Conference:March 6-8, 2017
Workshops:March 9-10, 2017
Presentation: Blockchain Introduction: Peering Through the Hype
Location:
- Mountbatten, 6th flr.
Duration
Day of week:
- Wednesday
Level:
- Intermediate
Persona:
- Developer
Key Takeaways
- Understand the data structure that makes a blockchain a blockchain
- See whether or not blockchain technology is appropriate for what you are doing or the application that you want
- Learn about the purpose behind bitcoins mining and how all the different aspects of blockchain work together to improve data security
Abstract
Will answer the questions: what is a blockchain, why all the hype, what makes a blockchain secure, what can be built on top of blockchains, what are some real-world use-cases?
Interview
We use smart contracts as computer executable code that performs the tasks and provisions that would be described in a real world legal contract. The intention is that it runs in an auditable place to ensure the integrity of this software contract.
It can run peer to peer but then it requires that the counterparties trust each other not to alter the contract in some way. Smart contracts can be running at thousands of nodes all over the world so you want to be sure that the code that is intended to run is indeed the code that is running.
Blockchains received a lot of hype. They’ve been proposed to solve problems like financial and storing data. The focus of my talk is to explain what blockchain technology is and why the evolved into bitcoin and distributed currency.
I want the audience to understand whether or not this technology is actually appropriate for what they are doing or the application that they want.
Bitcoin is a basic use case where blockchain was invented; it’s a way to record the transaction history of everyone who has ever sent bitcoins from one person to another person. As they are stored on thousands of nodes all over the world there’s a permanent record of the transaction history which makes it a currency.
One bad use case that I’ve seen is trying to track supply chains. For example a manufacturing company might want to track a product through manufacturing, shipping and distribution and they want to make sure that the items location is known at every point in time. It’s a bad application because you are relying on someone accurately transcribing information, on the human sphere onto the blockchain. If you are trusting humans to transcribe information then you might as well have them use their own database.
It will be introductory enough so that anyone with a general understanding of how computer systems work would be able to understand it.
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