The last day and a half, I've been down in the Mountain View / Los Altos area, to support Chris (and our co-hosts and experts, Angus and Bryan) with a workshop on cryptocurrency custody. This is something that's actually been a long-time coming, as Christopher and I started writing the material a year and a half or more ago.
We went down there midday on Monday to get all of the equipment running and the space setup. And had a nice dinner afterward with Angus, one of our other experts.
Then, Chris was staying out a bit more, but I decided to walk back to our AirBnB. It was about an hour walk, about two and a half miles, but what I hilariously learned is that most of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills is pitch black at night. I first saw this as I walked back into neighborhoods, past El Camino Real, but then even moreso on the Los Altos Palo Alto Bike Path, a nice path running alongside park then cemetery, and just a little spooky in the dark at night. I actually liked it, but after two bikes swooshed past me (with lights on), I reluctantly lit up my iPhone for safety. (It was on most of the trip back and I ended up with a 34% battery by the end.) I walked some other dark walking path, just set back a bit from the road, and I now see it continued on into hiking trails. (Alas!) And from there I went into dark neighborhoods, often without sidewalks, and eventually found my AirBnB down a pitch-black street and a mostly dark driveway.
The AirBnB was quite nice. Super tall ceilings, nice rooms. It was a guest house in someone's super fancy Los Altos Hills house, but curiously did have a connecting door.
So today was the actual workshop. Chris and I drove through the actual Los Altos downtown to get there, and it was much nicer than the corner of Mountain View I walked through on my way to our BnB last night. Much more small-town feeling. We got bagels, muffins, scones, and coffee for our attendees.
We'd mapped out the workshop to discuss custody, adversaries, and risk-modeling as our three main sections, and successfully worked our way through it with help from Angus and Bryan. We were the most unsure about the risk modeling, because we knew it would be challenging to teach because it's a lot of work to do the procedure, but despite our shakiness it was the best-received part of the course. And now we know even better how to teach it next time. (I actually did some teaching throughout all of this, which isn't something I tend to do, but I did explain issues with using various metal devices to protect your cryptocurrency keys, and I taught increasing parts of the risk modeling with Chris as we went on, until he left me to finish it up.)
And hopefully people will get even more useful info when they get home, as we distributed a 135-page booklet that contains most of our writing on custody, adversaries, and risk modeling.
After the event was over, and our space cleaned up for our kind hosts, I would usually have zoomed out as soon as I could, but it would have taken 2+ hours to get home in bumper-to-bumper traffic. So I joined folks for dinner one more time, and caught a Lyft around 8pm, which got me home just before 9.
Totally exhausted now. Though it was just a day and a half, it feels like it was a major trip.
We went down there midday on Monday to get all of the equipment running and the space setup. And had a nice dinner afterward with Angus, one of our other experts.
Then, Chris was staying out a bit more, but I decided to walk back to our AirBnB. It was about an hour walk, about two and a half miles, but what I hilariously learned is that most of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills is pitch black at night. I first saw this as I walked back into neighborhoods, past El Camino Real, but then even moreso on the Los Altos Palo Alto Bike Path, a nice path running alongside park then cemetery, and just a little spooky in the dark at night. I actually liked it, but after two bikes swooshed past me (with lights on), I reluctantly lit up my iPhone for safety. (It was on most of the trip back and I ended up with a 34% battery by the end.) I walked some other dark walking path, just set back a bit from the road, and I now see it continued on into hiking trails. (Alas!) And from there I went into dark neighborhoods, often without sidewalks, and eventually found my AirBnB down a pitch-black street and a mostly dark driveway.
The AirBnB was quite nice. Super tall ceilings, nice rooms. It was a guest house in someone's super fancy Los Altos Hills house, but curiously did have a connecting door.
So today was the actual workshop. Chris and I drove through the actual Los Altos downtown to get there, and it was much nicer than the corner of Mountain View I walked through on my way to our BnB last night. Much more small-town feeling. We got bagels, muffins, scones, and coffee for our attendees.
We'd mapped out the workshop to discuss custody, adversaries, and risk-modeling as our three main sections, and successfully worked our way through it with help from Angus and Bryan. We were the most unsure about the risk modeling, because we knew it would be challenging to teach because it's a lot of work to do the procedure, but despite our shakiness it was the best-received part of the course. And now we know even better how to teach it next time. (I actually did some teaching throughout all of this, which isn't something I tend to do, but I did explain issues with using various metal devices to protect your cryptocurrency keys, and I taught increasing parts of the risk modeling with Chris as we went on, until he left me to finish it up.)
And hopefully people will get even more useful info when they get home, as we distributed a 135-page booklet that contains most of our writing on custody, adversaries, and risk modeling.
After the event was over, and our space cleaned up for our kind hosts, I would usually have zoomed out as soon as I could, but it would have taken 2+ hours to get home in bumper-to-bumper traffic. So I joined folks for dinner one more time, and caught a Lyft around 8pm, which got me home just before 9.
Totally exhausted now. Though it was just a day and a half, it feels like it was a major trip.