DC’s Blockchain Engineering Group
How A Mid-Atlantic Crypto Meetup for Developers was Born
I’ve been going to cryptocurrency meetups since early 2013 in the DC area. I enjoyed meeting other people who were doing weird things like mining Dogecoin and paying for their beers with Bitcoin. It was all pretty goofy: people would be discussing things like the latest Bitcoin fork, how anonymous money would empower the individual, and the occasional comment about new smart contract platforms like Ethereum that had just launched on a test net. But it was exciting. I hadn’t seen people show this level of enthusiasm for a technology or idea before. I also marveled at the diversity of people that cryptocurrency attracted. Most of the social circles I was a part of were fairly homogeneous, but the only thing people at these cryptocurrency meetups had in common was a tendency to think creatively.
In 2016 things started to change. Ethereum was starting to lower the barrier for creating interesting new assets, like simple tokens, with the popularization of contract standards like ERC-20. New blockchains were popping up left and right. And the ICO, or Initial Coin Offering, was starting to become popular. This definitely changed who started going to local cryptocurrency meetups. Discussions were all about price now, and it became difficult for newcomers to figure out what was a scam and what was a legitimate decentralized network. Can you blame them? Scammers started to pour unbelievable amounts of time and energy into misleading people into buying assets that were fundamentally pump-and-dump schemes. But the real problem was that the “new wave” of cryptocurrency enthusiasts were interested in getting rich quick, not “overthrowing the Federal Reserve.” I think this fundamental difference explains a lot about what happened throughout the 2017 bull market. The primary motivation for new entrants to the market was no longer about radical independence, it was about radical wealth creation.
It was in mid-2017 that I became more involved in the Ethereum development community. I started to read up on the Ethereum Virtual Machine and all the work that Ethereum core developers were doing. But the local meetup scene was void of technical talk. What a shame! So much interesting work was happening with the Bitcoin Lightning network, the Ethereum network, and people were experimenting with new consensus algorithms — but I would only read about it online. It was then that I decided to start a Blockchain Developers group. Not because I was uniquely qualified to run such a group, but because it didn’t exist and I wanted it.
Thus far in the group’s short life we’ve had talks from engineers about the Bitcoin lightning network, how cross chain atomic swaps work (and a short demonstration), how private networks work and how they are different from public networks, decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, and hack nights to learn the Solidity programming language. Shortly after the group was started I was lucky enough to find a local engineer, Jake, who was just as passionate about making this happen as I was. I think Jake was instrumental in making this group work: he brought organization to the group and makes the events run like a well oiled machine.
So, if you live in the DC area and are passionate about programming blockchains, join the group and come out to one of our events. You won’t be sorry and you’ll meet some great people! We look forward to meeting you.
