Meetup Presentations

1. Welcome!

2. Sponsor: Profitics, Inc..

3. About Me
● Venkat Yetrintala
● 25 years of professional experience
● Hi-tech trends, engineering best practices and giving back
● Following Blockchain/Bitcoin since inception
● Sr Director of Engineering at Monotype
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vyetrintala/

4. Blockchain Myths
Venkat Yetrintala

5. Blockchain = Bitcoin

6. Bitcoin is just one of the applications
● We will hear a failed projects, market crashes and bubbles
● But blockchain not a bubble. It's not just a buzzword
● Blockchain (Distributed Ledger Technology) is the underlying foundation
technology of cryptos
● Blockchain was invented in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published his Bitcoin
paper
● So Cryptocurrency was the first use of blockchain
● Now we have around 2 K+ crypto / coins are traded actively
● There are many other uses of blockchain
● We are on a journey... Fear it, understand it, respect it, use it...

7. Blockchain kills all middlemen so banks
are against it

8. Ultimately, but we are in transition phase
● Banks, lawyers, notaries, real estate agents, insurance brokers will all be
affected by blockchain
● Blockchain will change the way middlemen operate but we will still need their
services
● Blockchain will not replace their soft skills. Yet it will automate manual work
they do
● Most of the new services on blockchain are not fully decentralized. Becoming
middlemen themselves

9. Blockchain "Has been hacked" / not
secure

10. Blockchain Security
● Bitcoin & Ethereum blockchains were NOT hacked
● The more distributed they are the more secure they come against 51% attacks
where attackers take over control of the consensus
● The standard cryptography blockchains uses were not hacked
● Most hacks come from human mistakes:
○ Smart contract bugs
○ Exchange wallets
○ Personal wallets including paper and hardware wallets
○ 51% attacks on smaller blockchains
● Quantum computing will force changes to the current cryptography

11. Blockchain Is Just A Storage
Mechanism / Database

12. Blockchain is NOT a replacement for distributed database
● A blockchain is a type of datastore
● It is NOT a (distributed) database
● It is NOT a cloud storage
● We do NOT store everything on it
● We usually store only the key (the hash) to the data
● Useful for multiple (non-trusting) stakeholders

13. Cryptocurrencies Are Volatile, So
Blockchain Must Not Be Reliable

15. Crypto Transactions Are Anonymous,
hence best for Criminals

16. Crime is much harder with Crypto than Fiat

17. Blockchain is free

18. Nothing is Free
● "Free Money Transfer" is one of the applications
● Blockchain solutions are more expensive to run than databases
● Every transaction incurs a transaction fee
● For each new block, a miner gets paid for solving a mathematical problem
● Miners have to buy computing resources. These consume electricity
● Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake

19. Miners are spending tons of electricity
performing a useless calculation.

21. Cryptocurrency And Blockchain Are For
Technology And Finance People Only

23. Blockchain Network Types

24. Thank you!
See you at next meetup on Wednesday, Sep 26th...