MIT Bitcoin Expo 2020: Building the Stack

Last year, we celebrated 10 years of Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. This year, the MIT Bitcoin Club is excited to announce the 7th Annual Expo — MIT Bitcoin Expo 2020: Building the Stack! From efforts to optimize base-layer protocols and sustained interest in privacy integration to second-layer development and standardization, the past year has brought both incredible innovation and increasing scrutiny. We were excited by the Taproot/Graftroot/Schnorr soft fork proposal; we are ever-anxious for the ETH2.0 hard fork; we love the existence of varied, yet standardized lightning implementations; and we continue to be intrigued by the precedent-setting SEC actions against a handful of ICO companies. Still, with a growing developer- and user-base, it is important we build consistent, accessible, and clean tools and experiences. Constructing a distributed, censorship-resistant digital world requires intuitive structures be adopted and implemented. Current infrastructure (such as HTTP over TCP/IP) communicates seamlessly and allows the common user and front-end developer alike to operate without necessarily understanding the intricacies of sending packets over the internet. In Bitcoin and other public blockchain implementations, we should strive for similar standards where developers can focus their efforts and users can operate under the assumption that other parts of the stack will work.