Blockchain – Software Engineering Daily

Dogecoin was started in 2013 as a joke. Jackson Palmer forked Bitcoin and created his cryptocurrency as a play-off of the “doge” meme. The currency became popular as a means of Reddit users “tipping” each other. If I made a comment on Reddit that you liked, you might send me some Dogecoin. This use case The post Dogecoin with Jackson Palmer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

There are two factors that limit the rate at which transactions are accepted into the Bitcoin blockchain: block time and block size. Block time defines how often a new block is appended onto the blockchain. Block size defines how many transactions fit into a new block. As of March 2018, the current block time and The post Blockchain Scalability with Peter Ullrich appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Bitcoin is an immutable, append-only blockchain ledger that reaches consensus through proof-of-work. The contents of the ledger are financial transactions–people sending and receiving Bitcoin currency to each other. Since Bitcoin, there have been other cryptocurrencies that have similar properties–like Ethereum and the IPFS/Filecoin system. Similar to Bitcoin, they use a decentralized, proof of work-based system The post Bitcoin Transactions with Daniel Van Flymen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Your friends from college are asking you how to buy Bitcoin. Your mom is emailing you articles about the benefits of decentralized peer-to-peer networks. Your shoe shiner is telling you to buy XRP. It is 2018, and cryptocurrencies have become a daily part of news headlines. The general public may not understand how this technology The post Tether, Ripple, and Blockchain Reporting with Matt Leising appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cryptocurrencies give us a decentralized financial system. OpenBazaar is a decentralized commerce system. A merchant can log onto OpenBazaar and post a listing for an item–for example, a t-shirt that I want to sell for $15. My item listing will spread throughout the OpenBazaar P2P network. A shopper can download the OpenBazaar desktop application and The post OpenBazaar with Brian Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A cryptocurrency has a distributed ledger called a blockchain. The blockchain keeps track of every transaction that occurs across the cryptocurrency. This blockchain must stay up-to-date and verified–which requires someone in the network to do that validation. Bitcoin and Ethereum use the proof-of-work algorithm. Miners do computational work to validate the legitimacy of transactions across The post Cryptoeconomics with Vlad Zamfir appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A smart contract is a program that allows for financial transactions. Smart contracts are usually associated with the Ethereum platform, which has a language called Solidity that makes it easy to program smart contracts. Someday, we will have smart contracts issuing insurance, processing legal claims, and executing accounting transactions. Smart contracts involve money, and they The post Smart Contract Security with Emin Gün Sirer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A blockchain is a data structure that provides decentralized, peer-to-peer data distribution. Bitcoin is the most well-known blockchain, but in the next decade we will see many more blockchains. Most listeners probably know that you could just fork the code of Bitcoin to start your own blockchain–but wouldn’t it be nice to know how to The post Blockchain Building with Daniel van Flymen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ethereum is a decentralized transaction-based state machine. Ethereum was designed to make smart contracts more usable for developers. Smart contracts are decentralized programs that usually allow for some a transaction between the owner of the contract and anyone who would want to purchase something from the contract owner. For example, I could set up a The post Ethereum Platform with Preethi Kasireddy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Visa processes 1,600 transactions per second. PayPal processes 193 transactions per second. Bitcoin processes only 3-4 transactions per second. In order to fulfill the dreams of financial programming–in order to get decentralized, peer-to-peer micropayments–Bitcoin needs a much higher transaction throughput. Bitcoin’s scalability issues have led to debates within the community and changes in the software. The post Bitcoin Segwit with Jordan Clifford appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was a digital form of venture capital. It was an ambitious idea–to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing corporations on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Few people in the crypto community were opposed to this premise–but the timeline was short, the code requirements were tremendous, and in retrospect, The post DAO Hack with Matt Leising appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Coinbase is a platform for buying and selling digital currency: bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Every payments company deals with fraud, but a cryptocurrency company has a harder job than most payments companies, because bitcoin transactions are anonymous and non-reversible. This is in contrast to a bank, which deals with a regulated, reversible transaction system. Soups The post Coinbase Antifraud with Soups Ranjan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cryptocurrencies have seen a surge of value recently. People are starting to see that bitcoin, ethereum, and other currencies are not just for speculation. At worst, they are a store of value–like digital gold. At best, they are a tool for micropayments, smart contracts, and an entire decentralized financial platform. Coinbase is a company for The post Coinbase Currencies with Linda Xie and Jordan Clifford appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Bitcoin is underappreciated even to this day. The public focus is usually on the speculative value, but Bitcoin has functional value as a technology platform. If I want to make 100 transactions with my bank for 1 cent, the bank won’t allow it. Our current financial infrastructure is not set up for micropayments. Bitcoin is The post 21 with Balaji Srinivasan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cryptocurrencies are not only a financial instrument–they are a new platform for building applications. The blockchain allows for new solutions to digital property management, micropayments, hedge fund incentives, and ad fraud. The cryptocurrency platforms with the most traction are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leader and is going through some growing pains with The post Blockchain Applications with Mike Goldin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In bitcoin, every transaction in the shared ledger has the sender, recipient, and value. This ledger gets appended infinitely and is shared within a peer-to-peer network. Zcash is a cryptocurrency with all the features of bitcoin, plus encrypted transactions. The sender, recipient, and value fields are all encrypted. If bitcoin is HTTP, Zcash is like The post Zcash with Nathan Wilcox appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Online advertising is a system of transactions that involve many different players. The user visits a publisher’s website; the publisher notifies an exchange that the user is on the website; the exchange presents an opportunity to a marketplace that can buy that opportunity to show the end user the ad. And this a simple example. The post Adchain with Ken Brook appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have not impacted the lives of most consumers today. The theoretical breakthroughs that blockchain enables will eventually happen–I will be able to pay 1 cent to a knowledge worker in Africa without having to pay a 5 cent transaction fee. My servers will be able to pay other servers The post Coin Center with Peter Van Valkenburgh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Almost a year ago, Software Engineering Daily aired a week of shows about decentralized technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and IPFS. Bitcoin has established itself as a stable network, but it can only be used for financial transactions. Ethereum is a global computer built on a blockchain, but it does not have the adoption of Bitcoin. The post Decentralization: Ethereum, Bitcoin, and IPFS with Karl Floersh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Nature, technology, and society ultimately will favor the more efficient, the better working systems.” Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that are guaranteed to run exactly as expected via smart contracts. Continue reading… The post Ethereum with Gavin Wood appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.