Blockchain for Beginners - Parity Meetup April 2025
Blockchain For Beginners
About Me
- Kian Paimani aka.
@kianenigma
- Engineering Lead @ Parity Technologies
- Polkadot Fellow
- blog.kianenigma.com (<-- slides)
Introduction
Owning Money
- €100 worth of Bitcoin, and €100 in your national bank of choice. What is the difference?
--
Owning Money
- How?
- 🧮 Cryptography: Military-grade, politically neutral technology
- 🤑 (Crypto)Economic Security: You diverge from correct behavior? You lose money
- 🔂 A lot of re-execution of the same work
- ⛓️💥 Did you notice a blockchain is not in the list? More on that later
Notes:
More on this in Blockchain Scalability - A Holistic Recap
--
Owning Money
- 🔫 + 🏦 + 👩⚖️
Trust - 🧮 + 🤑 + 🔂
Truth - aka. Verifiable trust
- "Less trust, more truth"
- Blockchain systems yield a truthful computer.
Properties Of The Truthful Blockchain Computer
Let's examine
--
Properties: Execution + Storage
- Given a set of rules for the computer encoded as a
code
- And an
input
to that code - The
code
is executed correctly - Any
storage
update by that code is truthful - Truthful Execution + Storage
- What is the
code
,input
, andstorage
in Bitcoin?
--
Properties: Execution + Storage
--
Properties: Auditable History
- ⛓️💥 Blockchain (is overrated)!
- Blockchain != Blockchain-based system
--
Properties: Public
- Both
code
andstorage
andinput
s to that code need to be public for other network participants to verify it - 🔂 Re-execution necessitates (some degree of) publicity
- ✅ ZK-SNARK proofs? Yes, that'll work
--
Properties: Digital
- Needless to say, this truthfulness only applies to the execution of the
code
, and its side-effectstorage
. - Not anything else, and importantly not the real world.
How
- How the blockchain computer becomes truthful?
- 🔂
Network of nodes, some authoring new blocks, some verifying - 🤑
PoW, PoS - ⛓️💥
Blockchain used to keep track of the correct order
Note:
We actually covered this.
- POW and POS are both ways to ensure economic security
--
PoS vs. PoS
Evolution Of The Blockchain Computer
- From the point of view of the primary developers
- .. Although history tells us this leads to the user experience as well 🤭
--
Evolution Of The Blockchain Computer
- Bitcoin: Domain-specific. Fixed
code
andstorage
- 🦖 A lot of other dino-chains are similar
--
Evolution Of The Blockchain Computer
- Smart Contract!
- A (limited) way to extend the
code
andstorage
of another blockchain computer
- A (limited) way to extend the
- Ethereum, (most) Rollups, and anything else EVM-based
- Solana, NEAR, ETH-killers and family
--
Evolution Of The Blockchain Computer
- How about we have multiple blockchains with different
code
andstorage
each? - Polkadot / Cosmos
- Some Ethereum Rollups
--
Evolution Of The Blockchain Computer
- How about we don't expose the blockchain to developers?
- Polkadot JAM, ICP, with differing properties
Introduction Ends
Questions?
Reflection / Discussion
- Not financial advise 😁
What Have We Solved?
--
What Have We Solved
- ✅ Commoditization of digital finance?
--
What Have We Solved
- 💶 Payment integrated into the internet protocols?
--
What Have We Solved
- A lot of other verticals attempted, but none are as successful as DeFi.
- Identity, RWA, IoT, Gaming
- Why?
- Some due to lack of scalability
- Some due to stickiness
- Some due to lack of PMF
--
Lack of PMF
- We cannot determine what problem can a technology can solve, if we don't exactly understand what that technology does.
- Ask yourself: When/Why do you I need a truthful computer with the properties mentioned above?
Notes:
- Social interactions, in societies large enough when you cannot trust one another
--
Why DeFi is Perfect PMF
👉 NOT A COINCIDENCE 👈
- ✅ Social interaction, needs truthful computer as intermediary
- ✅ Happens on entirely digital data
- ✅ Limited computation and storage needs
- ✅ Publicity is tolerable
--
What Else Is a PMF?
Note:
Exercise to look at the list of applications that you use, and determine in which:
- it is digital
- You are interacting with other humans
Limitations / Frontier Problems
- The Oracle Problem
- Personhood, Identity
- Private Computation
- FHE / ZK-SNARKs / MPC
--
Limitations: User Experience
- Blockchain developers tend to expose the underlying infrastructure to users
Notes:
- User Interface/Experience is the main bottleneck
- The amount of underlying details that we expose to user is as if:
- We asked an email writer to compose the email headers
- To open a webpage you would have to send a GET request, then paste the results into a separate HTML viewer
- Then when clicking on a new button you would repeat the same
- The amount of underlying details that we expose to user is as if:
(Politically Correct) Opinions End
Questions?
🌶️ Spicy Opinions
(DEFINITELY not financial advice)
--
Speculation
- Over-speculation in blockchain as an infrastructure is..
- 100% real
--
Speculation
- DotCom bubble, happening 2 months after the internet was invented, with 20 times more capital
--
Greed / Psychology
This industry is a unique mixture of
- A lot of capital
- A lot of potential to empower of individuals to build financial applications
Note:
I am sure some behavior scientists will look at our behaviors today as developers and investors in this space and so amazing studies on it
--
Potential For Good and Bad
- Like any other technology, it is a double-edged sword
- I have spent ~7 years of my life on this, and I ~believe~ can see and understand that it has a great potential for good.
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