Smart Contracts Day

Cryptography & Law: Information, Privacy and Smart Contracts

A single day in which expert speakers presented talks on the topic of Information, Privacy and Smart Contracts in the interdisciplinary field merging Cryptography and Law.

Watch whole conference as a YouTube playlist

Aggelos Kiayias:
Cryptography and Law, an Unexpected Encounter that was Obvious all Along

Burkhard Schafer:
Blockchain assisted e-voting and the law

Peter Van Valkenburgh:
Blockchains and Regulation: Why Open Matters

Christoph Sorge:
Legal requirements for cryptographic security: Necessity, annoyance, or both?

Dionysis Zindros:
Writing smart contracts in bitcoin

Darryl McAdams:
Writing Smart Contracts on Plutus

Panel:
The future of Cryptography & Law

Invited Speakers

Four of the world's experts on Smart Contracts spoke in our invited talks capturing different aspects of cryptography and law.

Aggelos Kiayias

Aggelos Kiayias

Prof. Aggelos Kiayias is Chair in Cybersecurity and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Lab at the University of Edinburgh, UK, Associate Professor of Cryptography and Security and head of the Crypto.Sec group at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (on leave), and Professor in residence at the University of Connecticut. He is also the chief scientist at blockchain company IOHK.

Burkhard Schafer

Burkhard Schafer

Prof. Burkhard Schafer is Professor of Computational Legal Theory and director of the SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP law at the University of Edinburgh. He is also co-founder and co-director of the Joseph Bell Centre for Legal Reasoning and Forensic Statistics.

Christoph Sorge

Christoph Sorge

Prof. Dr. Ing. Christoph Sorge is the holder of the juris professorship of legal informatics, co-director of the Institute of Law and Informatics, and member of the Center for IT Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA) at Saarland University. He is also a senior fellow of the German Research Institute for Public Administration Speyer.

Peter Van Valkenburgh

Peter Van Valkenburgh

Peter is Director of Research at Coin Center, the leading non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin. He is a graduate of NYU Law, as well as a self-taught designer and coder. He drafts the Center’s public regulatory comments, and helps shape its research agenda. He has briefed policymakers and regulatory staff around the world on the subject of Bitcoin regulation. Previously, he was a Google Policy Fellow and collaborated with various digital rights organizations on projects related to privacy, surveillance, and digital copyright law.

Writing Smart Contracts

How do you actually write a smart contract? And what is the future of smart contract language? Two researchers in the area will present a short introduction for non-experts:

Darryl McAdams

Darryl McAdams

Darryl is a type theorist at IOHK in San Francisco, United States

Dionysis Zindros

Dionysis Zindros

Dionysis is a cryptography PhD student at the University of Athens in Greece.

Panel discussion

What is the future of Cryptography and Law? Insights from an academic, policy, legal and industry perspective, moderated by Aggelos Kiayias, with an Introduction by Chalres Hoskinson CEO of IOHK, one of the co-founders of Ethereum.

Venue

The conference was held at the five-star Divani Caravel hotel in central Athens.

Divani
                                    Caravel

The hotel is a 10-minute walk from the Evangelismos metro station and also accessible by car and bus.

Schedule

  • 09:30: Registration
  • 10:00: Aggelos Kiayias: Cryptography and Law, an Unexpected Encounter that was Obvious all Along

    Slides

  • 10:45: Coffee break
  • 11:15: Burkhard Schafer: Blockchain assisted e-voting and the law: Balancing transparency, secrecy and inclusivity

    Slides

  • 12:00: Peter Van Valkenburgh Blockchains and Regulation: Why Open Matters

    Slides

  • 12:45: Lunch break
  • 14:15: Christoph Sorge: Legal requirements for cryptographic security: Necessity, annoyance, or both?

    Slides

  • 15:00: Darryl McAdams & Dionysis Zindros: Writing Smart Contracts

    Darryl Slides - Dionysis Slides

  • 16:00: Coffee break
  • 16:30: Panel discussion: The future of Cryptography & Law
  • 17:30: Closing remarks

This event is made possible only because of our wonderful funding partners.

Thank you!

The Smart Contracts Day conference was organized by the Crypto.Sec lab at the University of Athens. Supported by ERC project CODAMODA, project number 259152.

The ERC logo

Open access

We believe everyone should have access to knowledge. That's why admission to the conference was completely free. Bitcoin donations for future conferences are always welcome.

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We greatly appreciate your support!

We actively engage in open research and are committed to providing open access to everyone, even if they can't make it. Videos of all talks and slides are published under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license.

We welcome diversity and are striving to offer equal opportunities to all participants. We are dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.

  • Free admission
  • Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution
  • Everyone welcome