This doesn't seem to open in Firefox on OSX for me. Anyone else facing an issue?
Blockchain at Berkeley
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#12I think blockchain technologies have the potential to disrupt whole industries and I'm glad to see that students at world renowned universities are backing it up.
There's a student group from MIT that works on something mysterious related to litecoin: http://litecoin.mit.edu
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#13Tangential: is "blockchain" a Proper Noun? This page can't seem to decide. I always thought this phenomenon came from journalists writing about blockchains not understanding that a blockchain is a data structuture and not a singular proper entity, but I give Berkeley more credit. So what's up?
Blockchain @ Berkeley is a student-led group, so maybe that's why.
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Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#14Honestly, it just looks like a group of students piggybacking on Berkeley's reputation to make some money doing blockchain consulting
Knowing student groups, it's not about making money, but a few smart undergrads showing other undergrads emerging fields and letting them get some hands-on experience.
A group like this has a DeCal (a student-led university-credit course), events, speakers, and probably a selected group that works on club leadership and consulting.
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#15This doesn't seem to open in Firefox on OSX for me. Anyone else facing an issue?
The site runs abysmally for me (Firefox/Win10). It's on the verge of crashing my browser.
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#16This doesn't seem to open in Firefox on OSX for me. Anyone else facing an issue?
Worked on Firefox 54.0 on macOS 10.2.5 for me. Though it was incredibly slow, taking 5-10 seconds to load for me. (And also just updated and Firefox 55.0 works too)
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#17Honestly, it just looks like a group of students piggybacking on Berkeley's reputation to make some money doing blockchain consulting
Knowing student groups, it's not about making money, but a few smart undergrads showing other undergrads emerging fields and letting them get some hands-on experience. A group like this has a DeCal (a student-led university-credit course), events, speakers, and probably a selected group that works on club leadership and consulting.
It's definitely a mix of the two, speaking from experience.
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#18Earlier 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!)
There's a bit more to it. Proof of work hashing and ledger consensus rules and difficulty targets and fee schedules and forks. It's still all standard bachelor's degree algorithms, and I agree with the gp that it's not the interesting part. The interesting part is using these algorithms for social consensus on value.
I disagree those are essential. Federated chains like Elements Alpha are also considered block chains but lack many of those properties. I think it really is the case that a "block chain" is merely a singly linked list with hash linkages.
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#19I think blockchain technologies have the potential to disrupt whole industries and I'm glad to see that students at world renowned universities are backing it up. There's a student group from MIT that works on something mysterious related to litecoin: http://litecoin.mit.edu
Interestingly enough, it is launching when BIP148 activates for Bitcoin.
Re: Blockchain at Berkeley
#20'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...