1) Eran Tromer on ZeroCash, and 2) Andrew Miller on Permacoin

Eran Tromer (http://cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/) from Tel Aviv University will speak on Zerocash, a new cryptocurrency that has true anonymity. Eran's co-author, Eli Ben-Sasson (http://eli.net.technion.ac.il/) presented preliminary info on Zerocash here (http://bit.ly/1q5G498); Zerocash is built on SCIP (http://www.scipr-lab.org/pub) and improves on Zerocoin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin). Also, Andrew Miller (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~amiller/) will speak on Permacoin (http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf), a new security technique for cryptocurrencies that allows distributed storage of petabytes of data. Andrew has also published on FawkesCoin (http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BM14-SPW-fawkescoin.pdf) and Mixcoin (http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/077). Both speakers will present similar material to us as they will present that same week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2014/program.html).

In addition to cryptographic details, we look forward to discussions on the real-world consequences of their work. Please come!