Hi all, 
  I'm happy to announce the first Cryptocurrency Implementers' Workshop, cohosted with Financial Crypto. 
  http://fc19.ifca.ai/ciw/
  Now that the BITCOIN cryptocurrency research workshop has been folded into the main FC conference, it's time to try something new. The goal of this workshop is to focus on real world experience and engineering efforts. As such we're soliciting submission of *running code* to give a live demo at the workshop. Because of the tight timeline, there are only two weeks to go before the submission deadline, Dec 21. More details below the fold, and at the website link.

-- 
Andrew Miller
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

With the inclusion of the BITCOIN: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Research Workshop into the "Blockchain Track" of the Financial Cryptography conference, we now want to try out an experimental new workshop format, which focuses on engineering, development, and real world use of cryptocurrencies and permissionless blockchains.

In this first iteration, the workshop will be a half day, and the program will consist of two main components:

Invited talks on implementation post mortems: 
-----
we will aim to have several talks from developers and engineers that have led and maintained open source software projects in use by cryptocurrencies today.

Artifact Evaluation and Demo show and tell: 
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We will have a technical program of demo presentations about open source software artifacts. Presenters must submit their talk and demo abstract along with the open source software itself for review. Presentation abstracts should be no more than 6 pages in LNCS format, or the equivalent length (no more than 2000 words) of text, Markdown, etc. The write up should include:
motivation and application,
novelty or differences compared to alternative or related implementations,
challenges faced,
possible evaluation approaches
Submissions must include a software artifact that can be reviewed. It is expected the review committee will at least be able to run the artifact and observe the outputs. We recommend including a virtual machine image or Docker-based build instructions to facilitate this.

Suggested topics
====
The following list is non-exhaustive:
Cryptography implementations, such as digital signatures, ring signatures, zero knowledge proofs
Proof-of-work consensus protocols
Proof-of-stake consensus protocols
Mining hardware designs
Peer-to-peer networking and broadcast relay code
Full node synchronization
SPV and lightweight clients
Wallets and key management
Security vulnerabilities and defenses
Mining pools
Mining rig controllers
Staking wallets

Important Dates
====
Dec 21: Submission deadline
Jan 7: Presenter notification
Feb 22: Workshop

Submission Instructions
===
The submission website and instructions will be available mid December.
Demos accepted to this program will not be included in any proceedings. Submission and acceptance in this workshop does not preclude publication elsewhere.

Submissions may be anonymized at the authors' discretion, but it is not a requirement.

Program Commitee
====
J. Ayo Akinyele (Yeletech)
Rebekah Mercer (Aarhus)
Pieter Wuille (Blockstream)
Benedikt Bünz (Stanford)
Ethan Heilman (Boston University, Commonwealth Crypto)
Patrick McCorry (Kings College London)
Justin Ehrenhofer (Monero Community WorkGroup)
Jacob Eberhardt (tu-berlin)
... (more to come)

Program Chairs
====
Andrew Miller (UIUC)
Christopher Allen

Contact email address: Andrew Miller <soc1024@illinois.edu>