Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum

Birth of a distorted reality... whaaat? 😕

Forcing reality into spreadsheets

• Origins of relational data model and SQL
• Knowledge management and semantic web
• Doesn't fit into a spreadsheet? Then it ain't real!

Half a century's painful legacy...

• Paper form to fill? Table of a database!
• Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder? Databases!
• Fiber cable breaks. ISP: Did you try rebooting?

Act II – 1990 Tim Berners-Lee

Birth of the web – The network is the computer ~Sun Microsystems

Organic formation of computer networks

• Universities, companies, people; self-organizing
• Emergence of protocols: Telnet, E-mail, HTTP
• Intermittent to permanent connectivity

Invention of the Internet of Things

• Ever smaller, cheaper and smarter components
• Pervasive presence (eg. smart lightbulbs)

Where worlds collide 💥

Databases working together

• Seamless flow of data between entities
• Representing solely users' interests
• Orchestrated via their laptops

Our machines? Expensive paper simulators...

• Databases follow the images of their creators
• Connectivity boils down to filling out forms
• Collaboration is costly and bureaucratic

Let's connect the databases! (uhm, no...)

Link'em up and they'll just work™

• Our own database? Absolute truth
• Other's database? Statement of opinion
• Data flow is reduced to speculation and trust

Unusable long-term instability

• Tiny changes may result in unforseen consequences
• Interpretations from institutional assumptions
• Exponentially increasing failure possibilities

Let's centralize our collaborations! (oh my...)

Orchestration by a trusted third party

• Single standard, spoken by everybody
• Self-consciously co-created natural monopoly
• Neutral intermediary ⇒ financial and political monster

Delegating our social-, professional and financial interactions. But infrastructure too!

Protocols, protocols, protocols...

Collaboration above personal interests

• Globally accepted, available to all, decentralized
• BGP, DHCP, DNS, FTP, IMAP, HTTP, NTP, POP, SMTP, TLS/SSL

Stagnation for 3 decades! Skype, Slack, WhatsApp?

• Monopoly attempts and walled gardens
• At the whim of investors and shareholders
• Light in the tunnel: BitTorrent and Wikipedia (±)

Act III – 2008 Blockchain

Bitcoin – 7 billion dollar "accident" – Central Bank of the Internet

Academic experiment for global consensus

• Peer-to-peer database, eventual convergence
• No trust is required between participants
• Higher yield by support then attack (!)

Why financial application? Understandable, acceptable

• Global ledger of who has how much money
• Only the owner can ever access the funds

Soul of Bitcoin – Blockchain technology

Block time stability – Gold mining!? ლ(ಠ_ಠ ლ)

From a gamer's perspective 😋

• Wizards cook up potions, but no room for storage
• They order chests, but are afraid of monopolies
• Multiple chests may cause too much arguing

Need a solution to prevent multiple chests from emerging...

• Golden chest! 😆 Gold mining is hard, highly luck dependent 😈
• Unique orders! 😆 Half completed chests cannot be reused later 😈

Bitcoin clones, colored coins

Bitcoin became an enormous success

• Countless blatant copies popped up
• Significantly many modified protocols
• Useful, but untrustable: plain too small

Billion dollar question: Could they be merged into a single network?

• Generic, application independent data storage (can't be that hard)
• All logic – future included – encompassing network protocol (uhm... hmm...)

2015 Ethereum – Turing complete network

Ethereum – network is the database – network is the computer

Worlds first and only global computer

• Perfect machine: doesn't fault, doesn't stop
• Universally available: from anywhere, to anyone
• Cannot be subverted: influence- and censorship-proof

But what can it actually do?! 😅

• Unbreakable agreements between unknown parties
• Collaborations unstoppable by uninvolved third parties

Example – Crowdfunding

Gathering funds from complete strangers

• Announce crowdsale with fixed deadline
• If enough donations get sent, we keep it
• If not, everyone gets their money back

Tiny programmed contract (this one ⇒)

• No intermediary to collect fees
• Conform only to local laws
• Guaranteed outcome

Limitations and current development – Web 3.0

Global throughput not high enough (20-25 tps)

• At prototype level x10-x100, research level x10000 speedup (Casper)

Too expensive for massive data storage

• Global filesystem at pre-alpha level in development (Swarm)

No real time interaction (15s latency)

• Working but disabled global dark messaging (Whisper)

Thank you