Æternity Montreal meetup

[justin]

I started off by covering the basics of blockchains to try my best to get everyone on the same page, and then dove into how æternity is considered a blockchain 3.0 platform. Here are the topics I presented:
Why was cryptocurrency born?
How do blockchains work?
How do transactions work?
Consensus algorithms - proof of work vs proof of stake.
Byzantine problem.
Challenges of blockchain 1.0 and blockchain 2.0 platforms.
How æternity solves key issues through state channels, oracles, Bitcoin-NG, Sophia for contract execution, Base æpp’s wallet, blockchain explorer, voting æpp, token migration æpp, and shared the recent publishing success in the Apple AppStore & Google Play Store!
æternity Starfleet.
æternity’s GitHub.
Smart contracts, dApp structure, dApp attributes.
Why should you build a dApp?
What scenarios are dApps useful in?

I also focused on discussing the great learning material that dacade.org provides in order to get started on developing smart contracts for decentralized apps and really encouraged everyone to check it out!

Last but not least, I opened the floor to questions and had some really good ones! I had to cut the Q&A a bit early though because we were going overtime as I took most of the time covering a lot of material during my presentation.

Here are some of the questions asked by my audience, in no particular order:
What is the difference between proof of work and proof of stake?
What are the advantages of proof of work and proof of stake?
Why do you need proof of work?
How do 2 parties interact with a smart contract?
How does conflict resolution happen?
Why should I choose æternity over Ethereum?
Can you elaborate in more detail about key blocks vs micro blocks?
How many micro blocks are created after the key block?
What dApps have you used?
What kind of dApps are you most interested in seeing?

In terms of use cases, one person had studied about blockchains on a more technical level so I discussed with him my idea around sharing open science data on the blockchain because trust and reproducibility are some of the key issues in scientific research studies. We may discuss this further depending on how much free time we have.

As a bonus, I also shared a video about the Byzantine problem

[erik.chain]

I will share an interesting feedback/observation from this meetup:

"I spent a lot of time putting together the presentation trying to cater to an audience that could potentially be from newcomers to the crypto space to the more hardcore developers who may be interested in Starfleet. Maybe I’m approaching this wrong, but I feel like it’s very hard to cover such a large spectrum, so I’m thinking maybe meetups should have a more focused goal. For example a meetup should just target newcomers and introduce them to æternity, while a separate meetup should just target a more technical audience. But there probably shouldn’t be the same bounties and minimum requirements for each kind of meetup.

While I did get more technical and engaging questions this time because of the depth of some of my topics, at the same time I felt like I lost the interest of some people because they were more new and it was too deep to understand after just 1 evening of blockchain exposure. For example when someone asked me to elaborate more on key blocks and micro blocks in Bitcoin-NG, I really felt like I lost 95% of the room while I was explaining the details."

[erik.chain]

Really great work Justin!! I hope we can get some video material or group pictures next time