Are any of the FC'ers here affiliated with this International Financial Cryptography Association of Jean Camp's of Harvard mentioned in the New Scientist article?
What are they doing?

IFCA is an odd beast; you get to be a member if you turn up to the conference, but that's only for the year. Pretty much all in the FC community have at one stage been members, but many aren't on a regular basis.

The conference is (um...) quite pricey and oriented more to the academic market who have to publish or perish, so for startups and practical FCers it is really seen as a networking event and their one annual holiday on the beach. There have been attempts to broaden the base to include the startup and commercial market; An ongoing debate...

An alternate is the DigitalMoney conference in London which is commercial / Finance layer, and we used to run EFCE in Edinburgh which was tech/tech/tech/ layers 1-3 ... to get the cheap price you had to present and you had to deliver transactions within a minute of starting or go down in flames! A lot of fun :-)

I'm thinking that now is the time to run EFCE again, so if anyone is keen, shout.