July IOTA Argentina Meetup review
Yesterday, 25th of July, we had our third IOTA Meetup in Argentina with the participation of Serguei Popov, IOTA Cofounder. This edition was sponsored by the IOTA Ecosystem and took place at Instituto Baikal, that kindly allowed us to use their spaces as venue.
Despite the fact of having to deal with a heavy rain night, around 60 persons came to see what this IOTA thing was about. Let’s quickly review how things went.
Uncut video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY4aCy5Xbko. We are already working to upload each talk individually to Youtube.
Popov talk: https://youtu.be/4245xa4jF34
What is IOTA? by Gabriela Jara
Gabriela had the hard job of explaining in less than 20 minutes what IOTA is, assuming that the audience did not have an idea about what a DLT is. She took us through DLTs, explained what blockchain was and also its limitations and, finally, why IOTA needed a new data structure called the Tangle. It was a very good introduction to IOTA that left newcomers with lots of questions (addressed in the Food Break, mostly).
IOTA’s history by Serguei Popov
Serguei told the story of how IOTA was born. Beginning with his contributions to Sergey Ivancheglo’s NXT and following with the adition of Sønstebø and the creation of a DAG based DLT called Amaranth that would eventually become IOTA. This guys were thinking on a DLT for the Internet of Things and, clearly, the Blockchain was not a good data structure for this because of its limitations in terms of performance and electrical consumption. Therefore, the Tangle was born as a new method to allow descentralization without the need of miners, fees and the limitation of having to place your transactions inside a limited sized block.
Serguei also spoke about the Oslo IOTA summit and the advances achieved there by the research team in the direction of getting rid of the Coordinator and having a better tip selection algorithm.
Food Break
After almost one hour of presentations, we got to the food break. We had some empanadas and exchanged a lot of opinions. This kind of breaks are essential to allow people that just listened the speakers to approach them and discuss doubts or points of view. I had at least four very motivating conversations with different groups in the 40 minutes the break took.
Also, I kept my word and had some Malbec wine with Serguei. He was very happy with his empanada, as you can see here :)
After the Food Break audience minds were sharpen again. It was time to start with the second half of our Meetup.
IOTAReatta.ch, by Marcelo Bianchi
Marcelo Bianchi showed to the audience the tool he developed some time ago to help in the confirmation of transactions, IOTAReatta.ch. For the people to understand what this tool does, Marcelo had to explain how IOTA transactions work and that end up being very educational for newcomers but also for IOTA enthusiasts that never got to understand what happens under the hood when you click the send button.
IOTA use cases in Argentina, by Maximiliano Nardi
Finally, Maxi gave us the last presentation focusing on realistic-today use cases for IOTA in Argentina. There are so many things we could be doing with IOTA! Maxi took us through some examples that could apply to the agriculture sector, a fundamental piece in Argentina’s economy. He also covered use cases related to smart cities and the financial sector, making emphasis on the need to descentralize important/sensible information.
Conclusion
This was the third meetup in a row we had since May. The help we got from the IOTA Ecosystem allowed us to aim higher and we cannot wait to start organizing our next reunion.
The fact of having 60 attendees despite the horrible weather conditions is a clear indicator of the growing interest that people has in this new DLT technology as a protocol for the IoT.
Given all this, we think that it is fundamental to keep working on this kind of spaces. They allow us to show what we are doing, and provide an entry point for new people interested in IoT and DLTs.
