On February 22 and 23, nChain hosted the second installment of The Bitcoin Masterclasses in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the Intercontinental Hotel.
The workshop was led by none other than Dr. Craig Wright, Chief Scientist of nChain and the creator of Bitcoin. For the two days, Dr. Wright led eight sessions covering multicast, IP2IP, IPv6 and how they all tie back to the Bitcoin blockchain protocol.
“I’m trying to get awareness of just how much can be done in Bitcoin and the surrounding technology. So I’m going through different aspects that are overlooked. It’s not necessarily a deep dive into things like multicast and IPv6, but understanding how they can integrate this and why they should,” Dr. Wright shared with CoinGeek.
“The waste of bandwidth that happens when you send things many, many times and the inefficiency can go away, and you can make much better apps. And as we demonstrated here, there are new ways of doing applications that people aren’t thinking about,” he added.
While most of the in-person participants at the workshop were nChain employees by design, there were also a few external guests who greatly admired Dr. Wright’s work and jumped at the opportunity to attend.
“We have been following Craig’s philosophy, mindset, knowledge, genius experience for quite a while,” Richard Sinivassen of A.M.G Lux Trades Ltd shared.
“And today it’s a great opportunity which is given to us in Slovenia, in Ljubljana, to be able to meet him personally finally and to listen to what he has to share with us, because he’s just an ocean of information and we are very grateful for him to share this information with us,” Sinivassen said.
Alessio Pagani, Research Director at nChain and leader of the Emerging Technology Program, actively participated in the Masterclass group discussions.
Within the Emerging Technology Program, Pagani focuses on linking new technologies with blockchain, including how it can help improve these new technologies and how these new technologies can help improve blockchain.
“One of the programs within this Emerging Technology Program is the IPv6 program, which is very interesting, and that’s why I’m here. We want to understand and discuss more about IPv6, understand the potential applications of IPv6 and blockchain,” Pagani said.
Domen Osojnik, Frontend Developer at nChain Slovenia, lives a few hours from Ljubljana and commuted in for both days of the workshop.
“Today, we as a company came here as a little get-together and to learn something new about Craig Wright and what he does and his vision going forward. He’s very enthusiastic. Seeing him live, he is what I expected him to be from what I’ve seen before. So yeah, a very cool guy,” Osojnik shared.
“Everything we’ve learned here today is pretty much new to me. So it’s a whole new experiment and to put it together with blockchain, that as well is something new,” he said.
Luka Topolovec, Regional COO (SLO) at nChain added, “I think that we are all students in the Bitcoin area, and I think it’s really valuable for the people here and our colleagues to learn as much as we can because this gives us an opportunity and competitive advantage in innovating the future.”
According to Topolovec, Dr. Wright did a wonderful job communicating with his audience and leading the workshop by creating a “safe space” to share ideas and take in information.
“I think that he’s a great professor and he has a lot of patience in terms of expressing his ideas and view on the world. And I think that a lot of our colleagues and friends had an opportunity to learn something new,” Topolovec confirmed.
Cerian Jones, Owner & Director of Entheos IP, is an intellectual property lawyer who has worked closely with Dr. Wright for many years. She traveled from Wales to Ljubljana to learn more about Dr. Wright’s ideas on IPv6 and how IPv6 can be used with the blockchain for various applications.
“So far, it’s just been really, really fascinating to start thinking about some of the applications, some of the advantages and benefits that flow from this combination of IPv6 plus the blockchain,” she said.
Mihael Šinkec, Software Engineer at sCrypt, added “IPv6 is an area that I think I still lack on. I want to know more. And I think Craig, with his presentations, he knows a lot of stuff and a lot of potential use cases for this technology.”
When asked what he learned throughout the workshop, Šinkec mentioned the ability to delegate groups in IPv6 via multicast and the potential use cases that were discussed around that.
Wrapping up the Masterclasses, every attendee clearly walked away with a deeper knowledge of the power of multicast and IP2IP within the Bitcoin blockchain protocol.
Dr. Wright was also delighted with the outcome and had one final message for attendees, both in-person and virtual.
“What I’d like people to start thinking about is how to make group-based applications that aren’t based on the way that everyone’s been told they need to do it on a central server that monitors everything, where you create an application that people want to use, not you hold data for people,” he challenged.
The third Bitcoin Masterclasses took place this week in Zurich, Switzerland, focusing on accounting and mapping transactions on-chain.
Watch The Bitcoin Masterclasses 2 Slovenia Day 1 here:
Watch The Bitcoin Masterclasses 2 Slovenia Day 2 here:
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