On the 2nd of may of 2019 I was given the chance to attend to the business of blockchain conference in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was an amazing experience that I am very thankful for, and when I came back I wrote a small entry for my high school’s newspaper that I want to share with the blog:
Hello, my name is Miguel and I´m a student from 2º of ESO. Last 2nd of May I got the chance of attending to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for a Blockchain event, so now I am going to write a little bit about my experience in the conference.
First of all, what is Blockchain? Blockchain is a new technology which is still being worked on day by day, it consist on a group of computers which are supporting a network that has what you could call a “list” of sorts, this list keeps record of something you program it to get record of, and the revolutionary part is that this list is impossible to edit, this means that if the list says something has happened it really has happened. This tool is great because it automatically removes trust which is a big issue now a days, for instance let´s say you want to keep track of the medications you take so then you don´t have to worry when taking them, or imagine you are working on a document with other people; you normally wouldn’t be able to tell who wrote what unless they tell you, and even then you cannot be a hundred percent sure, but if you keep a record of who´s been editing the document, what has he edited, where has he edited it and when, you don´t need to trust anyone and can be certain about who worked. This is actually not great examples, as there are services that can do these jobs even though they might be more manipulable than a blockchain. But then why did I use this example? Well Blockchain isn’t always a worthwhile technology to use, I used the example to introduce the main downside on Blockchain: is it profitable? Well as I said earlier Blockchain consists on a network supported by computers, the more computers there are supporting the network the Blockchain will be stronger, if you have a hundred computers supporting a Blockchain a network and someone possesses 51 they could do whatever they wanted with it, this is the opposite to the idea of a transparent record that Blockchain is supposed to be, but my point is for your network you would usually like to have as many computers as possible so the network can be strong, so here’s where the main problem on Blockchain comes, it is extremely expensive and sometimes not worthy due to all the tech expenses, this is why my last example wasn’t good, Blockchain isn’t the solution for everything and that is one of the many conclusions I got from the conference.
This sounds very good and all, but what is people currently working on with Blockchain? Well during this event I got the chance to talk to a bunch of people about their interests on Blockchain and almost everyone talked about crypto currencies, if you are not familiar with the term, crypto currencies are digital coins that aim to be the currency of the future, but what do they have to do with blockchain? You may ask, one of the reasons it is so revolutionary is that most of the crypto currencies have their own blockchain to record the transactions making it impossible to create fake coins, plus the fact that some cryptos are limited and they can´t create more, that is why they have value, but that´s beside the point.
I also talked to some people that had other ideas on how to use Blockchain in mind, for example there´s was a guy who came representing his company that worked on cargo who was interested in learning about Blockchain to see if they could use it to track their products, there was this other guy working on a donations organization which wanted to implement on their website a public blockchain tracking where did the money that people donated go (which I think is a very good example of a use).
I loved the experience as I got to visit and get a tour of my dream school and I also got to work on my social skills by talking to a lot of interesting people about this new and exciting technology.
Serna Productions 
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