Blockchain Foundations: Ethereum & Smart Contracts

For our second meetup, we'll continue with our Blockchain Fundamentals series and look at the 'next evolution' of blockchain - Ethereum and Smart Contracts.

Until the deployment of Ethereum, our concept of the blockchain had been almost entirely financial. Ethereum's 'state' based system and smart code language changed that. It opened up the possibility of not just recording transactions on a decentralised ledger, but deploying programs which could perform functions independent of user oversight - commonly called 'smart contracts'.

Like all new technology, deciding where and how to use smart contracts requires understanding the fundamentals. To provide a basic grounding, we'll look at:

• The basics of Ethereum (how it's built and why it's different to Bitcoin)
• What are smart contracts?
• Examples of smart contracts at work (Solidity, OpenLaw, Microsoft Azure)
• Some drawbacks and challenges facing the platform

At the end we'll open it up for questions and audience input.

If you haven't already, feel free to sign up for the first Blockchain for Business meetup on Blockchain and Bitcoin.

Look forward to seeing you all there! If you have any questions, please post them in the meetup 'discussion' section.

An initiative of BlockSense - https://block-sense.io