This week I presented the 3rd and final free talk on Bitcoin, Cryptoassets and Blockchain.
This talk is based around the wonderfull book by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna — The Truth Machine. But I started with a explanation of the significant role secret writing (Code) has had on the history of humanity and for this I stole from Simon Singh’s book — The Code Book and reference the fait of Mary Queen of Scotts in 1586 when her cipher was broken and her writings were used as evidence of treason, which led to her beheading.
We then jumped to SHA 256 and hash functions. We watched a 17min video demonstration of blockchain hashing in action. This is long but I think worthwhile explanation of how blockchains work.
Next we went of a video tour of mining farms in China and Iceland. We talked about energy consumption Immersion Cooling and other technologies for reducing energy consumption. As part of this I explained Proof of Stake as a concept. We also looked briefly at other distributed consensus mechanisms such as Hedera Hashgraph being developed by Leemon Baird and Avalanche being developed by Emin Gun Sier.
Next we shifted focus to consider private v public blockchains and decentralised governance, we learnt firstly about surveillance capitalism.
We listed the the CEO of Human Rights Foundation speak about technology and freedom and liberty. And then we listed to Vitalik Buterin interview with the Centre for International Governance Innovation about decentralised governance.
This talk session was fairly heavy content. I decided to finish on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and Smart Contracts. I used the vending machine example to explain smart contracts and I used the Financial Service Sector as a live example of how this tech may play out in practice.
I introduced the concept of Financial Services Sector 1.0 (circa 1600ad — 10 October 2008) and Financial Services Sector 2.0 (10 October 2008 — …).
Thank you to all who attended.
