The State of Blockchain Technology

Bitcoin and Ethereum have been in the news a lot lately but the underlying platform offers an even bigger potential for the future of technology. In this talk, I'll briefly cover the state of art in Blockchain technologies and how different companies are using it.

Transcript

1. The State of Blockchain Tech Arpit Mathur Comcast Labs
2. The Digital Money Challenge • Make digital transactions of value • Without central identity store • Prevent double spending without a trusted third party holding balances of everyone Alice Bob $ 5 $ 2 $ 4 $ 3 $ 1
3. Lifecycle of a Bitcoin Transaction • Wallet declares transactions to a network of miners • Miners verify each transaction and if its valid collect it • Miners create a Block for the blockchain with all the transactions they know about • Miners compete for the opportunity to write to the blockchain by trying to solve the mining puzzle (Proof of Work) • First miner to find the answer to the puzzle writes to the blockchain and wins 12.5 BTC • In case of multiple winners, the next set of winners can decide which fork to build on top of
4. Components of the Bitcoin Solution Wallets: • User identity using Public Key Cryptography. • Wallets create Transactions moving bitcoins from 1 wallet to another which are signed with private keys and sent to addresses based on public keys Miners: • Verify transactions on the network and “try” to write to the global ledger • Any miner that gets chosen to write to the blockchain is rewarded 12 bitcoins (Block Reward) Blockchain • A decentralized distributed database that is used to maintain a continuously growing list of records, called blocks. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block
5. A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly. What is a Blockchain
6. Source: Redefining Security with the Blockchain by William Mougayar Blockchain = Technology + Game Theory
7. Decentralization and Internet 2.0 CENTRAL NODES PRONE TO COMPROMISE ( DDOS, HACKING, STATE ACTORS) MIDDLEMEN LIMITED BUSINESS MODELS
8. Blockchains • Trust without a central trust provider • Remove intermediaries • Permanent • Transparent • Slower • Proof of work can be expensive • Permanent • Transparent
9. The Future
10. Core Technology
11. Alt Chains • Bitcoin network is getting slower • Increasing the block size will help but one blockchain for entire world is not feasable • Different chains could be optimized for different things • Susceptible to 51% attacks • Is it worth it for the miners?
13. Sidechains
14. Permissioned chains • Known identity of participants • Faster • Defined Governance
15. Alternte Consensus Mechanism • ✅ Proof of Work • Proof of Stake • Proof of Activity • Proof of Burn • Proof of Capacity Source: Alternatives to Proof of Work
16. Coins: Collectable, transferable access tokens
17. Applications
18. Computing
19. Smart Contracts
20. File Storage
21. Entertainment
22. Sharing Economy
23. Education and Certification
24. Venture Capital / Crowdfunding
26. Go forth and Code