Hackathon Intro
Speakers: Robert Schwinker
Transcript By: Bryan Bishop
Preliminary notes:
Contact me- https://twitter.com/kanzure
Hackathon intro—
Thank you everyone for showing up. This is a fantastic event coming togehter. Mid-February we were focusing on our team, how were we going to make the room feel full at 800 people? Well today we are sold-out at 1500 people. We have a full room today and we are excited about the developers that have come together. It is the perfect day for a Hackathon, it’s rizzling 50 degrees if you choose to go outside so we will have a captive auience. I o want to thank Microsoft for hosting us. All of our sponsors in general, and specifically for this hackathon have been tremendously supportive. This cae together in the course of 1 month. I am extremely excited. By a show of hands, how many people in this room were actually around and interested in bitcoin when it was going to the moon in Nov 2013. Okay, so about half the room. That just goes to show the staggering growth of the developer comunity, which we know is much more important for long-term stability. I wore this shirt today because it was at the top of my drawer, and two it speaks to the theme of this year’s event which is making blockchain real. For this hackathon, there’s a ton of hype around smart contracts and the potential for smart contracts for financial services and beyond. The goal of this hackathon is to come up with killer apps. I have confidence that many projects, more than one, in the next 24 hour projects, wil become the bnext big thing and potentially the next blockchain unicorn. Last year we had 75 developers, and our winne rfrom last year wjust raised a million dollars as a seed round. If that’s a sign for that will happen here, then that’s good news.
Robert will be taking it away. Thanks Ryan. I am Robert Schwinker, I co-founded Blockchain University, we knew that educating developers was really where it was at, this is a global event here, we have a packed agenda for you. We will go over the rules, the house hkeeping, the judging criteria. Who is from out of the country here? Who comes from out of the US? Okay, cool. We will do a group ohoto of you all a little bit later, at the end of all the talks, so please stay awaround for that. This morning we will, hear from each of the sponsors a few minutes. And then we will be doing breakout sessions in the afternoon. They will be in the raido city hall room. This is a ice space, please keep it clea, please clean up, it’s only on the 6th floor that we can code, so there’s a land grab going on, please share rooms wit heach other. There will be coding going on here as well. Doors close at 9. You will re-register tomorrow morning. We will hear from each of our sponsors. After the sponsors, if you have an idea that you will like to pitch, you will have up to 1 minute to do that. We will have our sponsors talk for a few minutes about what they do and who they are, if any of you have a nidea, you will pitch for one minute, like hey I am using ethereum to do p2p insurance and I need someone who does nodejs. This afternoon, we will have you sign up on doodle, for rehersals for tomorrow morning. We will be alternating between podiums. You will figure out if you can connect. We don’t have an ELMO. If you are doing a mobile app, there might be some connectors here for that… it’s a 10 minute reherasal where we go throug hthe audio visual and your hack, even if it’s not ready, it probably wont be ready at 9 or 10 tomorrow morning. But w ecan deteremine the order of the hacks which will be posted tomorrow morning. You will be assigned to podium A or podium B, the judges will be in the middle, for judging their prizes as well as the grand prize. Sign up for rehearsals this afternoon, we will send the doodle link tomorrow, we will have sponsor office hours today and tomorrow, we will do the rehearsals starting around 8:30 tomorrow morning, at 1 o’clock hacking stops, everyone will have posted their hacks to the dev post site, we will create the presentation order, we will introduce the judges, and then we will get to the presentations around 2 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.
Team size is up to 4 people. You can operate solo, or you can have up to 4 people. The prizes are for up to 4 people per team. If you haven’t signed up on the dev site, do http://consensus2016-blockchain.devpost.com/ and then the grand prize is $5,000 and the general criteria is that the judges are looking for a unique idea that has not been done before. It’s not a 10-year out kind of idea, it’s an idea that could be relevant to the next 6 to 18 months. So, it can be more than an idea. We will not be doing code review. We like to look at the tech complexity. We want to see working code. You can have some slide where you present your team, your over-view if you are going to do a slide, just a couple slides in the beginning, show us what you built. If you built stuff before, please indicate that, and what you built over the weekend. You will be judged on what you built this weekend. And then your presentation. Make all, make thunder, make magic.
Corporate governance, digital rights management, metered autonomous device payments, escrow solutions, p2p insurance, we will introduce the prizes tomorrow and the judges. Let’s carry on with the Microsoft presentation.
Microsoft
We work with Azure. We also build development frameworks on top of things like Consensys that have brought to market. I have been working with the block guys team pretty closely. How do we enable their infrastructure in Azure to spin up private blockchains to get work done and enable production workloads? I want to show you how this works. On Azure, we have a marketplace and you can come up here and search for strateo, which is a blockapps strato. It shows you details about how this works. This is a dockerized blockchain container, it’s easy to spin up. You can click this big button here. We also have a testdrive feature, if you don’t have an Azure account, you can hit this test drive, it’s a time bomb version of the platform. When you are at the conference here, we have some microsoft people here, we have Christine and Matt, Eugene, Daniel, and Katour is also here as well. They all have experience with blockchain and Azure and Microsoft. When you click on this button, you get redirected to your portal, you can fill in this information, we have a wizard here that you would go, specify how big the VM is, click Go and then you have one created. We can bypass that really quickly. Once you have that setup, we have this blockapp running up here, let’s see if I can pull one up here. Should be a dash. http://blockapps.net/ There’s an interface… is port 9000 running on this one… so the core app that the API is running, you will see this nice little interface that will show recent transactions, block explorer, transfers that have happened, you can use this to drill through and see transactions going through. How do you get transactions going through? Once you have this up, one of the things at MIcrosoft, we wondered how to lower bar to entry, make solidity very easy to grasp and use. We have been working on an extension to Visual Studio, you will see we have a marketplace extension for solidity, we have one template out there, we will create some other ones, this one will hep you build smart contracts. We will be making a web app to spin up a decentralized app with a smart contract. I have the cclicking showed here. It will scaffold all this stuff out there. It will show some sample contracts out here. In this case it’s a payout smart contract. we have some simple storage ones out here. We also have some extensions with intellisense so we have all the normal syntax highlighting when you go to type stuff, you see the dropdowns come out, you will see this even easier to use. One thing we have to do is run a key srever. You will see this when you run this. You need to run a keyserver. I have one running. We have documentation out there. It’s a basic node application. Once we have htis installed, we can do block start on here, and we can basically start the block product that these guys have been working on, it’s listening on port 8000, it’s a REST interface for Visual Studio to hit, what we’ve done is said okay we have this simple storage contract here, let’s take that one, we’ve right-clicked and added context menus to do compilation, the SolC compiler is one in there, it will give you the output inside of there. You will see in a few seconds, it’s basically compiling, you will see the binaries in a bin folder, it’s kind of interesting, we typed everything right but what about deployment? If we do a deployment, what should happen is it that it does that deployment, it signed it, sent it ot the private blockchain and created the dynamic interface to start testing it. We can send some ether to the contract, you can see some in the debug screen, we can see the post and everything going through here, you are getting this full experience of how sending how do we send ether and execute these contracts and start working on this project. We are looking to extend this more, hopefully this lowers the bar to entry for these guys, as you get used to solidity and writing decentralized apps. We will now pitch it to Victor who is from blockapps who has been working on another interesting app.
Blockapps Victor
You will be leading the breakout session today? Okay we will post the schedule for that as well. Can you guys here me?
I am pretty loud naturally. Thank you guys for coming today. We have some really exciting tools. You guys are getting a first taste of what we whave been building. , more I’m Victor CEO of the BlockApps team. We are the first ceritfied blockchain solution provider on the Azure platform. Blockapps is basically, we don’t think anyone cares that much about blockchain, we think everyone cares about applications you can build on top of blockchains. We want to make that as easy for you as possible. We are the group behind the key ethereum implemetnation. We are ethereum for web developers. Today we are going to give you a very simple stack that you can build your first blockchain application in minutes. Everything that they showed you, we pre-provisioned that, that’s the developer sandbox on Azure. We also showed you the smart contract webdev framework. That can take you from the first …. network administrator, block server which is the key server, … … Vinay is Vitalik’s long-lost brother who started a decentralized pizza shop, we have pizza buyers who can review all these pizza offers, we expose ethereum with a REST JSON API. You can do node, php, whatever stack you choose to work from, anything that can take json, you can use that to build your backend. Lastly, and I might regret this for the exponential curve that ethereum is going up, we might regret this, we are in go to moon phase for the ethereum network, if 100 ETH winds up being $100k then I might regret this prize….
IBM
IBM Bluemix Hyperledger project
Hi. I am Shiat Anderson. I am a software engineer. I am going to present to you the IBM challenge. It uses blockchain services on IBM BlueMix, based on the hyperledger project which is from the Linux Foundation. The hyperledger project mission statement is a collaborative effort to advance blockchain technology. It is collaborative. It is the key word here. There are a ton of members involved in this project. I see people out here wearing hyperledger t-shirts, which is awesome, I haven’t seen those yet. Tons of companies are contributing code to this. This is out on github, github.com/hyperledger/fabric. This is the fabric project under hyperledger which is an incubation project proposed by IBM and Digital Asset Holdings. We have 45 contributors. The key things to know is that it’s permissioned, there’s no native cryptocurrency so it’s very easy to run your contracts on it, it has a pluggable consensus model, we give you practical byzantine fault tolerance out of the box, it has chaincode which is smart contracts, chaincode is smart contract. These are currently go programs, no custom languages, golang is super simple to learn, you will pick it up in 10 minutes. We will be adding more support for other language, like java and javascript. These are deployed on docker containers and run out on the blockchain.
The other half of this is IBM Bluemix, which is a cloud service. There are tons of runtimes out there. There’s nodejs, java, golang, python, https://bluemix.net/ to register and sign up. To deploy the blockchain hyperledger project on bluemix, it takes 3 clicks. You go to the catalog, you find the blockchain service in the catalog, you click create, you don’t edit those fields, they arecorrect by default, you hit this launch button, you will get a dashboard which is a live view into your blockchain, we give you 2 peers by default, a membership services peer, let me show you a live view of this quickly, switch over to… we give you a swagger API, you can click on all the APIs and try them out, we will give you a, blockchain tab, which will give you a live view into your blockchain, you can see blocks as they are created, you can click on blocks, We have a couple of apps, this one is for trading marbles
http://marbles.mybluemix.net/p1
You can see your transactions in your blocks, you can drag marbles back and forth to create transactions on the chain. … the bluemix catalog has other things, these are 3 things you can try out, there are APIs for the weather company, it would be awesome if someone makes a project for weather data going into the blockchain as an oracle, there’s a twitter API, there’s cloudant, IBM Watson, we always have people asking about storing large amounts of data and then hashes of that data in the blockchain, that would be cool for someone to build. For writing your first chaincode, this is going to be really simple, install golang, get github.com/hyperledger/fabric/core/chaincode/shim (go get). You are ready to write your chaincode and deploy to bluemix. We have a learn chaincode tutorial, http://bit.ly/IBM-Blockchain we also have a ton of people at the back of the conference room probably be wearing these shirts at some point. Ask them for help and we will get you up and running in 15-30 minutes.
We have many APIs. We have REST, node.s, https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain/ibm-blockchain-js and gRPC - https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric/tree/master/protos
IBM challenge is simple, create the most innovative blockchain application using our blockchain on bluemix service, it enhances your entry to add other bluemix services to it. It’s not required. The important thing is what you can win, each member of the winning team will get a Go Pro camera, up to 5 per team, the team is limited to 4, so everyone gets a camera…. if you are a startup or thinking of starting a startup, you get 30 days of recognition on IBM.com/blockchain which could be great marketing for you. You will get a 1/2 day session with the IBM Garage with our blockchain architects. We have garages all over the world, we have one in New York. And then for 2nd place, every member of the 2nd place team will also get the GoPro camera, same thing, again, bit.ly to get started, or go to bluemix, check out the bluemix documentation, find any one of us, we have a conference room on that side, we will be glad to get you started on writing the first hyperledger project on bluemix. That’s it.
Consensus 2015 winner (Wayne)
Morning. Last year we won the Consensus hackathon. I am not going to give a demo of Tierion. This is something in the insurance space. We figured, why not build a prototype around insurance? What we did is we thought about the claims process. When someone submits a claim to the insurance company, they have to prove the content of the claim and the timestamp of that claim. So we thought that would be a great way to demonstrate this verifiable proof of any document or any file on the blockchain. It’s a simple REST API, you give us a data, we generate a blockchain receipt, a cryptographic proof that this is linked to a bitcoin transaction, we can do this at scale for millions of documents. We used Tierion’s data, we built a mobile app that submited the claim, submitted data, return the blockchain receipt to both the claimaint and the insurance company. We gave proof that the content of the claim and when it was submitted. We modeled out how that claim travels through the claim process, we took it from each state n the claim workflow, we hi the API at each step to create a cryptographically verifiable audit trail for that claims process. I think the reason why we were successful last year was because we took a real use case, we built something that worked, we created a story that clearly told what we were doing. Things have worked pretty well for us. It was an accidental launch. We thought we were going to make Tierion live on September 2015… we came to the hackathon and winning, we got a ton of attention that was unanticipated. The past few months have been really great for us. We announced a seed round of financing yesterday. An event like this can be a good platform to get your idea out into the world. Good luck at the Hackathon.
Deloitte Consensus2016 title sponsor
Good morning. Ready for the challenge? Santana. I co-lead the cryptocurrency community at Deloitte. We have several thousand practicioners. We have a challenge here that could bring you to the forefront of many of our clients. The app with the highest potential for commercialization. We spend, many industries, we spend in every sector, starting from finance, insurance, healthcare, automotives, energy, name it and we’re there. We want to create, we want you to create a killer app that would benefit our clients. It should increase consumers, it should create a killer app that will attract consumers so that they can get more market share. It should improve their revenues significantly, make them too big to fail, right? Improve efficiency, there’s lots of efficiency issues in legacy enterprises. Show them that your killer app can reduce their operational costs…. most people think that they can make a blockchain and fire all their employees. That’s the challenge. We are also platform agnostic, you can choose any platform you want, including excel spreadsheets. Any platform you want. We will be around. The Deloitte team, we are here, two days, jessica, matt, derek. We are here for two days. We will be here to help guide you. Let’s go to the prizes. First as I said, we have a fairly big group, cryptocurrency group, we have something called an innovation lab where we bring our top clients to showcase some of the apps that are out there in the industry, so half-day session with innovation lab and the global innovation group followed by dinner with deloitte blockchain leaders and executives. I will be there too. It also includes roundtrip airfare, max value $500 eat, one night stay in Atlanta, for each team member up to 5 team members. That’s where our innovation lab is. That’s the challenge. That’s the price. Did I miss anything else? So welcome to everybody, let’s get started and hope we will meet some of the future billionaires in the room. Alright thank you very much.
Pitches (nope)
Anyone who would like to pitch… we have one more sponsor presentation. If you have an idea, start to line up here.
Truffle
Karl Floersch
I am Karl from the truffle team. I am going to show you a quick demo of truffle. It’s really rapid development. You can get up and going really fast. I am going to show that with a live demo which will probably not work but let’s hope for the best. … These are our solidity contracts, they are based, to make building contracts very easy. You have your, this is going to be a coin demo, we are building bitcoin right now, so get ready….. so first we have to deploy this to an ethereum node… these are public keys, it fills them up with coins, now what we can do is do truffle deploy, what this is going to do is compile those contracts and then deploy them to our test network. We are not verifying the blocks. This gets you going. You can do the same things on a live network. Don’t start with a live network. You can do truffles serve, it builds everything right in, you can get started quickly. This is just basic javascript html technologies. This is metacoin. It has new, you start out with 1000 fake coins, it’s just development coins. You can send it, who are we going to send it to, well we can go back here and grab an account that i skimmed over. We can grab an account and drop it in, transaction completed, I can’t verify that it did anything, is truffle production-ready? Is it going to get me all the way? I am working on the doge dao, this is the new best dao that has ever existed, you have met our supreme leader. We are in the blockapps room, ethereum.stackexchange.com, that might work out for you.
Pitches
Egor: One of the use cases for blockchains is peer-to-peer cash. I think the second one is identity. I would like to build identity KYC micro-oracle inspired by Consensys proof-of-address. It will probably be proof-of-phone-number or proof-of-email or proof-of-social-network. We will probably use truffle, if we know how to solve… if you know how to solve out-of-the-gas team.. we have one developer and one designer. Anyone who can solve the out-of-gas problem, like an ethereum developer.
Pavol: I am from Ukraine. I am a cryptographer. At Singapore, I designed a platform for financial .. that, I wrote a whitepaper, my team is building a few commercial applications on this, one of them is a decentralized auction to sell government property in Ukraine, which will be launched. Today I want to design basically a blockchain stack, something like a model for blockchain, and differentiate transaction layer database layer, consensus layer, contract layer, identity layer describe all these pieces. I want to write a whitepaper again. This is a piece needed to build a set of open protocols like a common language for industry to communicate. I need researchers for my team.
Kid: I am a UX strategist. I am looking for is, what I am building is a blockchain app that connects to your health records and your health tracking devices. This will allow you to have a record of what your prescriptions are, what your copay is, what your payments are, access it anywhere using your blockchains….. I need programers.
Bill: I am here representing team Farmshare. It is for community supported agriculture. People receive weekly deliveries of food. We want to tokenize shares and let people support agricultural community ythrough labor and time. I am a deisgner. We need one more developer, preferably experience with Ethereum.
Hugo: I am from Australia. I am working on UNionD which stands for decentralized. I want to put unions on the blockchain. I am looking for developers.
Scott Morris: I am founder at Ithacash. I am here with Project Forward which wants to support volunteerism with blockchain. We want to work with smal lscale national governments for people to give back to a community and receive purchasing power. I am a systems thinker, so I need technologists.
Greg: The dream is I want to sit around with my friends with my poker cards in one hand, my smartphone in another, and place bets or fold, as you will, and have the funds transferred accordingly with the smart contracts. I need programmers.
Simon: I am from Boston. My team is GameHorse… the game is to bring transparency to real estate process. There are “phantom deals” which artificially drive up the price. I am looking for a UX person. The platform will be ethereum or …
Ethan: Dating application where people show each other that they don’t have vernereal disease. I thought it was a cool idea. Biometrically verified information, verified by a robot. No human will be using. I need developers, designers.
Jessie: There is an election this year. We are 100 million people short of a full turn-out. I wnat a dead-simple voting app. How do we get 216 million people into a blockchain? How do we create rich metadata on this? Social proofs for keybase? I want to keep track of people and there will be a lot of publicity, if we count 200 million votes, I am looking for UX people, social media APIs, I need developer support too.
How many of oyu will like to be the next blockchain unicorn? (Hah, nobody). How many of you want a house in the next 5 years? How do you make people work with you? Make your equity liquid. Make any illiquid assets into liquid. Regulation is built-in. I am building a governance/regulation platform for secondary market. This is going to be quickbooks + legalzoom + nasdaq before you get to nasdaq. Your VC is going to be signed up with me. Your VC is going to say go here, get the list fo things here, submit your proof-of-existence. How many of you want seed money? I am going to build a part of this, which is registration. I need proof-of-existence. I have some team members, anyone interested should talk with me.
Alias bank account system, permissioning from the bank, not only could oyu payment schemes to pay someone to an email address, an ethereum address, anything. I need anyone who wants to play with ethereum.
Open-source blockchain logistics. Credit scores. World of warcraft, minecraft, you want to motivate tihs person to give you resource.s… you can plug in the etehreum, put it in bigDB, put that messaging layer, smart contract processing. So basically the stack is… stuff comes in, processes through ethereum, posts in BigDB, end results are done there. Lawyers would be good…. we also need 2 backend people, someone with javascript or angular, we have need some UIs.
Luke: I am an expert in DRM. Cable industry is unbundling. Video exploding. Ujo music with consensus customer has done, but for videos. Video player with checkout button to pay through ethereum. I need programmers.
Charles: I wanted to build a community relief fund. p2p insurance. Community would donate money. Whoever donates would be a voter. I am a developer, need a designer and frontend. That would be great.
Howard Lin: I am a finance consultant. For those who are not familiar with the financial market, currently the financial market is fragmented. Equity is traded in multiple exchanges like dozens of dark pools. One of the challenges is how to reconstruct the market events when something happens. Data has to be distributed in multiple places. We’re building a, use the blockchain to build a distributed database to save a lot of exchanges and financial regulators to rebuild this whole thing in one place, rather than separate places. I need developers. I am a technologist, so I know the business, thank you.
Kenneth: I want to revamp the supply chain management. All of it. I want to put my mom out of work. Whenever a blank comes in, Hong Kong to JFK, she has to get on the phone and ask what flight is it on, when is it going to arrive? I want that automated, I want to put my mom out of work, I want to automate freight with smart contracts. I want to incentivize truckers and everyone else to get things on time. Right now, everything is late. I need developers. I need anyone.
Jeff: I am from Luxembourg. Big financial hub. I am an attorney. I worked for 2 years in capital markets. It was quite boring. I have the vision to build a company that would be non-profit for example to care about … medical data or digital IP. The idea is to build a historic IPO where the shareholder would be a non-profit company. The shares of the IPO would be distributed over the blockchain. One human, one share. Not more than one share. No dividends, not tradeable, suspended. To raise awareness about democratic potential of the blockchain tech.
I have been working at Bloomberg. I left to do Hacker School in NY. It’s a programmer rtreat. I got into hardware stuff. I want to build a low cost low power, this is a $3 dollar you can buy one, it has wifi, it’s basically like a narduino clone…