welcome-remarks

Welcome remarks

Dan Boneh

https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1230178753805836288

https://cbr.stanford.edu/sbc20/

livestream: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JhZUItnyQ0k

wifi: Stanford, blockchain/blockchain

Okay, we're going to get started in five minutes. We're going to get started. We have a fully packed day. Everybody can grab their seats and then we can get started.

Alright. So let's do this.

Okay, welcome to the fourth Stanford Blockchain Conference. It's been a lot of fun running this conference for a couple of years now. There's a few quick administrative things I wanted to say. If you want to get on the wifi network, then just go to the Stanford wifi network. There's Stanford and Stanford Visitor. You can go to the Stanford one and click on "sponsored account" and then use the very secure username/password blockchain/blockchain and that will get you on to the Stanford network. Either one will work, though.

The entire event for the three days is going to be livestreamed. The links are on the program website so you can see them there too. If you want to watch the livestream, you can see that in the other rooms. If you want to tweet about the conference or things being said, there's a hashtag for that. There's also a parking lot and a parking code: 6162 and parking is on us. So just remember that for the following days.

This conference is about bringing together two communities: the practiocioners who run vafious blockchain projects, and academic researchers trying to answer questions. We've tried to make this a technical conference. This is specifically about technology. We want to discuss new ideas, research challenges, and obviously researchers like me get interested in new questions. Maybe the speakers have some open questions they would like the community to think about. The goal is to bring together the practicioners and the academics in this space.

This conference got a lot of registrations. We have 1400 people registered which is remarkable. If they all come here and all in person, we're going to have some interesting problems. But I can tell you that actually given the number of registrants, we tried to get the Stanford football stadium for the conference but unfortunately they wouldn't let us so we settled for this beautiful facility. Since it will be so crowded, we are asking people to squeeze in. We're going to have to share the space.

The other thing is, there's overflow space at the other end of the building. The whole building is ours for the whole three days. We have streaming on the other end, there will be TV screens so you can watch everything. It's much more comfortbale to sit over there because there's tables and power. You can go to the other side of the building and it's pretty close.

The other thing is that if you want to talk, try not to talk at the far end of the room and take the conversation outside instead and it will help the speakers and audience.

The program itself is organized by myself, Benedikt Bunz, and Byron Gibson. A round of applause to Benedikt and Byron. We had 118 submissions, and we accepted 25. We had an accept rate of 21%, plus 7 invited talks. If you still want to speak, then tomorrow we're going to have a lightning talks session. This is tomorrow at noon. Anyone can come and speak for 2 minutes about whatever topic they like, even if you have a job opening that you would like to advertise. The only thing that we ask is that you sign up on the schedule on the program's website. cbr.stanford.edu/sbc20/ and if you look at the session there's a link here to sign up to speak at the lightning talk and submit a proposal, and submit slides if you want, and those will be presented during the 2 minute presentation. Depending on the number of submissions, we might have to downsample but I think we can get through everyone's talks.

Let's see. The program itself was selected by the program committee. We had a very large program committee to help select from a large number of papers. They did a lot of work to make this all possible, so again a round of applause for the program committee. We hope you will do it again next year.

The reason why we're able to run this large conference, and you'll notice registation is free. We're able to do this because we're fortunate to have fantastic sponsors for the research program and the conference. The Center for Blockchain Research is funded by Ethereum, protocol Labs, Interchain Foundation, OmiseGo, Dfinity, Polychain, ConsenSys, LemnisCap, and Calibra. This is how we are able to keep the conference open and free for everyone to attend. So thank you all.

Let me tell you about Stanford. This is a beautiful campus. During the breaks, walk around and see the sights. I'll walk through a few highlights. There's also Stanford Blockchain Club https://blockchain.stanford.edu/ who are helping out.

We will run from 9-5 the program will run 9-5. Lunch will be at 1230 served outside. You can walk outside, grab your lunch and mingle, or you can walk around campus. There will be lots of space for people to mingle during lunch. Tonight we will have a reception at 520pm. It will be right outside the lecture hall. Dinner for Thursday/Friday you're on your own. The lightning talks are tomorrow at noon.

Overflow setaing with tables and power is located on the other side of the conference building. No smoking within 25 feet of the building. Hand sanitizer dispensers are provided throughout the conference venue. We put hand sanitizers around the whole room so that people can use them at their pleasure.

Sponsorship: These transcripts are sponsored by Blockchain Commons.

Disclaimer: These are unpaid transcriptions, performed in real-time and in-person during the actual source presentation. Due to personal time constraints they are usually not reviewed against the source material once published. Errors are possible. If the original author/speaker or anyone else finds errors of substance, please email me at kanzure@gmail.com for corrections or contribute online via github/git. I sometimes add annotations to the transcription text. These will always be denoted by a standard editor's note in parenthesis brackets ((like this)), or in a numbered footnote. I welcome feedback and discussion of these as well.

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