Meet 1 — DApps & Trust
After a great success hosting Blockchain Manchester — Genesis we hosted a second event at a Federation House. Our sponsors, EqualExperts, kindly helped organise the event and supplied lots of drinks and pizza so a massive thanks to them.
The general plan was to build on the introductory session by covering a broader range of subjects relating to decentralised applications (DApps) as well as covering the more academic subject of how Blockchains are often referred to as trustless.
We moved venues to allow for a larger capacity and in the end had about approximately 50 interested attendees with a variety of Blockchain experience turning up to hear our talks and demos. 👍
We covered some of the basics about DApps, what they are, how they work, what they can be used for in the real world. Andy demoed some live examples of DApps such as https://leeroy.io/ (a decentralised social network). We made a live post during the talk. We also received some tips for this post that can be seen on the Ethereum Blockchain.
We then moved on to covering a slightly more academic and theoretical subject about how Blockchains can be classed as trustless. The topic of trust is both complex and broad so we tried to cover it from a pragmatic angle, going over how the technology is really the driving factor in the trustless nature of blockchains. Also highlighting that it’s a time game and a leap of faith to a certain extent as to if the trustless model will truly prevail.
We finished up covering oracles and how they could be used to provide a trusted data feed into the smart contract world. James performed a small demo of an oracle we had built which resulted a dice throwing game which was backed by a very basic solidity smart contract.
See our articles Trusting the trustless Blockchain and Who can you trust in a decentralised world? for more information on this subject.
All in all the talks seems to go down well and we met some really interesting people with some great ideas on how they are looking to use Blockchain technology to solve real world problems.
What became obvious from speaking to the audience is that lots of people are aware of the hype around Blockchain technology, however many don’t fully understand how to utilise it and how to turn a theoretical idea into a reality. This reaffirmed our own similar thoughts and validated our approach to try and build a growing community in the Northwest which hopefully can foster some of the ideas and help bring them to fruition in the future.
The next talk will be early 2018 and we hope to have a few guest speakers as well as some lightening talks from the community who have approached us with ideas.
To find out more follow us on Medium, and check our twitter feed at @blockchain_manc and sign up to our meetup page for all the latest news about the next event.
You can also come join our slack channel for daily discussions, a signup link can be found on http://www.blockchainmanchester.co.uk/
Have a great xmas & see you all soon! 🎄
