Blockchain – Software Engineering Daily

Zcash is a payment and consensus system that allows users to transfer money to each other with strong guarantees of privacy. Zcash implements the same core features of Bitcoin, with the added functionality of shielded payments. Shielded payments are private, and they are enabled by a novel cryptographic technique called zk-SNARKS: zero knowledge succinct non-interactive The post Zcash Design with Sean Bowe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The Federal Reserve System is fraudulent. Whatever its stated purpose, its effective purpose is to create a mechanism of deficit spending by politicians, through the insidious invisible taxation of monetary debasement (aka inflation).” These are the words of Erik Voorhees, the CEO of crypto financial exchange ShapeShift. Long before he started ShapeShift, Erik was opposed The post ShapeShift with Erik Voorhees appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

We sign many different types of contracts throughout our lives. We sign a mortgage to get a loan for a house. When we go to the hospital, we sign a piece of paper that defines how our medical data can be shared between organizations. These pieces of paper represent our opting into an agreement that The post Enterprise Smart Contracts with Marley Gray appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ethereum is a system for running decentralized smart contracts. In the current implementation of Ethereum, every smart contract gets deployed to every full node. Whenever a user wants to call a smart contract, that smart contract gets executed on each full node–across the entire network. The current model for smart contract execution needs to be The post Plasma: Smart Contract Scalability with Christian Reitwiessner appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Soumya Basu is a PhD student at Cornell, where he studies distributed systems problems associated with cryptocurrencies. Soumya is advised by Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell professor who previously appeared on the show to discuss smart contract security. Soumya joins the show today to talk about a variety of issues in the cryptocurrency space. We The post Cryptocurrency Networking with Soumya Basu appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Consensus protocols are used to allow computers to work together. A consensus protocol lets different servers agree on the state of a system. For decades, these protocols have been used to establish consensus among database nodes, application servers, and other infrastructure that runs within an enterprise. More recently, new consensus protocols have been invented to The post Consensus Systems with Ethan Buchman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The DAO was a system of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that investors put millions of dollars into. Back in May 2016, it was the largest crowdfunding event in history, and we discussed it in detail in a previous episode with Matt Leising. The DAO was hacked due to a security vulnerability, and this The post DAO Reflections and Slock.it with Christoph Jentzsch appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Data streams about the weather can be used to predict how soybean futures are going to change in price. Satellite data streams can take pictures of the number of cars on the road, and judge how traffic patterns are changing. Search engines can aggregate data from different queries and determine what people are most interested The post Streamr: Data Streaming Marketplace with Henri Pihkala appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

To use a web application, you probably open a web browser or a mobile app. To access an Ethereum application, many people use an Ethereum browser. In previous episodes, we explored Metamask and Mist, which are Ethereum browsers for the desktop. In today’s episode, we explore Status, a mobile Ethereum browser. Status founders Jarrad Hope The post Status.im: Ethereum Mobile Browser with Jarrad Hope and Oskar Thoren appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Anthony Diiorio was involved with Ethereum from the earliest days. He was one of the first people to see the Ethereum ideas presented by Vitalik Buterin, and he invested deeply in Ethereum–both financially and by helping to establish the early Ethereum community. Anthony started Decentral in 2014, which is a hub for his projects in The post The Business of Decentralization with Anthony Diiorio appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A financial exchange is an operationally intensive business. You have customers making a high volume of transactions, your service has to be low latency and highly available, and you are dealing with a lot of money. A cryptocurrency exchange has all of the complexity of a typical financial exchange–and then some additional complexity. ShapeShift is The post ShapeShift Operations with Jon ShapeShift appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cryptocurrency speculation has pulled in a large population of people who do not know what they are investing in. If you hear about an investment of $1000 turning into $1M, it’s tempting to get sucked in yourself. For most of these everyday people, the game is completely rigged. A large percentage of market activity is The post Crypto Pump and Dumps with Bruno Skvorc appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In the finance industry, many people have a computer on their desk called a Bloomberg terminal. A Bloomberg terminal contains news, stock prices, communication tools, and other features that make it worth a high subscription price. And people in finance can afford to pay that high subscription because their decisions can cause a gain or The post Crypto Bloomberg with Valentin Mihov appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most applications today run on a cloud provider like AWS. They are built with a framework like Ruby on Rails. They use a set of APIs like Stripe and Twilio for middleware services. This is the era of “web 2.0.” With decentralized systems, we are starting to get a feel for what “web 3.0” might The post Web3 with Fabian Vogelsteller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Decentralized applications can be built on the Ethereum blockchain. Just as the Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed, append-only ledger of financial transaction history, Ethereum is a distributed, append-only ledger of computational transaction history. New kinds of applications can be built on the Ethereum blockchain—and just like every new technology, we need an interface to bridge The post Metamask with Dan Finlay appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Decentralized applications might someday offer alternatives to modern monopolies. Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon—all of these services could be recreated on a decentralized stack of technologies like Ethereum, IPFS, and Golem. Fully decentralized services could be more transparent, cheaper, and more efficient. But let’s be realistic. Today, even the simplest applications of fully decentralized blockchains don’t The post Monopolies and Proof of Stake with Karl Floersh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

For a decade, Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system has run without disruption. In a proof-of-work scheme, Bitcoin miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle associated with a block of transactions. Every ten minutes, all the Bitcoin miner nodes race to be the first to solve a block of transactions. Only one miner wins each block, meaning the The post Proof of Stake with Subhan Nadeem appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Humans organize into groups. There are lots of group types: religions, corporations, national governments, state governments, citizenries, clubs, musical bands. Every group has governance. Governance defines the rules and the ways that rules change. The United States requires citizens to pay taxes. A corporation requires you to show up to work, but they have to The post How Aragon Manages DAOs with Luis Cuende appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Smart contracts are programs that run on the Ethereum blockchain. A smart contract developer pays Ether to deploy the contract. When a contract is deployed, every full node on the Ethereum blockchain has a copy of the contract code in that node’s address space. Every full node needs to hold a copy of every smart The post Smart Contracts with Raine Revere appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Joseph Bonneau is co-author of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, a popular textbook. At NYU, he works as an assistant professor exploring cryptography and security. His YouTube lessons teaching Bitcoin have hundreds of thousands of views. His material offers clear explanations of how Bitcoin works. Since Joseph has a clear understanding of the objective facts around The post Bitcoin’s Future with Joseph Bonneau appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.