Motivation
After the good experience last year at the six fintech hackathon, I was trilled to go to hack the valley which is even closer geographically and whose subject is even closer to Bitcoin. My goal was to gain experience with ethereum. So far I only completed the tutorials. I found the technology very interesting, but in the past, I couldn’t come up with a good idea how to make use of it. Neither did I learn of a killer product that went live. This is in stark contrast to Bitcoin. When I first learned about Bitcoin, it was immediately clear to me that this was something very special, something that I waited for without knowing.
Team formation
In contrast to the hackathon last year, most people already showed up as teams. I estimate that only about three of the fourteen teams were formed on site. I joined three guys from a bank in Paris, along with another French guy and a South African who lives in Zurich. First we had to decide on a project. We went through a list with a couple of ideas. But it turned out that for a lot of them it was hard to justify what benefit a blockchain would bring compared to a more traditional approach. That is something I see a lot in the current blockchain hype. Showing up as a team with a formulated idea is a big advantage, as the technology and possible problem areas can be explored before. But In both occasions I enjoyed it to meet new and interesting people and see what we can achieve together in this limited time.
Our project
We settled on the challenge “fighting fraud in the supply chain” with a project that puts smart locks on containers. The devices log all open and close operation on a blockchain. Unlocking operations would have to be authorized by a smart contract. The locks communicate with bluetooth low energy with an app on a smart phone. This in turn communicates to a backend that talks to the blockchain.
Implementation
Shortly after we had the rough concept, the other team members stated that they would feel more confident implementing the smart contract in java, rather than solidity. That’s why they voted for using hyperledger instead of ethereum. Setting it all up and getting the docker containers to work proved a lot more difficult than anybody anticipated. Not only had some team members Windows machines, but also on linux we faced a problem. Namely the docker containers were configured to use the google nameservers, while apparently all outside DNS was blocked by the Thomson Reuters network. The connectivity was generally very flaky.
Infrastructure
I enjoyed working with the team. But that we didn’t know the infrastructure we were working on, complicated our work considerably. The last time I programmed seriously with Java was probably 15 years ago. And we didn’t have good tool support within the environment. I’m sure it is possible to set everything up to work comfortably, but that would have cost us more time even than we lost with the complicated turnaround cycles. In the end, we couldn’t complete our prototype in time. Sure, that is is not a strict requirement of a hackathon. But it’s the pride and goal of every software developer to have the thing perform in a live demo.
Presentations and prize giving
As is common for events like this, the quality of the projects varies wildly. I think nobody in our team expected to be in the top ranks. Even though I must say the presentation looked better than my code.
The project that I liked the most was about subleasing parking spots while people don’t need them. I could imagine something like this generalized to become a decentralized form of AirBnB.
The winners were the same people that won the London HackEthon. During the presentation I thought it rather boring. It was about heart rate sensors publishing directly to ethereum. A smart contract would then take action if the data was out of order. Only after they received the price, I thought some more about it. In hindsight I can see the value in it, and that it was probably implemented better then most other projects.
Conclusion
Thanks to Thomson Reuters and all others involved for organizing this great event!
I hear a lot from Bitcoin maximalists that all other chains can’t compete with the one true blockchain. I’m also invested most in Bitcoin, but I want to be open to the possibilities of other blockchains and smart contract platforms in special. Although I must admit, I never saw a compelling reason for permissioned ledgers and private blockchains. A week before the event I learned about Bitcoin uncensored, and listened to a couple of the episodes. They essentially debunk most of the altcoins and blockchain projects. Calling them ponzi schemes and frauds. This made me skeptical of the blockchain boom, but all the more I was keen to discover good uses at and event full of blockchain hackers. I’m still positive that there are applications that can be improved with blockchains. But most of the ideas have to be descarded upon closer inspection. The only three practical uses for blockchain so far are monetary, timestamping and naming. I am looking forward to expand this list, but it’s not as easy as it seems at first.
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