Libby Kent on Ethereum: The World Computer

New York - April 19, 2018

Description

In 2009 bitcoin emerged as a peer-to-peer value transfer system, and was successfully deployed throughout the world. Four years later (2013), the Ethereum white paper was published by an 18 year old Vitalik Buterin which builds on top of the Bitcoin consensus model to allow for distributed computation and applications to be deployed on a decentralized peer-to-peer network.

This paper discusses introducing a turing complete language that can be run on top of the network, utilizing a modified consensus algorithm (GHOST), strategies for defending against mining centralization, further application of such a system beyond just finance, the introduction of state, as well as a history of bitcoin and and the fundamental concepts of the underlying blockchain.

Bio

Libby Kent / @viskobatz is a software engineer, former Hacker Schooler (now Recurse Center) and Papers We Love groupie who leans towards functional programming, and really wants to understand category theory some day. She has worked in an array of industries from game startups to digital publishing and advertising and is currently in financial services, working on distributed systems - distributed ledger technology, blockchain - and cloud technologies. When not coding she enjoys snowboarding, tennis, traveling, friends, good conversations, beer, coffee, dark chocolate and cheese.

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TwoSigma The New York Chapter would like to thank TwoSigma for helping to make this meetup possible.