There are approximately three conferences that specialise in FC that I know of. IFCA's FC, Digital Money Forum, and EFCE (Edinburgh Financial Crypography Engineering). These are listed in an Events Circuit which is located here:
http://www.financialcryptography.com/content/circuit/
in the knowledge base.
Financial Cryptography was the original. Back in '96, Bob Hettinga coined the term, invented the conference, and swept the driveway of snow all in one fine Boston winter's morning.
He conspired with Vince Cate and Ray Hirschfeld to run the first peer-reviewed Financial Conference in 1997 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla. An outstanding success, in many ways the first FC was the only FC, as a large bevy of legal professors and finance wonks turned up to challenge the crypto geeks on a variety of challenging subjects. Later FC conferences reduced themselves to cryptography, security and rights protocols, although the newest - FC'04 - has opened itself up to the temptation of "Systems and Finance Sessions".
Digital Money Forum was started by Dave Birch, one of the foremost FC thinkers. He created a high-level all-aspects approach that brought a lot of diverse people together. The breadth of the conference in many ways mirrors the diversity of FC, although this also works against the conference in impairing the ability to drill down in the short 2 day timeframe. It's by far the best place to get an broad-brushed introduction to the subject.
Rebel FCers Rachel Willmer, Fearghas McKay and Ian Grigg started Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering - EFCE - to concentrate on the technical aspects of FC. As a forum for techies showing stuff, there were a few rules: presenters had to show running code, and presenters got a deep discount on price. EFCE was - for the practical implementor - wildly successful, especially as we measured a 25% deal rate. Less wild, EFCE only ran twice.
A special mention also goes to Bob Hettinga's Digital Commerce Society of Boston's monthly meetings, now apparently on sabatical, and the DBS symposiums in 1997 and 2001.
Posted by iang at September 14, 2003 03:36 PM