Problems and differences between POW and POS & The automotive on the blockchain

This meetup is all about how to decentralize a blockchain, the problems and differences between Proof-of-Work (POW) and Proof-of-Stak (POS) and the automotive on the blockchain.

The meetup is all about sharing knowledge and networking. And, it is set up in such a way that it is interesting for both technical and non-technical people.

18:30 Doors open + Burgers
19:00 Manuel Chakravarty - Language Architect at IOHK (Cardano)
20:00 short break
20:15 Audrius Kučinskas – Chief Technology Officer at carVertical
21:15 Drinks

Decentralisation, consensus & trust: the differences between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake
How do we establish consensus and trust among multiple distributed parties? The introduction of Bitcoin demonstrated that a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol is a viable approach to that problem. However, this approach suffers from two weaknesses: (1) excessive use of energy and (2) a tendency towards centralisation in the form of mining pools. Proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocols have been proposed as an alternative for some time now. However, they are technically more involved and for a long time, there was no rigorous proof of their security.

In this talk, Manuel will discuss the technical risks and benefits of PoW and PoS. Furthermore, he will provide an overview over the family of Ouroboros proof-of-stake protocols underlying the Cardano blockchain and explain how they advance the state of the art, including by providing a mathematical proof of their security properties. Finally, he will discuss the currently in-progress decentralisation of Cardano on the basis of Ouroboros.

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty is a Language Architect at IOHK. He holds a doctoral degree from Technische Universität Berlin and published extensively on programming languages, compilers, and high-performance computing. He contributed to both the design and implementation of the Haskell programming language as well as several Haskell tools and open source libraries. He is co-leading the research-driven Plutus smart contract language team at IOHK. https://iohk.io/team/manuel-chakravarty/

The automotive on the blockchain
The automotive industry has dramatically grown and evolved in the past century. Unfortunately movement, at such speeds, leaves issues at the very core that are extremely difficult to fix. The primary core issue now is data, its accessibility and usability.

The European GDPR laws increase the problem of data accessibility ten folds, by providing strict requirements for personal data.
Used vehicles market itself is becoming more and more borderless. Automotive industry is steadily moving to “Mobility as a Service”. These two market shifts has a growing need for widely available, easily accessible and standardised data.

We have put a very large portion of our resources to standardise and unify data from most of the European Block and USA to a single, flexible data structure. But data unification is not enough.

Blockchain technology was a missing piece in solving core issues of these problems.
carVertical is using DLT in number of ways:
1. Vehicle Identity - we create anonymised vehicle token, representing digital equivalent of a vehicle on decentralised ledger.
2. Vehicle ownership - we are building a state approved vehicle transfer and ownership mechanism.
3. Vehicle history - we attach vehicle history events to a vehicle token and vehicle owner at a time of the event.
4. Vehicle wallet - an application that connects user to its vehicles, allow transfers and acts as data access consent hub.
5. Transparency incentives - we reward vehicle owners for using our platform, for providing consent and data. This serves a greater purpose of market transparency as a whole.

Audrius Kucinskas is the CTO at carVertical. He will talk about how carVertical is using multiple public blockchains to improve the state of data in the automotive industry.