Opening doors with Niels Launert at ETHBerlinZwei – Team B9lab
The journey to becoming a member of team ĐOor
Niels Launert got interested in Bitcoin in 2014, as he would say ‘relatively late.’ He’s made up for it since! He’s just finished working on a project at ETHBelinZwei that caught the interest of one of our Founders — Elias Haase. A simple yet secure solution to event ticketing ‘ĐOor’.
We had a chat with Niels to see what inspired him and to find out about his journey in blockchain.
How did you get into Ethereum?
In early 2014, relatively late, I came across Bitcoin. After that, the topic of crypto currencies wouldn’t let me go. I bought my first coin on bitcoin.de and tried various apps with friends, sending bitcoin from phone to phone. It felt revolutionary. The long confirmation time didn’t bother us, we could see the transaction right away.
A little after the launch of Ethereum my flatmate and I started a small project. First we worked on the compilation of an old gaming PC including a GeForce GTX 660 and then on to mining ether. We were mining 3–4 Ether per day. As winter came we thought about heating the kitchen and did a quick energy consumption calculation. With our electricity tariff, it wasn’t viable continue to mine, so we decided to shut down.
Over the next few years I was working on other projects and just watched for new Trading Platforms and followed price developments. The DAO crash was both shocking and fascinating at the same time, wanting to know more, I started looking into meetups. After starting my job and moving to Hamburg I took part in a Meetup “#moinblockchain17” (@eVmoinworld).
At the Moinblockchain event I met Elias and Rhian from B9lab. It turned out to be a milestone. Elias held a training session where we wrote the first smart contract on Remix. After that I was hooked. I registered and signed up to the Ethereum Developer Course. I have made several attempts to pass the course — not so easy if you do a day job and have to train yourself on new technologies in your spare time. I am not quite through yet, but I have learned a lot that I am feeling quite confident in solidity (thanks to Rob and Xavier)!
In the course, the team guided me through the blockchain jungle, and brought me up to speed. The three projects took a lot of time but IMHO it was the best experience I could gain! My personal programming development steps were only reached so fast, because I made serious mistakes (in solidity programming) and these were intentionally designed into the course. And again: Refactor!
So what about ETHBerlinZwei?
I didn’t know much about Hackathons but I applied through their site and got accepted (I think I found out about it on B9lab’s Slack). The skills I brought with me were mainly limited to the backend — Solidity. I was so excited and just wanted to bring useful dapps to life. We created a team of four (coming from Lithuania, Israel, Germany). We didn’t know each other before, met first on the day of the hackathon and decided the scope two hours before the start.
Two days previously, everybody was at the event entrance for DappCon with a ticket with a printed QR code on it. Each ticket had a 14 digit number and a small note saying, “do not print the same ticket twice!”… But even with these tickets we stood in line in 4–5 queues for quite some time.
That was when we had our ‘Ah ha!’ moment. Why is it still not possible to prove ticket ownership at the door by using ledger / crypto technology. Why do I have to use fiat money to enter events like DappCon (or any other conference on planet earth)? And don’t forget all those meetups! The QR code I presented just contained a plain number, it’s open for forgery, duplication and abuse! Not to throw shade a ETHBerlinZwei in particular (they did an amazing job in organising such a big event with so many good speakers!), but I had to disclose my email address to someone by typing it into his Mac and by that going through an excel sheet of email addresses to redeem my badge. I could have been anyone, simply pointing to another person’s email address and I would have had access to the event. ETHBerlinZwei is such a good event, we felt they deserved a ticketing system that reflected that.
Pretty direct inspiration! How do you go about creating ĐOor?
We wanted to build an app that I can use to “buy” a ticket and to “open the door” / “get into the venue”. Simple as that.
What we did from the very start, no preparation, no nothing: We saw quickly that there were three stakeholders in the transition; event organisers, event attendees and bouncer.
We built an ĐApp that can be used by event organisers:
- to create new events from a factory contract
- to keep track of all events that were created
by event attendees:
- to buy a ticket and
- to “get into the door”
by bouncers
- to challenge at the attendee shortly before entrance
- to scan users dynamically created qr code and verify the ticket owner (off-chain!)
Check-in would be done by simply presenting the public address which is associated with the ticket together with the signature that has been created by the private key belonging to that address.
(For further information please have a look at: https://devpost.com/software/door )
So what’s next for you and ĐOor?
First of all, I would like to emphasise once again, that I definitely could never have achieved this without my team, namely Stefan (he came up with the general idea for this dapp), Ben and Yotam.
For me, on the current code basis, first I will dedicate myself to self-study in order to get a broader understanding of frontend technologies. My teammates used Vue but just before EthBerlinZwei I started looking into React. This will help me with the exam to get finally certified for the Ethereum Developer Course. Maybe B9lab’s Ethereum QA Engineer Course will follow?
As team ĐOor, we are still in close contact. We will continue the project. Currently — just after about a week like Berlin Blockchain Week — everyone was still busy with their actual work. It will get better. The next step is to review our code and then expand the functions of ĐOor: OpenZeppelin’s GSN, using sidechains and integrating identity and authentication platforms etc. Wouldn’t it be great if we could run the first meetup access controls on one of the testnets?
I am so incredibly proud to be a part of this blockchain/technology/social movement — even its not my daily business. I really enjoyed my experience spending the whole weekend at EthBerlinZwei on hacking, with ambitious people with such a positive, hands-on mindset!
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Find out more about ETHBerlin and the Department of Decentralization.
Published at Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:19:21 +0000
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By trendingtopics on 2019-03-13 05:39:23
