SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Name Registrations on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Muneeb Ali (https://twitter.com/muneeb), Co-Founder of Onename (https://onename.com/), will talk about Name Registrations on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Namecoin have seen significant adoption in the past few years, and show promise as zero-trust, decentralized key-value stores. Users can securely store and retrieve information, as only the owner of a particular private key can write/modify the data. In theory, many decentralized systems can be built using cryptocurrency blockchains, such as decentralized DNS or PKI. As the technology is relatively new and evolving rapidly, little production data or experience is available to guide design tradeoffs.

In this talk, we describe our experience operating a large, real-world deployment of a blockchain ID registration service. We present various challenges that we needed to overcome while registering/updating over 33,000 users in our first implementation on the Namecoin blockchain. We discuss how our initial experience informed the design of a new blockchain-based key-value store, Blockstore. We detail why we changed from Namecoin to the Bitcoin blockchain for the new system, as well as operational lessons from this migration. Blockstore is open source and available at http://github.com/blockstack/blockstore .

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/f/0/e/600_443347950.jpeg

Muneeb is a final-year PhD candidate at Princeton University, where he has worked in the Systems and Networks group and also at PlanetLab. He helped start a new course at Princeton on "How to be a CTO" and gives guest lectures on cloud computing at Princeton. Muneeb has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship (declined) and a Princeton Graduate Fellowship, and has served as the Program Co-Chair of ACM NSDR.

Post-talk mingling will commence @ 10pm at The House of Shields (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/717+Market+St,+San+Francisco,+CA+94103/The+House+Of+Shields,+39+New+Montgomery+St,+San+Francisco,+CA+94105,+United+States/@37.787768,-122.4036877,18z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x8085808f31f89e85:0xec1bbb4e9a79ccb1!2m2!1d-122.4039218!2d37.7870067!1m5!1m1!1s0x80858062a07fa93f:0x94ef3e221b1df369!2m2!1d-122.401349!2d37.788283!3e2) bar.