ETHWaterloo announces world's largest Ethereum hackathon

ethwaterloo.com

32 points·lihorne··3 comments

There were a few cryptocurrency start-ups in the Velocity program in the Bitcoin hay-day. What makes things different in the Ethereum era?

Also, who is sponsoring the hackathon, and what do they hope to get out of it?

Hi, I'm one of the founders of the event. Ethereum took the core technology behind Bitcoin (the blockchain) and figured out a way to generalize it for any kind of decentralized application. Vitalik has a great overview you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66SaEDzlmP4

Regarding the event, you can read our philosophy here: https://ethwaterloo.com/philosophy.html. Essentially we believe that the technology has immense potential, but there is an enormous shortage of talent and general understanding of how to build applications on top of it. The simple goal we aim to achieve is to educate and inspire talented developers to build on Ethereum. There is no other agenda, and to that end it is free for all attendees.

Regarding sponsorship, we're primarily backed by Blockgeeks Lab out of Toronto (blockgeekslab.com), which is a blockchain-based accelerator started by Dmitry Buterin. We're also accepting a carefully selected group of companies with an interest in developing applications on / learning more about Ethereum to sponsor on a case-by-case basis.

I'm super interested in attending, and it's only a few hours away from me, but I have absolutely no knowledge in building blockchain based applications. If I do some preliminary research and get a fundamental grasp of the terminology and basics of working with it down, do you think it would be a worthwhile trip for me and maybe a couple of other classmates?

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