Understanding Blockchain and Bitcoin with Bhagwan Chowdhary (Professor of Finance, UCLA)

Jaipur (India), a place well known for producing some top businessmen. Home to an ever buzzing business community. Surely can't wait to miss out on the cryptocurrency frenzy.

To help the citizens understand the cryptocurrency phenomenon, IIT Bombay Alumni association and FORTI-Rajasthan, organized a session by Prof. Bhagwan Chowdhary.
Professor of Finance at UCLA and guest professor at ISB, also working on Financial Access at Birth project.

Jaipurites were lucky to have someone of his calibre, sharing his knowledge in what was like a 'classroom' session.

So, how the session went?
Mr. Rajan Sanghi initiated the session by talking about IIT Bombay Alumni association and how the association contributes back to the Alumni, Students, Faculty and Society.
Next was Mr. Mahesh Kala on behalf of FORTI (Federation of Rajasthan Trade and Industry), who highlighted the importance and deep-rooted presence of FORTI in Rajasthan Industries and trading community.

Now it was the turn of "young, restless, forward-looking" crowd (described by prof Chowdhary himself) to be sincere classroom students once again.

Agenda was to understand how cryptocurrencies bring together math, economics, cryptography and computing.

It Started with an introduction to the power of numbers and indexing (with examples of binary, decimals, hexadecimal systems). Followed by how SHA256 is used, (with cheeky usage by WikiLeaks to communicate this message to John Kerry)

After helping understand how public-private key pairs can be used, he took us through the history with the historical figures who have researched and lead the developments that lead to the present scenario of computers and related technologies. Blockchain, is the name of this game.

Later he dived into what's a block, what's a blockchain, how bitcoin works, what are smart contracts, what's mining and how a cryptocurrency hold value.

He also discussed some upcoming blockchains, where algorithms different than Bitcoin blockchain are used, example Stellar-Lumen (He is an advisor to the team as well)

The session concluded with students bouncing questions. Now, most were curious about, how to ride the cryptocurrency wave, how to identify the next big bet that would make them "Fortune", and most important, how legal all of it is?

Professor, helped the crowd to develop a perspective for answering these questions and said while the technology of blockchain is here to stay, individual tokens and crypto currencies depends on market, adoption, technology factors.

So, yeah the wave is not over yet, it's just the beginning. It was great to be a part of this forward-looking crowd, and much greater were insights of Professor Bhagwan Chowdhary.

Cheers,
Kartik

Here are some images from the session: Courtesy IIT Bombay Alumni Association - Jaipur.