privacy, and more, Breaking bitcoin instead highlights all the different ways in which bitcoin can be attacked and how these attacks can be defended against.

“Talks will range from social and political attack vectors, to spam attacks, to layer 2 security, to hardware attacks, to secure and usable applications,” Stark said. “This is, as far as I know, the first ever technical conference focused solely on bitcoin security. The goal of the event is to have a true community-driven, cypherpunk conference, and our hope is that we’ve delivered on this.”

Speakers and panelists in Paris include Bitcoin Core contributors Eric Lombrozo and Peter Todd, Libbitcoin developers Amir Taaki and Eric Voskuil, Lightning Network developers Dr. Christian Decker and Laolu Osuntokun, BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp, Electrum developer Thomas Voegtlin, Venture Capitalist Alyse Killeen, and many more.

Tickets start at €100 (~$120), with room for up to 300 attendees.