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Blockchain at Berkeley

blockchain.berkeley.edu

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Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#21

Post by delhanty »

tylersmith wrote: post #10
elmigranto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My layman understanding is that blockchain is literally singly linked list, except of "nextNode" you have "parentNode" pointer (which actually checks that parent is valid for "parenting" :) The important part is how blocks get added over network, and decentralized consensus of the addition. (Well, socioeconomic phenomenon of adding monetary value to all that jazz is pretty cool too!)

It's more of a tree with single root and a function returning the longest tip by some distance method. Bitcoin uses amount of work proved as the distance. Bitcoin ignores other tips unless/until one of them becomes longer than the current tip but some systems like Ethereum leverage stagnant branches for their length function. But yes, dynamic-membership multi-party signature schemes and their use for creating permiss…

Straight question for the uninformed (me):

Do you (or anyone else) have a technical reference for differences between the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain length function?

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#23

Post by jameskegel »

There's a lot of pessimism in the comments here, and I feel like I'm the only one interested in where this will go. I can identify with what some of you are saying, but it is still interesting regardless. Distributed tech has some of the most fascinating projects right now. Here's a few examples:

Distributed file storage: Sia [1] and Storj [2] are both using blockchain tech to form a dropbox-like atmosphere where you can rent space for as little as 2c/GB. Renters can rent out their extra storage, while miners can mine and sell their units or use them on file storage to pay rent for their data.

Decentralized Content Platform: Steem-it. Very interesting concept here about compensating content creators with the currency that the platform surrounds. It bears somewhat of a resemblance to Reddit. [3]

Private yet fungible cryptocurrency: Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency on the rise that has privacy baked in, with the ability to opt-in to making your transaction public. It uses Ring Confidential Transactions [4] to mix the transactions and reduce the chances of the participants being identified to an almost 0 chance. It is ASIC resistant [5], has solid governance and dev team, and can even be used on hardware wallets like Tresor with a bit of hacking [6].

[1] - https://www.sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf

[2] - https://storj.io/storj.pdf

[3] - https://steemit.com/steemit/@panenka/what-is-steemit-and-how...

[4] - https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf

[5] - https://monero.stackexchange.com/a/138

[6] - https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/2495/ex...

Disclosure: There could be some bias, because I'm long on all of these except Storj, so I'm including sources that hopefully will allow you to make your own decision without me being preachy.

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#24

Post by arthurcolle »

mtgx wrote: post #20
arthurcolle wrote: post #5

'Blockchain' is literally the least interesting part of cryptocurrencies and their applications. its a boring flat file structure that is an artifact of needing many clients independently deriving a shared ledger, nothing more and nothing less. the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for crypt…

You call it boring, others call it the most important invention in the last 500 years: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

I'm a huge fan of cryptocurrencies and related decentralized technologies, but that is immaterial to the fact that anyone who acts obsessively focused on the blockchain data structure is missing an appreciation of what the actual underlying innovation is - please re-read my previous comment, it seems clear you didn't spend time thinking about the actual words I wrote.

> the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units.

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#25

Post by Buge »

mtgx wrote: post #20
arthurcolle wrote: post #5

'Blockchain' is literally the least interesting part of cryptocurrencies and their applications. its a boring flat file structure that is an artifact of needing many clients independently deriving a shared ledger, nothing more and nothing less. the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for crypt…

You call it boring, others call it the most important invention in the last 500 years: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

More important than the Internet? More important than computers? More important than electricity? That's ridiculous.

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#26

Post by miralabs »

Buge wrote: post #25
mtgx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You call it boring, others call it the most important invention in the last 500 years: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

More important than the Internet? More important than computers? More important than electricity? That's ridiculous.

> More important than the Internet? More important than computers? More important than electricity? That's ridiculous. reply

its given, we've passed those stage already

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#27

Post by simias »

arthurcolle wrote: post #5

'Blockchain' is literally the least interesting part of cryptocurrencies and their applications. its a boring flat file structure that is an artifact of needing many clients independently deriving a shared ledger, nothing more and nothing less. the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for crypt…

I don't think you can really split one from the other, the blockchain and its surrounding algorithms is how "you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units".

I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the same time once you hear how it works it sounds almost obvious. All the individual parts have been known for ages but they're combined in an innovative way.

I'm personally not convinced by the "political" side of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but on the technical side it's one of the most inspiring piece of software in the past decade IMO.

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#28

Post by akhosla »

latenightcoding wrote: post #8

Honestly, it just looks like a group of students piggybacking on Berkeley's reputation to make some money doing blockchain consulting

Hi there, I am one of the executives of Blockchain at Berkeley. Happy to see we're getting some attention on here! I would love to clear some things up about what we do. :)

We're a student group (mostly undergraduate) that runs somewhat like a non-profit. We focus on all things related to cryptocurrency and decentralized tech (more simply put, blockchain - that's at least how the world sees it).

In the case of consulting, no one is actually pocketing money for themselves. While there is money involved, it is essentially a donation contract between us and our clients. Everything goes back towards the organization and the cause. We all work for free in that sense, and we reward the community with what we earn where we can.

What we do for consulting is mostly on the lines of Ethereum smart contract PoCs with front-ends. It's a lot of investment for a company to make their engineers go out and do this themselves, but not unreasonable for some students with a lot of motivation and decent programming knowledge to learn and build. We don't ask for much so companies are happy to work with the group of amazing students we have here to benefit the cause. ;)

Fundamentally, the whole thing is a learning experience for those who lead, those who consult, and even those who teach. Everyone who's a part of us at the end of the day is learning. We try to reach professional standards where we can - we love the personal development aspect that grew from so many people putting in their efforts to make the org a reality.

Blockchain at Berkeley does a few things beyond consulting - we run an undergraduate cryptocurrency course during the school year and post materials online (see blockchain.berkeley.edu/decal), we host events with well-known industry speakers and workshops for the public to join which can be found on Facebook, and we also teach executives about the technology in custom sessions. We're also working on an Ethereum Dapp course which will be offered Fall 2017 at UC Berkeley and will be recorded for the public with open sourced materials.

You could say we're just trying to demystify buzzwords for the world!

If you have questions or are interested in talking, you can ping me personally: akash@blockchain.berkeley.edu

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#29

Post by xg15 »

simias wrote: post #27
arthurcolle wrote: post #5

'Blockchain' is literally the least interesting part of cryptocurrencies and their applications. its a boring flat file structure that is an artifact of needing many clients independently deriving a shared ledger, nothing more and nothing less. the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for crypt…

I don't think you can really split one from the other, the blockchain and its surrounding algorithms is how "you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units". I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the sa…

If you talk about the general idea of an append-only distributed database with no central point of control, I agree with you.

However the proof-of-work/auto-adjusting-difficulty method of asserting truth still seems horrible to me from a technical perspective.

Politically, I don't want to live in a world where this principle catches on and an ever-growing % of energy production would be spend on solving meaningless math problems.

Re: Blockchain at Berkeley

#30

Post by simias »

xg15 wrote: post #29
simias wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can really split one from the other, the blockchain and its surrounding algorithms is how "you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units". I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the sa…

If you talk about the general idea of an append-only distributed database with no central point of control, I agree with you. However the proof-of-work/auto-adjusting-difficulty method of asserting truth still seems horrible to me from a technical perspective. Politically, I don't want to live in a world where this principle catches on and an ever-growing % of energy production would be spend on solving meaningless m…

Yeah the proof of work is probably the less elegant aspect of it all, I can agree with that. But theoretically you could replace by any other function that's difficult to compute but easy to verify. Maybe it's just a solution in search for a problem.
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