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Lotte Houwingis a file coordinator for the Sleepwet at the Public Interest Litigation Project, a five-year project of The Jurists’ Commission for Human Rights in The Netherlands. She will talk about fighting mass surveillance through strategic litigation.

Nine de Vries is a project officer for Amnesty International’s Security and Human Rights Program in the Netherlands. In this role she concentrates on the subject of state-sponsored communications surveillance and what her organization considers the flaws in the Dutch Intelligence and Security Services Act of 2017.

Ian Grigg is one of the pioneers of financial cryptography. He is the creator of the Ricardian Contract, a secure approach to registering the intent of a legal agreement in a system like a work a work of software. He also co-invented triple-entry accounting, an early form of shared ledger like that used in today’s blockchains.

Teun van Dongen is a lecturer at Leiden University and an expert on terrorism. He previously worked as a policy analyst at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS), a think tank in The Netherlands, and has served the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counter Terrorism.

Jordan Earls is the lead developer and co-founder of Qtum, a hybrid blockchain that integrates a modified version of the Bitcoin core network infrastructure with an enhanced version of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. He will talk about this enhancement, known as the x86 VM, which provides an x86-compatible operating system for decentralized applications.

Hans de Zwart is the executive director of Bits of Freedom, the leading Dutch organization for digital citizen’s rights. He returns to Bitcoin Wednesday to talk about the surveillance state and the upcoming national referendum on the new law known as the Sleepwet.

Tech journalist Francisco van Jole will be session chair on 7 February 2017. Francisco is currently the editor of Joop, the news and opinion site of Dutch broadcaster BNN VARA. He has appeared frequently on various television and radio programs and has covered science and technology for many newspapers and magazines, including De Volkskrant.

Lawrence H. Whiteis a professor of Economics at George Mason University and an expert on the theory and history of banking and money. He is the author of The Clash of Economic Ideas and The Theory of Monetary Institutions and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. He has been a visiting research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, a visiting lecturer at the Swiss National Bank, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Arnold Daniels and Rick Schmitz are co-founders of LegalThings, a platform for digitizing legal agreements with Blockchain technology. The duo won a blockchain hackathon sponsored by the Ministry of Justice in September 2017 which earned them an assignment to create the first digitized law on the blockchain. They will talk about the challenges of creating legally valid agreements with smart contracts.

Right now is one of the most exciting times to be involved in the sector. Everyone is talking about it, especially the skeptics. A journalist recently asked me for a […]