Jeff Tucker

Editorial Director, AIER.org

Bio: Jeffrey Tucker is an early adopter of cryptocurrency who was out in front with the intellectual defense of the theory, practice, and future of synthetic monies and assets. He was one of the first writers in the tradition of Austrian economics to explain the viability of the currency as an alternative to national monies and the realization of F.A. Hayek’s vision of the denationalization of money and choice in currency. He has written more than 200 articles on the topic in the scholarly and popular press.

Keynote: People think it is an investment. A speculation. Maybe a bubble. But actually the distributed ledger allows humankind to achieve something that has never before been possible. All the rest is an application.

Paul Sztorc

Chief Scientist, Truthcoin

Bio: Paul is Passionate about knowledge and scientific truth, (and the scientific methods used to uncover the truth), I've explored the fields of economics and psychology, to look at what/how/why people know what they know, and why/how they reveal that information.

Keynote: Sidechains: Revenge of the Bitcoin Maximalist - Will we live in a multi-token future? Bitcoin dominance has gone from 95% → 33% can anything stop the bleeding? The idea of sidechain has been floating around since 2013 and aims to create a protocol where chains compete on tech but all share the same 21 million bitcoins.

Talk: Sidechain Use case: Prediction Markets - Today the phrase "corrupt politician" is redundant, and public opinion is shamelessly manipulated at all levels of the media, with better technology we will be able to return to an era of competent governance and responsible discourse.

Brian Hoffman

CEO, OB1

Bio: Brian is the CEO of OB1, and the project lead of OpenBazaar. He started OpenBazaar in April 2014, and founded OB1 nearly a year later. Brian is a developer with a background in building encryption software for managing healthcare records.

Talk: OpenBazaar - Building Decentralized Applications in a Multi-coin World

Shawn Wilkerson

Founder and CSO, Storj Labs Inc.

Bio: Shawn Wilkinson is the cofounder and chief strategy officer at Storj Labs where he oversees company strategy, vision and architecture of the Storj network. He also works directly with community members to understand the requirements of developers, users and farmers to ensure their needs align with product development. He graduated from Morehouse College with Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

Talk: In the modern era, data runs the world and the majority of your data sits with a handful of cloud providers, giving them detailed visibility into your life and your business. Decentralized cloud storage aims to balance the scales in favor of consumers by providing a platform that is private at the foundational level, meaning no one can access data except the data owner. In this session, Shawn Wilkinson with Storj Labs will share how decentralized cloud storage powered by blockchain technology is creating an ecosystem that is more secure, private and more affordable than traditional cloud storage solutions.

Wayne Vaughan

Founder/CEO, Tierion

Jameson Lopp

Team Lead, BitGo

Bio: Jameson Lopp is the infrastructure team lead for BitGo, an enterprise digital asset security service based in Palo Alto. He is the creator of Statoshi, a fork of Bitcoin Core that analyzes statistics of Bitcoin nodes, founder of Mensa’s Bitcoin Special Interest Group, and founder of the Triangle Bitcoin & Business meetup. In his spare time he waxes philosophical upon the nature of Bitcoin.

Talk: Forking Fun: Altcoin Airdrop Challenges Conquered - A plethora of Bitcoin hard forks descended upon the crypto ecosystem in 2017 with little notice. Jameson will cover a variety of issues that BitGo had to deal with while building support for these shared history assets. He'll also make best practice recommendations for protocol developers who are thinking of using Bitcoin's UTXO set as distribution schemes for new crypto assets.

James Worthington

CEO, Belltane LLC

Bio: James Worthington is the founder and CEO of Belltane, a full service Hyperledger Solution Provider. James' has held a variety of business and technical positions in his extensive career, including Industrial Engineer (Apparel), Director of Material Management (Healthcare), Principle Architect (BI and Multi-Dimensional Analytics) and Director of Enterprise Reporting and Analytics Strategy (Consulting). He is currently designing and delivering Hyperledger Blockchain for Business solutions.

Talk: Whose Data? OUR Data! - The impact of the transition from ‘My Data’ to ‘Our Data’ utilizing Blockchain shared data networks is still poorly understood. We will use Belltane’s live, publically accessible demonstration network to help clarify the importance and utility of multi-organization Blockchain shared data networks. All audience members can simultaneously participate live within the application. Be sure to charge your devices and join the fun!

Wayne Chang

Proprietor, WYC Technology

Bio: Wayne Chang is a software business consultant specializing in product innovation and security. With a background in software development and the evaluation of new business models, he helps organizations make decisions and explore solutions that support their strategies and meet their business needs. Wayne has developed innovative solutions for IBM, the MIT Media Lab, and numerous software startups. He currently works on discovering useful token models at Consensus Systems.

Talk: Blockchain Stuff For Developers - You're a developer who is extremely suspicious of all the excitement around the blockchain. Come find out from another developer about what's under the hood from a technical standpoint. We will go over the broad technical architecture of blockchains today with some interspersed deep dives into various codebases. You scrupulous devs are not the heroes that the blockchain ecosystem deserves, but the heroes that it needs.

Cherie Duncan

COO, Dominode

Brandon Mintz

President, Bitcoin Depot

Talk: The value of Bitcoin ATMs during Bitcoin`s mainstream adoption - Entering into the cryptocurrency ecosystem can be complex and time consuming for many. In 2018, there are now countless ways to purchase Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies known as Altcoins. This discussion will cover the value of Bitcoin ATMs compared to alternatives when making these purchases as well as the best practices when doing so.

Elizabeth Strickler

Creative Media Industries Institute

Yuri Eliezer

Partner, Founder Legal

Talk: Corporate Governance on the Blockchain 101 - Smart contract platforms to run a company; from equity distributions, profit sharing, voting, asset management, employee time tracking, salary payments, contractor payments. Democratic Autonomous Organizations - how they are established on the legal/business end, and how they function on the technological end.

Peter Rehm

CPA

Bio: Peter is a CPA who has worked and consulted within the banking industry as a corporate controller, financial reporting manager and senior systems technology development consultant at a succession of large firms including Bank of America, PNC Banks, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and mortgage industry giant Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA). After graduating from Rutgers Business School, he started his career working with Big 4 firm Ernst & Young and where he spent a fair amount of time preparing and reviewing corporate and personal tax returns. After Ernst & Young, while working for a small bank he was asked to set up and manage its Fedwire wire transfer system, a smaller version of the widely used Swift money transfer system. At that time he came to appreciate how important value transfer systems are to the world economy. Peter believes that cryptocurrencies are the democratic evolutionary descendants of Swift and looks forward to advancements in blockchain technologies.

Talk: Taxation of Blockchain-based Cryptocurrencies - The arrival of cryptocurrency to more widespread global use has resulted in questions of how the United States in 2017 will tax blockchain oriented cryptocurrency transactions that 1.) Are new to the business lexicon (forks/ airdrops/ mining), 2.) Are covered by existing laws (capital gains and losses/ barter), or 3.) Have possibly been incorrectly reported in prior years by taxpayers (Use of Code Section 1031 as previously applied to cryptocurrency swaps).

Michael Iglesias

DevOps Engineer, Candid Partners

Bio: Michael is a Software Engineer currently working on several different projects aimed at automating the provisioning of infrastructure in the cloud. He became a blockchain enthusiast several months ago and has since tinkered quite a bit in writing Smart Contracts & developing dapps.

Talk: Learn by developing your own in JavaScript - we are going to go over how you can build your own Blockchain using JavaScript, Websockets, and a few other complementary tools & technologies. We'll take a look at transactions, and how these transactions are signed and included in blocks. We'll take a look at generating new blocks and appending them to the blockchain. Also, we'll look at how proof-of-work is implemented, and go over a few other rudimentary aspects of blockchains.

Marie Antoinette

CEO, C2Legacy Technologies

Nadine Hachouche

Developer Evangelist, Storj

Rika Sukenik

Senior Consultant, Deloitte

Michael B Casey

Consultant, Black Marble Holdings LLC

Bio: Michael Casey has over a decade of experience in data & analytics in fortune 50 companies and has been an ardent enthusiast in in the cryptocurrency space since 2012 after being fascinated by patterns in Bitcoin price movements. He accurately predicted the massive run-up in Bitcoin price in 2017 back in December of 2016.

Talk: Speculative Bitcoin Adoption/Price Theory - Understand and explore the long term trends in bitcoin's (and in general cryptocurrency's) exponential increase in price and adoption. Utilizing well worn concepts such as S-Curves and Gartner Hype Cycles, see one vision of how the cryptocurrency market will likely behave as it grows towards it's eventual final adoption level. Learn about the fractal patterns present in the price charts and see how "while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes."