When Jed McCaleb discovered Bitcoin, there didn’t even exist an online marketplace to trade the cryptocurrency yet. The experienced founder who had earlier started file sharing site eDonkey, acted fast and started the first Bitcoin exchange MtGox which he later sold to now-infamous Mark Karpeles. Jed later founded the pioneering Ripple project before leaving to start Stellar. We discussed his journey through the industry and the ambitious plans Stellar has to create an open financial system that will give access to financial services to a much broader spectrum of humanity. Topics covered in this episode: Jed’s early involvement in the industry and founding of MtGox and subsequently Ripple Why Jed left Ripple and started Stellar How Ripple and Stellar differ The Stellar Consensus Protocol Why the organization behind Stellar is a non-profit foundation Stellar’s focus on developing markets and Nigeria in particular The role and distribution of Stellar’s currency Lumen Episode links: Stellar Website Stellar Consensus Protocol Bitcoin-Lumen Giveaway Stellar Graphic Novel Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/128

One of the major drawbacks of Bitcoin is its low transaction throughput. Maxing out only a handful of operations per second, there have been many proposals to scale it up so that it can compete with existing distributed database technologies. As the blockchain’s demand continues to increase, it’s unclear if the Bitcoin protocol will ever be able to handle thousands, if not millions of transactions per second. BigchainDB is taking a different approach. Rather than trying to scale up blockchain technology, it starts with a big data distributed database, RethinkDB, and adds blockchain features and characteristics. Trent Mcconaghy, Co-founder and CTO of Ascribe and BigchainDB, joins us to talk about how this protocol may become to databases, what IPFS and Ethereum are to distributed filestorage and computing, respectively. Able to perform more than one million writes per second and capacities in the petabytes, BigchainDB has the ambition to become the world’s public database platform. Topics covered in this episode: A brief update on Ascribe since Trent was last on the show The motivations behind BigchainDB and that problems it’s trying to solve How BigchainDB plans to solve the typical scalability bottlenecks found in blockchain protocols BigchainDB’s capacity, performance and latency characteristics BigchainDB’s consensus model, applied to RethinkDB Potential application for BigchainDB, in both centralised and decentralised application stacks Episode links: BigchainDB BigchainDB Whitepaper Ascribe Left Gallery 23vivi This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/126