James Hanson

Software Engineer for the last 10 years in mostly public web and intranet applications. That’s my day job.

In my free time I work on learning to ethically hack, learn/play with blockchain tech, and really want to build my own drone swarm.

Company
Rice Lake Weighing Systems

Sessions

Crypto What? Grokking the Blockchain

With all the buzz online and in the media about cryptocurrencies/blockchain, it’s hard to dig through fragmented articles and fanatical blogs to get to the nuts and bolts of what this technology is, how it works, and what it proposes to do. Come to find out, it promises much more than just KryptoKitties.

Join me as we take a look at this technology, mainly from a developer’s view, and really see what all the hype is about. We’ll start off with some theory on tokenized systems and game theory, trust, what a blockchain is, decentralized systems, along with some history and details on the most well known blockchain, Bitcoin.

We’ll then move into some short, basic C# examples of the cryptographic side of blockchains that reinforce the idea of trust through immutable integrity, such as hashing, HMACS, and Digital Signatures. We’ll also discuss storing transactions in blocks and the two most popular consensus algorithms, Proof of Work versus Proof of Stake.

With this foundation, we will then look at some of the blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, that take these ideas further. We’ll go through some of the basics of Ethereum such as how it differs from Bitcoin, smart contracts, ERC20 tokens, and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).

We’ll finish off with some very good use cases for the technology outside of cryptocurrencies, some additional resources I’ve curated, along with a short question/answer session. You’ll really be able to impress all your skinny jean friends at the local vape shop after this session!