Friday Hacks #130, March 10
Posted on by Jethro Kuan
Hello folks, this week we’re very excited to have Virgil Griffith over to speak about Bitcoin, Ethereum, the dark web as well as the exciting prospects of legaltech.
Date/Time: Friday, March 10 at 7:00pm
Venue: The Hangar by NUS Enterprise
Bitcoin, Darkweb, Ethereum and LegalTech
Talk Description:
A showcase of recent work Virgil has done in the darkweb, blockchain, and legaltech space. Some highlights include:
- owning and operating the world’s largest search engine and proxy for the darkweb, //onion.link/, enabling all manner of analyses of darkweb content and traffic.
- a system by which regulators can freeze bitcoin accounts.
- an entrepreneurial graph to stand alongside the Erdos and Bacon collaboration graphs.
- the very first graph of the Ethereum contract ecosystem.
- an Ethereum powered light-weight replacement for commercial VPNs.
- the potential of a domain-specific language instantiating a “Periodic Table of Contracts” to negotiate contracts between IoT devices and revolutionize the creation of smart-contracts and traditional legal drafting.
Speaker Profile
Virgil Griffith is a postdoctoral fellow at smart.mit.edu, contractor for the Ethereum Foundation, and cofounder of the Legalese opensource project. Virgil’s primary interests are in smart-contracts/Ethereum, arcane corners of higher mathematics, and technologies that interplay privacy and transperancy for collective good. His favorite tools are information theory, graph theory, Haskell, and large harddrives. Virgil believes a rigorous formalization of obligation structures will bring about a global digitization with an impact of >1T dollars and is teaching himself deonitic logic and formal verification to make this happen. Virgil received his PhD from Caltech studying info-theoretic measures of quantifying the functional complexity of neural networks. His Erdős-Bacon number is 6. A New York Times biography dubbed him the “Internet Man of Mystery”.