Last Sunday, I was invited to give a talk about Blockchain. The Malaysian Technology Development Corporation (MTDC) wanted me to breakdown the understanding so that the normal person on the street can get a good understanding about the technology. But here’s the thing…..
I was only starting to get myself familiar with Blockchain since the last 11 months, and like almost everyone out there the awareness was always secondary to Bitcoin. So wanting to know more about blockchain specifically, I decided to organise a series of talks about it called ‘The Blockchain Train’. It is targeted towards those who had little to no idea of why this thing called blockchain can make such a thing like bitcoin so the hype. Also, I myself was the target audience for this kind of talks.
In short, The Blockchain Train talks about other aspects and practical uses of the technology other than transacting cryptocurrencies. And the speakers are people who are not developers but understand what blockchain can do within their respective domains such as entrepreneurs, bloggers, filming artists and legal advisors.
I co-organized it with the help of a local property development consulting firm and we manage to have 6 sessions throughout 2018. It is within these sessions I begin to understand more about what blockchain is.
Having some form of knowledge about it, I then only start to do more in-depth online research. From then onwards I begin to craft my slides to share in the simplest form of possible for the audience to understand. I turned up that Sunday with a mindset of doing exactly that. When I got up on stage, I realised that I’ve never done this sort of thing before. Hello anxiety, my old friend!
With the best in mind of what is about to happen, I started my session with a ‘bit’ of history. Anyone who’s familiar in this space knows that you can’t talk about blockchain without talking about bitcoin.
There’s a slight nervousness in my voice, I marched forward with the mysterious Mr Nakamoto and a bit about the debate on whether this is one person or a group of people, possible background and a quick history of bitcoin as well as the genesis block.
I realized that standing on a stage in front of a crowd is too much too early for me, so naturally I stepped down to make the session less formal. Talking about a ‘block’ in blockchain and shoots straight to the hash function.
As expected that startled the audience slightly. I guess it’s too technical too soon. So I mixed it up a bit and connect to a real world example. Which is cooking. I know it sounds totally unrelated but it manage to capture their imagination and there seems to be good responses and signs showing that they now begin to understand the hashing function.
Imagine you’re in the kitchen and preparing the ingredients to cook stew. As you prepare the ingredients and begin putting them together, in order to cook them following the steps in the recipe book. Once done, you’ll have your stew.
Now is there a technique where you can deconstruct that stew and separate all the ingredients individually to its original form? I doubt it. At best you’d only get the powdered version of that stew and not the individual ingredients. In this case, the cooking method is the hash function, no?
The experience is becoming more comfortable for me so I started to walk around the hall to take any questions the audience might have. After one or two clarifications I then walked back to the front and continued. Now it’s time to look at the actual blockchain structure.
I begin to notice the difference between when the crowd understands something or when they are confused. I make sure that I stop for a moment to take in their reaction and asses. So at each slide I will explain the technical aspects first and then relate to another example that’s non-technical. Generally I can see that by using this method the audience is more able to make the connection between the hashing function and how the next block is added.
Throughout the 55 minutes sharing session that I did, I managed to give 3 non-technical analogies to help the audience make that mind connection, received 3 questions and 7 ‘this is the last question’, questions. In the end my session totalled up to 90 minutes.
It’s my first time, so I apologised to the next speaker profusely. Dr Ibrahim talked about Artificial Intelligence. At the end of his sesion I wanted to ask more questions, but I guess the audience was hungry, and they can probably smell that lunch is already served for quite some time.
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