Devcon 2 in Shanghai brings Ethereum's center of gravity briefly to East Asia

SEP 19 2016 · 12:15

Video: 150 – Devcon 2 And The State Of Ethereum Date: 2016-09-19 · Type: conference · Hub: beijing-shanghai · Tags: devcon, shanghai, china, ethereum, dos-attack, 2016, scaling Vitalik addressed part of the audience in Mandarin; a denial-of-service attack arrived uninvited Devcon 2, held at the Hyatt on the Bund in Shanghai from September 19–21 2016, was the first major Ethereum gathering in Asia. The Chinese ETH community — already significant in mining, trading volume, and early project development — had been largely invisible to the European and North American core. Devcon 2 was the explicit recognition. The roughly 700 attendees were nearly three times Devcon 1's count; Vitalik delivered part of his address in Mandarin; Chinese-language Ethereum documentation projects began at the conference. The timing placed Devcon 2 precisely in the middle of the post-DAO hard fork recovery. The community had split six weeks earlier; ETC was already trading; the immediate crisis was over but the cultural wound was fresh. Against that backdrop, the Shanghai conference carried a particular significance: a reminder that the protocol's future was not determined solely by the German-American engineering axis that had built it. The conference also coincided with the 'Shanghai' denial-of-service attacks on the Geth client — a sustained flood of cheap CALL operations that exploited underpriced opcodes, disclosed live during the event. The attacks prompted two emergency hard forks within weeks: Tangerine Whistle (October 18 2016) and Spurious Dragon (November 22 2016), repricing the vulnerable opcodes. The fact that the community absorbed a live protocol crisis during a major public conference without panic — executing two forks in sixty days — was itself a demonstration of operational maturity that no amount of marketing copy could have provided. Facts • Dates: September 19–21 2016, Hyatt on the Bund, Shanghai • ~700 attendees; approximately three times Devcon 1's count • Vitalik Buterin gave part of his address in Mandarin • Concurrent with the 'Shanghai' DoS attack on Geth (underpriced CALL opcodes) • Led to Tangerine Whistle (October 18 2016) and Spurious Dragon (November 22 2016) hard forks • Chinese Ethereum projects active at this period: Qtum, NEO (Antshares rebrand), early VECHAIN precursors Primary Documents • Devcon 2 archive (devcon.org) — https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/2/