Meetup 4

Thursday, March 12, 2016 from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM (IST)

Following will be discussed:

1. IPFS - Interplanetary File System
2. Smart Contracts
3. TheDAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Notes on the meeting

Creating nodes in Ethereum and Ethereum Lite - there was a discussion in telegram regarding the number of nodes in India and ideas on how to increase that. Increasing the number of nodes increases the stability and reliability of the system so this a good thing to do. A couple of ideas associated to this -

1. We can use Ethereum lite to create lightweight nodes that dont need the entire blockchain downloaded in order to transact roadmap
2. We can use IPFS to leverage a common version of the blockchain database. Concerns of how things like understanding history and validating transactions without having to pull down the entire database need to be investigated.

IPFS - leverages blockchain, git and bittorrent concepts to build a distributed filesystem. As part of this discussion other distributed file-system implementations were discussed - in particular Tahoe LAFS.

References ,

1. ipfs.io
2. ipfs whitepaper
3. tahoe fs

Multisig transactions - had a discussion on multisig and the strength of encryption when using assymetric encryption to sign with keys of varying lengths. One thing we missed disucssing is the utility and use of multisig concept. A good overview of that is given by Vitalik here - (need a good link on a paper explaining the technical backing of multisig)

Deterministic Wallets - talked about HD (heirarchical deterministic) wallets, what they are and how they are built. A general idea can be found in bitcoin wiki

Segregated Witness - this was mentioned in passing, but we did not have a clear idea of what this is. We should take this up in the next meeting. References - github.com

There was a great introduction to Bitcoin, Blockchain and DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organisation) that was provided by @jikkujose. We had a very interesting discussion regarding some of the use cases of a DAO.

The discussion meandered a bit at this point to topics like politics and whether China is more electified than India. The population density map of India and China is here

Action Item

We should have a more technical session in the next session, where we discuss in detail the underpinning technologies and algorithms that form the blockchain.