Turtles Status Letter #4 — Year In Review

As usual, this year’s status letter covers all news-worthy updates since our previous letter.

Inside This Year’s Letter:

Group Income
- 2018 Hawaii Hackathon development
- Group Income team continues to grow development
- Group Income Presentation at BlockCon 2018 (Los Angeles) education
Miscellaneous Decentralization Related
- Rebooting Web-of-Trust (Toronto) research education
- Scaling Bitcoin (Tokyo) research
- Internet Identity Workshop IIWXXVII #27 (Mountain View) research education
- Noteworthy Decentralization Tech research education
Organizational
- Server infrastructure
- Finances

Group Income

2018 Hawaii Hackathon

New blog today by @okTurtles about @Group_Income. This is a project that's been in the works for years and I'm excited to be a part of it. I was invited to be a part of last year's hackathon and this blog is a summary of that week and the progress made.https://t.co/kwl3urPE1S pic.twitter.com/TvipCUxRlp

— Scott Santens (@scottsantens) May 13, 2019

Group Income team continues to grow

We are honored and humbled to be joined on this journey by some truly amazing and very talented individuals. Keep an eye on the Group Income blog for more details on that, coming soon!

Group Income Presentation at BlockCon 2018

Greg gave an update on Group Income’s progress at BlockCon in Los Angeles:

At the end of this presentation he knowingly committed the sin of publicly declaring an estimate for a software deadline. He did this knowing full well that he might end up being wrong, because the risk of embarrassment would be worth the kick in the pants we needed to get it finished sometime this century.

With one month remaining it’s looking less certain that the prototype will be in usable shape by December 31st, 2019, however, we’re very pleased with the progress made! We’ll see how close to that deadline we can get!

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpjLwNyR_dU&t=26822

Miscellaneous Decentralization Related

Rebooting Web-of-Trust

A quick refresher: Rebooting Web-of-Trust (RWoT) is an ongoing series of workshops that’s put on by Christopher Allen and others. RWoT works on fixing security problems related to online identity, problems that go well beyond its namesake of “web of trust”.

Each time we’ve attended we’ve focused on the subject of DPKI. This year, we submitted a topic paper titled DIDs In DPKI (Decentralized Public-key Infrastructure), and assisted Mikerah’s group with a paper on Digital Wallet Credentials.

RWOT Toronto: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot7-toronto

Scaling Bitcoin

From Toronto we flew to Tokyo, where we joined Bitcoin and decentralization fans from all over the world at Scaling Bitcoin 2018. Our mission there was simple: learn and ask questions. You can watch the presentations for free online:

Watch: Presentations at Scaling Bitcoin Tokyo 2018

Internet Identity Workshop IIWXXVII #27

IIW is a very interesting “unconference” for all things Interent Identity releated. An unconference is a conference where the attendees self-organize talks and presentations, creating the schedule on the spot.

Greg relates his experience:

Though I’d never been to an unconference before, I ended up giving three talks at IIW. The first went terribly, as I wasn’t sure how an unconference handled audience participation. I quickly learned: when there’s a lot of material to discuss, the audience should do very little talking, even at an unconference. Without structure, too many voices began to trample over each other, creating a disorganized mess, and stealing precious time to cover the material. The next day I made up for it by repeating pretty much the same talk on “Blockchain TLDs and key management” to a different group, but without interruptions. That went really well! In a third session, I covered the topic of common “Blockchain Myths”, including “Bitcoin wastes energy”, “Bitcoin’s energy use is bad for the environment”, and “Blockchains can’t scale”.

Read: Proceedings — IIW #27

Noteworthy Decentralization Tech

This year we gave shoutouts to several new ones and several oldies:

Want to see yours here? Please share it with us in the comments or in a toot/tweet!

Mastodon: @okTurtles@mstdn.io
Twitter: @okTurtles

Organizational

Besides all of our public facing activities, a lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into keeping the okTurtles Foundation running as an organization. Things like maintaining a functioning online presence, this website, logistics, accounting, fundraising, email, newsletters, contractors, status updates — the works!

Server infrastructure

We spent considerable resources this year continuing to upgrade, maintain, and automate our server infrastructure. There’s really little to show for it, other than websites that are less prone to downtime and faster at recovering from failure. Although these improvements might not be easy to show off (as nothing in sysadmin is), they are nevertheless critical work that we successfully completed this past year.

Finances

We’ve updated our finances page to show our past year’s expenditures, and we ask that you please take a few minutes to make a donation to support our work. None of this is possible without our donors.

Thanks, and Happy Holidays!

That’s it for the fourth turtle status letter! We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and we wish you all the best for the upcoming holidays!

It’s only thanks to your donations that this work is possible, and for that we are very grateful. Please help us continue this work by making a tax-deductible donation today.

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Without our supporters, we can’t do what we do.
Please take this moment to support our work.