Silicon Valley Bitcoin Meetup - 6pm @ Plug and Play Tech Center

The Silicon Valley Bitcoin Meetup is hosted weekly, every Tuesday from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, at Plug and Play Tech Center's 2nd Floor Game Room.

Please join us and meet other Bitcoiners!

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1ST FEATURED TALK

Dr. Shiva Kintali, @kintali, Homepage: http://shivakintali.org

Title of the talk: Blockchain Scalability - Algorithms, Data Structures and Game Theory

Bitcoin (and the underlying Blockchain technology) is one of the most important technological breakthroughs of our lifetime. Unfortunately Bitcoin (and other blockchain-based platforms) can only process less than 10 transactions per second, thus increasing the transaction fees and making it impossible to use Bitcoin as a daily currency. In order to compete with companies like Visa (processing tens of thousands of transactions per second) and truly disrupt the existing centralized financial solutions, we need to design and develop new algorithms that are ultra-scalable, decentralized and incentive-compatible. Improving Scalability of Blockchain is one of most important open problems of this decade. In this talk, I will present some of the solutions and discuss the algorithms, data structures and game theory in these solutions.

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2ND FEATURED TALK

Calvin Liu, @venturacyber, COO & Cofounder, Ventura Enterprise Risk Management

Title of the talk: The dark side of Bitcoin: cryptocurrencies and cyber crime

This presentation will look at some of the ways by which cyber criminals use bitcoin, as shown through cases Ventura has worked on in 2017. This includes ransomware, extortion and cyber crime marketplaces.

Bio: Calvin is an EE who started designing on the AMD K6 and K7 processors. He spent 10 years in semiconductors including the formation of the Stingray Division in Motorola Semiconductor. Other roles include: Consulting Services Solution Architect, then Country Manager for Epic Design Technology in Synopsys Japan and Senior Manager at Cadence Design Technology. At Cadence, he was responsible for all technical and business interactions with at Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), including joint marketing, IP and new technology development. Calvin also spent 8 years in startups developing hardware, mobile apps and GIS/GPS systems. Calvin has been on the internet since 1987 and used one of the first 5000 IBM XTs. Calvin cofounded Ventura Enterprise Risk Management in 2015 where he serves as COO/CFO and delivers incident response and FAIR cyber risk quantification analysis.