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Why ETHBerlin is worth it, come and work it, put your hack down…

Why ETHBerlin is worth it, come and work it, put your hack down…

Congratulations your hackathon world is complete. You have been accepted to hack at ETHBerlinZwei, the Hollywood of all hackathons. So what does this mean exactly, for all those who are brand spanking new to this.

Some quick facts so you avoid asking us, which is penalised by the joint laws of ETHoff and the ETHBerlinZwei Martial laws — we may or may not have a dumb questions leaderboard, and we don’t want you in it, so read up to avoid any appearances there.

You received the approval email so once you receive that from us you can start planning your trip. This year we even have a present for you, in the form of a free dAppcon Ticket (August 21st and 22nd). We also need to know if you are coming to dAppcon too, but only if you know if you are ACTUALLY coming. In case you have been on a silent vipassana retreat, or living under a social media rock since November, you need to know that our conference tracks will run inside of dAppcon, so you get to go too and take advantage of both awesome conference tracks.

Also if you have something super interesting you want to present or a new topic you want to open a discussion about, then what are you waiting for?! We love having our hackers present at ETHBerlin and we highly encourage you to speak! So apply here, but we do ask that you channel your inner artistic self because we want to see creativity, new topics that will educate the community and most importantly, MEMES. But please god no shilling and no sales pitches.

Don’t have a team yet? Or just want to make new friends before you are heading to the city of techno clubs and Bauhaus and because you will need some space from your team mates after hacking constantly with them. We got you. We have a Riot Channel dedicated to all our hackers so join the conversation and find some friends.

To help you survive, throughout the weekend at the hackathon, and during dAppcon, everyone will be fed and there will be a constant “Mate” supply (not the kind of “mate” you are thinking about. Google it. You have to learn to love it before heading to Berlin otherwise you might not survive). Food and drinks throughout the hackathon will be provided for you for free. Yes, you heard. The awesome catering at the Factory means you don’t have to survive on bratwurst and doner the whole weekend.

We are super lucky to have the Factory as the hackathon venue for a second year running and a few things you need to know. In case you didn’t hear from last year, there’s a mofo-ing ballpit! And there are also cages on the 5th floor in true Berlin style, so if your team mates drive you nuts, or if anyone starts annoying us… well we might just use them.

And we might have plenty of new surprises to entertain you and give you a break from hacking, but we shall not ruin the surprise just yet, all shall be revealed in August. And NEVER FEAR, this year we will also be throwing another badass closing party so you can celebrate hacking at the world’s greatest hackathon in true Berlin style.

So we’ve teased you on how exciting and even more WOW it will be this year. Now for some admin…

We are all about diversity and inclusion, and we put our money where our mouth is. We are happy to announce we will have some hacker subsidies of around 500€ but hold your schnitzels. We will be sending this application out in June. Make sure you only apply if you really need it, be respectful of other hackers too. No application sent before we ask you will work or blag you to the top of the list. And bribing will also not work because only bribes over 5 ETH will be considered, and hey if you are applying for a subsidy you shouldn’t have 5 ETH to give us.

Another thing we are totally here to help you on is your visa. We would like to minimise the chances of immigration locking you up in their dungeon when you hit German soil, so CHECK YOUR VISA requirements before you book your flights and if you need one please make sure you reach out to us and send us your full name, address, passport copy and the address of the German embassy of your place of residence and we will be more than happy to help.

Check your emails, check your spam when we tell you via Twitter (so following us might be a good plan), we won’t send a lot of emails, but we’ll announce and tell you when we have so keep an eye out.

And for goodness sake — fix your hair, get ready, start exercising your fingers and spread the word to everyone. We welcome non blockchain devs to join hackathon teams as well, there’s plenty of room to make hacks more creative and we encourage that, so invite your non dev friends to apply too!

Published at Wed, 08 May 2019 13:30:05 +0000

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Ivy Playground for Bitcoin: Experimenting With the Future of Bitcoin Smart Contracts

IvyChain.jpg

Blockchain developer Chain is releasing an open-source compiler and development environment for writing Bitcoin smart contracts using Ivy, a smart contract language developed in-house.

Chain is best known for the open-source Chain protocol and Chain Core, an enterprise blockchain infrastructure that facilitates financial transactions on scalable, private blockchain networks. An open-source developer edition of Chain Core is available to developers, with a testnet operated by Chain. Ivy was developed at Chain as a smart contract language for Chain Core. With Ivy for bitcoin, which compiles to bitcoin Script, Chain wants to make it easier for average programmers to write smart contracts for the public bitcoin network.

By design, bitcoin doesn’t include a Turing-complete programming language for smart contracts of arbitrary complexity. But this doesn’t mean that bitcoin doesn’t support smart contracts. In fact, the simple, low-level, primitive operations included in bitcoin’s native scripting language (bitcoin Script) can be exploited to write smart contracts of significant complexity. “bitcoin Script does provide a set of useful primitives — signature checks, hash computations, and absolute and relative timelocks  — and the freedom to combine those primitives,” notes the Chain news release.

However, bitcoin Script is not being fully used by software developers, which according to Chain is due to “the relative difficulty of reading and writing bitcoin Script programs, and of creating and using addresses from those programs.” In fact, bitcoin Script is a very low-level, assembly-like language, which doesn’t offer the readability and ease of use of high-level programming languages. Therefore, most bitcoin programmers limit themselves to simple applications, without pushing bitcoin Script to its limits.

The Chain developers want to change that with Ivy, a higher-level language that allows developers to create custom, SegWit-compatible bitcoin addresses that enforce arbitrary combinations of conditions supported by the bitcoin protocol, including signature checks, hash commitments and timelocks.

Earlier this year, Chain released Ivy Playground, a tool for designing, drafting and testing smart contracts on a Chain Core blockchain network with Ivy. Now, Chain is making Ivy available to bitcoin developers and releasing Ivy Playground for bitcoin, which allows developers to design, create and spend simulated bitcoin contracts. The playground includes preloaded smart contract templates for bitcoin and developer documentation.

A disclaimer states that Ivy is relatively untested prototype software and should be used for educational and research purposes only. “Do not attempt to use Ivy to control real Bitcoins,” warns the front-page document.

Besides Chain, other developers are realizing that bitcoin needs more sophisticated smart contracts and user-friendly programming environments for smart contracts. Recently, blockchain developer Blockstream introduced Simplicity, a new programming language for blockchain-based smart contracts, intended for inclusion in Blockstream’s sidechains and eventually in bitcoin. Lead developer Russell O’Connor said that “after extensive vetting,” Simplicity support could be considered for inclusion in one of the next releases of bitcoin.

In the Blockstream announcement, O’Connor noted that Ivy’s programming language development efforts may be suitable for being compiled to Simplicity. But it now appears that Ivy’s progress toward these more sophisticated bitcoin smart contracts is advancing faster than some might have expected.

The post Ivy Playground for Bitcoin: Experimenting With the Future of Bitcoin Smart Contracts appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.