As was previously announced, I (Jeremy Rand) represented Namecoin at Internet Governance Forum 2018 in Paris.

My panel at IGF (moderated by Chiara Petrioli from Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza) went reasonably well, and a quite diverse set of perspectives were represented. I suspect that a lot of the attendees had never been exposed to the cypherpunk philosophy of “trusted third parties are security holes” (credit to Nick Szabo for that phrasing), and I hope I did a good job of providing that exposure so that maybe we’ll have some new allies. As with ICANN58, I continued my adherence to the Fluffypony way of answering questions: don’t hype things, and always be quick to admit disadvantages. This worked well at ICANN, and I think it worked well at IGF. (Special thanks to the guy from Verisign who asked a question in the Q&A that will shortly be immortalized in the Namecoin.org FAQ!)

IGF has published a transcript[1], a video recording, and a report. The transcript and report should work fine in Tor Browser at High Security settings; the video recording can be viewed via youtube-dl (Debian package) (recommendation by Whonix) if you don’t trust YouTube’s JavaScript (and there’s no reason why you should trust YouTube’s JavaScript!). I’ve also posted my slides.

The next day, I was on a panel hosted by Jean-Christophe Finidori. This one was a bit more in my comfort zone, as the attendees were mostly blockchain enthusiasts, and there were a lot of quite sophisticated questions about the details of Namecoin’s design. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any recordings of this event.

Of course, I had lots of other meetings while I was in Paris, but as usual, I won’t be publicly disclosing the content of those conversations, because I want people to be able to talk to me at conferences without worrying that off-the-cuff comments will be broadcast to the public. That said, the result of one of those conversations is likely to be posted very soon.

Thanks to Chiara and Jean-Christophe for inviting me; I enjoyed visiting Paris!

[1] Reading the official transcript makes me realize how lucky I am that I’m not hearing-impaired. Hearing-impaired people are going to have a miserable time trying to understand the transcript.