What I learned from my first blockchain meetup

I just got back from a Blockchain meetup. And boy am I pumped. Its 9:15 today, and I’ve been basically working from 7:00A.M. but I REALLY need to get these thoughts out of my head, before I lose my stoke. So here. we. go.

Chatting before the meetup starts.

Donation Tracking with Blockchain

Close your eyes. Breathe. Imagine the world 10 years from now. What does it look like, in terms of blockchain? This was what the panelist asked.

No caption needed.I imagine a world where there is a GLOBAL PUBLIC DASHBOARD that everyone sees in real time, where people can instantly donate to the charity of their choice, and see their contribution on the scoreboard. Furthermore, people can provide disaster relief instantaneously, and see their contribution on the global scoreboard. — Connie Gallippi, the CEO and Founder of BitGive foundation

Wow. That really struck home for me. How cool would that be? It would literally gameify giving money. (P.S. Gameify means to make into a game.) I mean, that’s pretty cool to me, I don’t know about you. Connie is working on a donation platform which enables nonprofits to provide transparency to donors by sharing financial information and results in real time.

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

Send money cross-borders with Blockchain

Another interesting use case that came up at the meet up is from Adeoye Ojo, within the market of remittance. Imagine your father is overseas, in a foreign country, and he has a large medical bill he needs to pay, and he needs your help. What do you do? The fees to transfer money are usually around 7–10% of the total value. Are you kidding me? You mean that if I send $10,000, I’m going to lose $1,000 of it? Yup. Not only that, the payment can take up to 48 hours to actually go through. This is where SureRemit comes in. This company uses the RMT token to enable users to send e-vouchers that are used to purchase goods and services at certain merchants. The top things to know about SureRemit:

1. Zero fee remittances. The amount you send, is the amount your family member will receive.
2. Instant Delivery. You can access e-vouchers for retails stores and pay 100s of utility bills within the app.
3. Transparency of your payment. You can send e-vouchers for specific needs and can see redemption details.

Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

Other interesting blockchain use-cases

1. Land registry. It’s registered on paper, and people lose track of these papers.
2. Voting. Since there is so much speculation that elections are rigged, wouldn’t it be nice to have transparency into how each vote actually gets counted?
3. Digital Identity. BankU is already doing this. They create digital identities for developing countries. They put people’s identity on the blockchain, to reduce identity theft.

How to get blockchain to the next level.

Roadblocks for Blockchain

1. Scalability. How do we put massive amount of info on the blockchain, without proper infrastructure?
2. Environmental Impact. Proof of work is not going to work. It uses way too much electricity.
3. Consensus Mechanism. No perfect solution out there. So many different mechanisms, and so many different use cases.
4. User adoption. People buy the coin to make money, not actually for the purpose it was intended for. For example, people will buy RMT just to see the value go up, and won’t use it to buy e-vouchers.
5. Crypto is not mainstream. Not enough businesses accept cryptocurrencies.
6. Older generation. Older people don’t want to think about blockchain.

Food for Thought: What if you get crypto tokens from attending a FREE meetup?

Food for Thought

1. What if banks team up with crypto providers to help exchange crypto for fiat currency? This is what Stellar is working on.
2. What is the world going to look like after Google?
3. People getting paid cross-boarders in Venezuela are getting paid in Bitcoin.
4. What if you get free money from attending a meetup? I got lucky today :)

Again, thanks for reading. I’m tired, and I want to play some Call of Duty. Horea Blockchain out.

What I learned from my first blockchain meetup was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.