FC in Kota Kinabalu

A night flight from Tokyo, and a week of talks, sea and sun light!

This year the Financial Crypto and Data Secure Conference did a little detour from its usual venue and came to Asia, and for the first time to Malaysia. From Japan it takes a night flight to Kuala Lumpur and then to Kota Kinabalu in Borneo. Only a night flight is ok to take. A trip to the other side of the planet, that is, to the Caribbean, would be a different story to attend it.

Despite the COVID19 outbreak in the region and all the constraints it brings, several researchers made to Malaysia, although there were a few absences which the FC chairs managed to mitigate by asking the authors to record the presentations, and even call the them via Skype for Q&A after the talks.

Talks

There were a couple of talks that drawn out attention because we are more closely looking into to, specially those related to payment channels, including a SoK paper similar to one we released last year on Eprint.

During the poster session I was surprised by one of the works because the author explained he relied on a technique that ``programs the generic group model’’. The reason of my surprise is that I have a work from 9 years ago that introduces programmability in the Generic Group Model. Needless to say I was glad to see it being used (not sure, if it was cited though).

Two other works that I plan to check are about privacy-preserving atomic swap by Deshpande and Herlihy, and uncooperatively closing of payment channels by Nagamine and Matsuura. The former was also presented at SCIS 2020.

IOHK

We also had a few works by my colleagues from IOHK:

• Dionysis Zindros - Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work
• Kostis Karantias - Proof-of-Burn
• Alexander Nemish - Marlowe
• Alexnder Nemish (on behalf of authors)- The Extended UTxO Model

More pictures!

Terima kasih, Malaysia! It was a really good week down there. i even had time to work in a Crypto submission. Fingers crossed!