2018 Review: What I learned in 100 days Blockchain Events
Version 1.1 with many pictures
From AI to Blockchain
Coming from machine learning (deep learning) and leading a data science team in 2017, I wanted to utilise this knowledge in the field of Blockchain.
With friends we used our New Year’s holiday to a have a private programming trip and analysed financial as well as social media trends in correlation to cryptocurrencies values.
My Resume, the long-term global Bitcoin trend couldn’t be predicted accurately, because the internet currency is not a repetition of a similar pattern. And after our programming holidays, we had to focus on job tasks.
Alled with BBB ended quickly after a hackathon group participant secretly, see this git commit, placed a coin miner on our site — it’s uncomfortable with me to this day
Blockchain technology stands for much more than just cryptocurrencies
You hear much about cryptocurrencies, but the really special thing about it actually the concept behind it, the Blockchain technology.
In order to understand Blockhain one has to understand the technological fundamentals, consenus algorithms, the functioning of fullnodes and the peculiarities of different platforms.
Within the framework of the projects in the Porsche Digital Lab in Berlin we were able to do exactly that.
We have worked our way up from the basics to smart contract programming. This has laid a very good foundation and allowed us to solidly evaluate use and business cases.
Hackathons are a great way to learn & try out fast use case ideas
In many Hackathon events you could get to know a ton of Blockchain ideas, great people and new technologies first hand.
These were often cross-industry and showed the whole field of possibilities.
Especially exciting were the three hackathons, where I worked for Porsche with Volkswagen AG, Zalando and Adidas, where we could support social entrepreneurs with supply chain transparency.
The Blockchain world is already colorful and very diverse
Once one has explored the basics of block chains and transactions, including different consensus methods, it becomes clear what the advantages and disadvantages of the technology are. And also where there are limits.
The original blockchain is supposed to make intermediaries unnecessary and distribute the trust ‘censorship free’ fairly among all users, but today’s proof-of-work (PoW) approach devours vast amounts of energy. Even the alternatives have not yet been able to assert themselves.
Distributed computing and smart contracts are interesting for companies and process design. However, such a network grows virally if it is ensured that the investment costs are secure in the long term (e.g. through public permissionless systems without PoW).
Visiting Meetups to learn about specific topics helped a lot:
The future of Blockchain is not Blockchain: D(L)T, zero knowledge proofs, dApps & quantum secure computing
Although most blockchain platform ideas have not yet been implemented and are far from a productive stage and ‘blockchain nowadays mainly runs on PowerPoint’ (citing Ingo Brenckmann) — we already looked at the following technologies.
Beside the immutable Ledger of a Blockchain we need for example for the privacy and the data protection (also in the sense of GDPR) also erasable and encrypted data (e.g. with personal data). A blockchain seldom comes alone and needs a distributed file system. Here also Quantum secure encryption plays a big role — this topic we also deal with in 2019.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) also include other methods that are of application-specific interest, such as the ‘Gossip over Gossip’ protocol (e.g. from HashGraph) or decentralized Tangle (e.g. described by Helix).
When we think about the future of blockchain applications, Smart Contracts and distributed computing play the most important role. Designed with zero knowledge proofs such as ZK-STARKs and zk-SNARKs in mind, these programs would no longer have to be executed in parallel on all blockchain network participants, but only on a single one — verifiable by the others. Thus, the complexity of the programs can be increased ten thousand times nowadays.
And then, in the more distant future, whole applications can run decentrally, so-called dApps.
Sharing knowledge
After an intense period of information gathering and testing with prototyping, I was able to share some knowledge in presentations and share it on one or the other panel.
Relevant areas besides payment are record keeping (e.g. vehicle history), distributed computing (e.g. supply chain product lifecycle) and property & asset management with token.
Many useful applications can be sorted into one of the categories — but are still at different stages of implementation and deployment.
RECORD KEEPING: The protection against data manipulation of any information is an optimal and very feasible task for Blockchain. For this purpose, only the digital fingerprints (e.g. hashes) have to be written on a secure network. (For example for secure video timestamping by my colleague Jagrut Kosti)
PAYMENT: In order to bring a payment service to the masses by means of security tokens on blockchain (e.g. into a car, which pays the parking fees itself), you need more price-stable, less volatile cryptocurrencies. This can be done through extremely high market penetration or more likely through government guarantees / regulation. But both can take a long time and are difficult to influence.
DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING / SMART CONTRACTS: This creates stable, upwardly compatible interfaces between players / users and companies. SUPPLY CHAIN and PRODUCT LIFECYCLE are a particularly large field of application in this context — this area may also grow together across industries.
SECURITY TOKEN: According to studies, the token as a certificate of ownership of real values or representation of a value (e.g. of company shares) will take a heavy toll, but also requires stronger regulation through a clear legislative statement.
What’s for 2019?
In 2018 we took the technology apart and learned a lot. This makes it easy to investigate the usefulness and feasibility of use cases.
In 2019, it becomes important to focus on the user benefit of blockchain & DLT and to calculate business models for these platforms.
After all, you want to see the first real use cases in production.
About the author:
This article presents a personal comment by Claudio.
His professional work in the Porsche Digital Lab is research & pre-development of Blockchain and A.I. topics.
