As was previously announced, Jonas Ostman and I (Jeremy Rand) represented Namecoin at 34C3 in Leipzig, Germany. This was our first Congress, so we didn’t quite know what to expect, but we were pretty confident that it would be awesome. We were not disappointed. The CCC community is well-known for being friendly and welcoming to newcomers, and we greatly enjoyed talking to everyone there.

Namecoin gave 3 talks, all of which were hosted by the Monero Assembly and the Chaos West Stage. I expect 2 of those talks to have videos posted sometime later this month. Unfortunately, 1 of the talks suffered an audio issue in the recording, so it won’t have a video posted (but I will post the slides of that talk, as well as the other talks’ slides). The talks’ titles are:

  • Namecoin as a Decentralized Alternative to Certificate Authorities for TLS
  • Namecoin for Tor Onion Service Naming (And Other Darknets) (No video will be posted due to audio recording technical issues)
  • A Blueprint for Making Namecoin Anonymous

As usual for conferences that we attend, we engaged in a large number of conversations with other attendees. Also as usual, I won’t be publicly disclosing the content of those conversations, because I want people to be able to talk to me at conferences without worrying that off-the-cuff comments will be broadcast to the public. That said, I can say that a lot of very promising discussions happened regarding future collaboration with allied projects, and we’ll make any relevant announcements when/if such collaborations are formalized.

Huge thank you to the following groups who facilitated our participation:

We definitely intend to return for 35C3 in December 2018. Until then, Tuwat!