My Experience at the First SatsConf Hackathon and the Biggest 100% Bitcoin Event in Brazil
Starting with registration…
I came across something very interesting… At the time of my presentation I was informed that there wasn’t much to do with web3 and bitcoin, where the term “web3” is not very well regarded in the bitcoin community.
Support material offered by Vinteum
The material offered was very rich, but there was a lot that I still didn’t understand, what would a Lightning Network be? What was a Miniscript?
I had doubts…
Is this Hackathon really for me? Will I be able to contribute? Will I be a burden on the team?
I was almost giving up on participating… Until something unexpected happened
An extremely out-of-the-box guy with high knowledge of bitcoin and machine learning invited me to his team
He asked me the following
Tell me something, how much do you know about bitcoin, miniscript, lightning, etc? no pressure, just curiosity
— Brenorb (AI engineer, Bitcoin-only shepherd)
Look, to be very honest, none! I’m a mobile developer.
— Bellu (Developer Mobile)
The next day, the hackathon starts
On the first day, I was very confused, it seemed like another world to me, everything there was English, no mentor spoke Portuguese even though I was in Brazil.
The mentors were from another place in Brazil.
How did I manage to proceed?
With Breno’s guidance, we began to see the problem he addressed about Miniscript and study more about it, with this, we focused on developing the idea.
What was our idea and the problem to be solved?
- MiniScript (Smart Contracts for MiniScript).
- Problems understanding language that was created to be simple.
- We did a local search, almost no one understood Miniscript.
Currently the miniscript looks like this:
and(pk(A),or(pk(B),or(9@pk(C),older(1000))))Our solution
- Artificial Intelligence to answer questions about miniscript
2. Flowchart Generate
How do we develop this artificial intelligence?
In just two days we made more than 200 MiniScript examples:
How was the development of the demonstration?
There were hours and hours of development, with the need to redesign the application several times. Even though it was late at night, the work wasn’t done yet. I just finished the demo in Uber on the way to the event.
Words from the doorman at the event building…
We told him about the tournament he told us
They look like a champion, will definitely win
— (Doorman)
We arrived at the event and the Pitch presentation began.
All the projects appeared to be at another technical level, we were impressed!
What made ours stand out among 20 projects?
The person who was going to make the pitch, brenorb, had the brilliant idea of starting the pitch with a question…
Who doesn’t know how to program in Miniscript?
— Brenorb (AI engineer, Bitcoin-only shepherd)
Out of curiosity, the majority raised their hands, including some jurors
After all the presentations…
We returned to the house, as the result would happen at SatsConf (Biggest bitcoin event)
Arriving at Satsconf…
The entire event only accepted bitcoin to eat or buy anything! It was incredible, we received several gifts and it was packed.
A funny curiosity… I didn’t have sats to buy a drumstick at the bitcoin event, but a teammate from another team gave me sats and I sent him the PIX
After enjoying the event, we anxiously waited for the winners to be announced until we discovered…
The team that most of them didn’t know what bitcoin was… WINNER OF THE BIGGEST 100% BITCOIN HACKATHON IN BRAZIL
We were very happy and surprised, and we were qualifying for the Bolt-fun Bitcoin Global!
What was our difference?
According to some judges, the way we present the pitch means we have a demonstration running!
How did we do overall?
We won in the Bitcoin Finance category! But I’ll leave that story for another day!
Now some advice for you at the end of this experience.
Face challenges, don’t let yourself get discouraged because you haven’t yet gained knowledge on a subject, leave the confrontation zone and go for it! — Bellu (Winner of 16 national and international podiums)
