26.06.2019CSG at the 2019 Crypto Valley Conference, Zug, Switzerland

Christian Killer was one of the invited panelists on the moderated panel "Why do Voting Systems Need Blockchains?", which took place on the first day of the 2019 Crypto Valley Conference in Zug, Switzerland.

The lively debate argued that the benefit of using a Blockchain in E-Voting is the added transparency and auditability for the public. Additionally, security and verifiability aspects in general and within the current postal voting system in Switzerland had been discussed, i.e., the general trust in the current system and its security. The debate concluded on a highly positive trend line, such that the need for experimentation, usability improvements, with a focus on the verifiability of electronic voting in general is key to reliable results and system validations.

Markus Knecht presented the paper on "SATOS: Storage Agnostic Tokens over Opaque and Substructural Types" on day 2, which proposed an approach on a better and secure token representation, directly embedded into the Smart Contract run-time and Smart Contract programming language. The core of the model uses opaque and substructural data types together with an on-chain soundness checker to generically represent tokens securely as values similar to integers and Booleans. Since scaling determines a hot topic in the blockchain space now, the question, if it will have a positive or negative impact on scaling smart contract platforms, will have to be answered within future work.

Thus, the attendance of approximately 35 to 40+ people per session revealed with an active participation of the audience in terms of questions a larger interest in these topics as well as many others of the event in Zug, which lasted from June 24-26, 2019 and for which the full program is available here.