Can someone start a drum roll please…..? Ok, I’m going to imagine it was epic.
I wanted to take a moment and talk about blockchain, why it’s amazing, and how it works from a technical level. But first, let’s take a quick dive into what blockchain is, how it works and the power behind it.
Blockchain Basics
To get a basic understanding of Blockchain and how it works, checkout this video from Devslopes. Then comeback and let’s dive in! [What is Blockchain - Simply Explained in 5 Minutes] (
Why the blockchain should matter to you
Since the 1950’s we’ve been using, more or less, a centralized store. And what I mean by that is data or information being grouped together in a single place. For example, banks. Thousands of users private information under the roof of a single entity. There has been major problems with this, keeping a lot of data all in one place. Maybe you heard when Uber was hacked and and lots of information was stolen. Or when Experian was hacked and thousands of social security numbers and other informations was stolen. This is a really scary thing. This is possible because all that data is in a centralized storage.
And we run into other problems too. Have you ever used an app or service and the servers go down? And you receive a message like “Sorry our servers are down, we’re working on it right away”. The reason for this is because we have a centralized store.
This is a trust-ful kind of relationship. WE TRUST the product owner to keep their servers going and to keep our data safe. Even here at Devslopes, our students are TRUSTING us to keep our servers up and their data safe.
Blockchain - a new Hero
And then we have the notion of Blockchain, which disrupts this kind of centralized model completely. In a sense, it is like a whole new internet. It’s a more secure way to store data, receive data and it cuts out the middleman.
You’ve probably heard of the US Government demanding information from Google and Apple right? It’s happened many times.
When you have centralized data it’s so “easy” to come to someone’s door and demand their data (figuratively speaking).
And again, Blockchain completely disrupts that. It makes it virtually impossible for those kind of things to happen. Which is why cryptocurrency can actually live on the blockchain where it’s secure, distributed among thousands and thousands of different computers.
The Opportunity for Developers
There’s billions of dollars being raised for Blockchain technology and there’s going to be lots of jobs coming forth because of this. So if you’re a developer or want to be a developer, you definitely want to learn Blockchain.
If you didn’t know, Bitcoin was built on it’s own blockchain network and is open source. But I think the real future of Blockchain is going to be in Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin - co-creator and inventor of Ethereum, is an open source project that allows blockchain networks to be developed on. This is where things get really fun for developers.
Let’s say you have a really cool idea you want to build on blockchain and you were able convince people it was a good idea. You essence you could create our own currency/token and raise millions of dollars and issue your own ICO. And all this can be done on the Ethereum blockchain which has great tools available to you like being able to create smart contracts(snippet of code that will be ran on the blockchain to perform an action) and distributed apps(apps on the blockchain). There’s other blockchains you can do this on, but Ethereum is one of the largest.
Devslopes believes in Blockchain so much that we want to teach others how to develop on the blockchain, create smart contracts and even create their own tokens (currency) to put up on exchanges.
We’ve been working hard and created brand new curriculum dedicated to Blockchain development available on the Devslopes platform.
If you’re a developer or someone curious about blockchain development, checkout Devslopes and this upcoming course. There’s so many cool things happening with blockchain and it’s an exciting time to get involved. Sign up on the waitlist to save a spot for Devslopes 2.0 and let’s write some codezzz