73. The Blockchain, Beyond Cryptocurrency

Owen Ou is an engineer at Heroku, and he is joined by two employees from AE Studio: Melanie Plaza, the Head of Technology, and Adam Hanna, an engineer. The conversation begins with a discussion of the tools used when developing with the blockchain in mind, including testing environments that mimic production systems like Ethereum. Developers in the blockchain community are constantly trying to lower the barriers to entry, and both Adam and Melanie agree that it's very easy to get started with the available tooling.

The three take a step back from this and start talking about the origins of the blockchain and Bitcoin in particular, how it came about from a need for a decentralized system of privacy. The ultimate goal of the blockchain is to provide a repeatable and verifiable chain of anonymized information that cannot be tampered with. Each block in the blockchain is a cryptographic hash of all the data that came before it. Adam talks about how "mining" works--the incentives for people to provide computational resources to help verify the blockchain. Since all of this information is decentralized, no one can control or manipulate the history of the hashes.

While cryptocurrencies have been used for nefarious activities in the past, Melanie is optimistic for its current and potential uses. Filecoin, for example, is a distributed file storage network on the blockchain. Residents of countries with draconian censorship laws rely on Ethereum to communicate safely with each other. Adam believes that a potential "second Internet" could arise for social conversations that's separate from the transactional, ad-driven one we currently use.

Links from this episode

• AE Studio builds technology products that increase human agency
• Truffle allows you to spin up a development environment to compile and test your smart contracts on as if they were on the Ethereum network
• MetaMask is a browser extension which allows you to interact with your smart contracts and the Ethereum blockchain
• Merkle trees are the basis for the blockchain
• Overcoming Byzantine fault tolerance is one advantage of the blockchain
• Filecoin is an application of the blockchain for file storage