If you are new to Blockchain, this intro will guide you through the main concepts, use cases and technologies behind it. Blockchain is a revolution that goes beyond Bitcoins. It will involve the relationships between normal people and governments or established power, other than the way most of the the applications we use today works. Consider this an effective Blockchain guide for newcomers. These slides have been developed and used in an Open Lesson at the Geeks Academy.

1. Blockchain
Davide Pelosi
davide.pelosi@dpstudio.eu

2. The Internet’s problem of early ‘80
Privacy Security
Inclusion

3. Any solution required a third party
Paying with credit cards requires users to
divulge personal data.
Transaction fees too high for small payments.
The God Protocol
“Doing business on the Internet
requires a leap of faith.”
Nick Sazbo, designer of "bit gold", precursor of
Blockchain

4. “‘Oh my god, this is it. This is the big
breakthrough,’ This is the distributed
trust network that the Internet always
needed and never had.””
Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the first commercial Web
browser, Netscape.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto (father of blockchain)?
Dorian S. Nakamoto
The hero: Blockchain!!!
Really?
I have done it?
“The internet finally has a public data
base”
Chris Dixon, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a
venture-capital firm which has financed several bitcoin
startups.
“Bitcoin has the potential to do
something like change the world.”
Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of Paypal.

5. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2016
Source: Gartner (August 2016)
"As a portent for the rise of the
programmable economy, the potential
of this technology to radically
transform economic interactions
should raise critical questions for
society, governments and enterprises,
for which there are no clear answers
today."

7. Decentralized
Community VerifiedTrustfull
Blockchain Key Factors
Secure

8. How it works

9. Some Numbers
Blocks
460,000
Current Space
113GB

10. Blockchain Today
● Only 0.025% or $20 billion of global GDP is held in the blockchain
○ This will increase significantly in the next decade, as banks, insurers and tech firms see the
technology as a way to speed up settlements and cut cost
● Being used by "less than 1%" of its total audience
● Bitcoin is "the only proven blockchain"

11. Current sentiment (mainly in finance applications)
● Scale the technology is still a challenge
○ may be unable to support thousands of different services with millions of users
● Uncertainties surrounding security and privacy issues
● Governance is a "critical factor" for adoption
○ What data do we use? Where do we store them? How can we ensure usage is compliant with
the regulations? Who updates them?
● As participants to a trade finance arrangement may rely on different banks, for
the information shared on the blockchain to be meaningful, the different banks
must agree on a common platform.

12. Need for standard
● There is no blockchain standard yet
● R3 Consortium
○ leads a consortium of 42 financial
companies in R&D of blockchain usage in
the financial system
● Smart Contracts Alliance
○ an industry initiative of the Chamber of
Digital is a de-facto authoritative resource
for smart contracts.

13. Use Case types
● Use blockchain for transferring any type of assets
○ Colu has developed a mechanism to add extra data to bitcoin transaction so that they can
represent bonds, shares or units of precious metals.
● Use the blockchain as a registry of anything worth tracking closely
○ Bitcoin transactions can be combined with snippets of additional information which then also
become embedded in the ledger
○ Es. Tracking land titles, luxury goods
● “smart contracts”
○ Execute automatically under the right circumstances
○ Bitcoin can be “programmed” so that it only becomes available under certain conditions

14. Blockchain Platform Players

15. Cookies for Techies
● Blockchain security based on Hashing
● Hashing is any function that can be used
to map data of arbitrary size to data of
fixed size
○ Hashing is in a one-way: It is easy to go
from the data to their hash; impossible to
go from the hash back to the data
○ Change what goes into the block in any
way and the hash would be different
● Hash is put into the header of the
proposed block
● The header becomes the basis for a
puzzle which involves using the hash
function yet again

16. Miners looking for gold
● A block’s hash has to look a certain way; it must
have a certain number of zeroes at the start
● Miners test trillions and trillions of possibilities by
trial and error looking for the answer
○ Changing the “nonce” to create different hashes
○ Transaction data unmodified
● When a miner comes up with a solution other
nodes check it
○ solving is hard but checking is easy!!
○ each node that confirms the solution updates the
blockchain accordingly
● The hash of the header becomes the new block’s
identifying string, and that block is part of the
blockchain ledger
The winning miner
earns 12 bitcoin, worth
about $21.111,00

17. The Blockchain 3 factors security
● Chance
○ It is not possible to predict which miner will solve a puzzle
○ It is not possible to predict who will get to update the blockchain at any given time
● History
○ Each new header contains a hash of the previous block’s header
○ Make a change anywhere and that changed block’s header will come out different
○ The ledger will no longer match the latest block’s identifier and will be rejected
● Incentives

18. Sources and Resources
https://openwt.com
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/blockchain-explained-simply/
https://blockchain.info
http://www.economist.com
http://observer.com/2016/10/benben-factom-bitfury-ghana-georgia-honduras
https://www.infoq.com/articles/blockchain-middleware
http://prwire.com.au/pr/62010/gartner-blockchain-and-connected-home-are-almost-at-the-peak-of-the-hype-cycle
http://fortune.com/2016/05/08/why-blockchains-will-change-the-world/

19. The end!
davide.pelosi@dpstudio.eu