Winnipeg Blockchain Meetup
by Angela Toews
Posted on Friday April 27th 2018 at 4:28 PM
It was great to meet everyone who joined us for the first official Winnipeg Blockchain Meetup. We met for beer and pizza at Launch Coworking Space on Wednesday April 25th, and enjoyed a learning session about Blockchain followed by lots of questions and discussions.
Kevin started off with a presentation explaining the history of Blackchain from it's creator Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 for use in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, as its public transaction ledger. We talked about the reason of invention, the double spend problem and the needs for a solution. Blockchain enabled Bitcoin to become the first cryptocurrency to solve the double spend problem. The double spend problem is a flaw in any digital cash scheme in which the same single digital token can be spent more than once. This is possible because a digital token consists of a digital file that can be duplicated or falsified. This problem extends to any form of traditional data storage. It leads to inflation, counterfeit money, devaluation of currency and diminishes user trust
Later we discussed the pros/cons of the Blockchain
|
Pro |
Con |
|
• Extremely high fault tolerance • Virtually immutable • Easily verify user identities w/ private keys • Trustless, does not require a trusted third party • Public blockchains are permissionless and require no access control |
• Slow to read & write to database • Requires consensus algorithm (ie proof-of-work or proof-of-stake) • Virtually immutable |
The longest part of the meetup was spent with talks about current uses and trends of the Blockchain, like smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, digital scarcity, Private Blockchains & Digital Ledgers, securities, digital record keeping and much more.
To highlight the key points of the evenings discussions:
- The blockchain is a slow, immensely powerful new type of database
- Blockchain solutions are applicable to any system that relies on a third party to provide trust between participants
- Digital Scarcity is here to stay
- Frameworks like Solidity allow us to write turing complete code and model any application in the blockchain with smart contracts
- Majority of large organizations are looking at implementing blockchain based solutions
You can check out the full presentation here.
Additionally Kevin showed us how to get started with Blockchain development:
- Developers looking to get involved in distributed apps and smart contracts https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.4.23/solidity-by-example.html
- Mastering Bitcoin https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook
- Ethereum / Dapp development https://www.reddit.com/r/ethdev/
