09-28, 16:30–17:00 (Europe/Berlin), Community Ampitheatre
Consensus mechanisms are hotly debated, but often times handwaving, short sightedness, and blinkered thinking prevents an accurate view of the security they provide or the factors which will determine their suitability. In this talk we will look at different consensus mechanism, "analog" world factors which will impact these choices, and how many projects are assuming much greater levels of security and stability than is actually provided by the consensus mechanisms they've chosen.
Ryan Lackey is Chief Security Officer at Evertas, the world's leading insurance provider dedicated to the cryptocurrency industry. He has been involved in crypto since the Cypherpunks mailing list in the mid 1990s, and has founded several security, privacy, and infrastructure companies, as well as worked for a variety of small to huge enterprises around the world.
Prior to Evertas, Ryan was CSO and on the board of a top-10 crypto foundation in Switzerland, founded a single-use high security computing hardware service for high-risk travel, and started a secure virtualization startup, funded by Y Combinator, which was sold to Cloudflare in 2014 (where he then worked for several years as product manager for security products, including launching a secure DNS registrar and the first Internet-scale free SSL certificate program for tens of millions of sites.)
Ryan is most well-known for starting the world's first physical datahaven, HavenCo, on the self-declared sovereign island of Sealand in the North Sea. He also worked on gold-backed anonymous digital cash in the Caribbean and bootstrapped a war-zone defense contracting business providing satellite and wireless Internet while driving around active conflict zones in old BMW sedans.
Ryan lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico and is also a security and technology investor and travel hacker in his copious spare time.