Introduction to Blockchain, Crypto Mechanics & Smart Contracts - Part 1
This is Part 1 of a Two Part series on Blockchain, Crypto and Decentralized Finance (event notice for Part 2 is at: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/500639).
You will learn the history of blockchains, the essential technologies behind modern cryptocurrency, and the basics of decentralized finance.
Get a detailed look into how Bitcoin blocks are created and linked to form an immutable distributed ledger, the consensus mechanism that is the foundation of the Bitcoin public permissionless blockchain’s operational security, the control system operation of Bitcoin block creation, the Bitcoin supply/limits and more, all using Bitcoin Version 2 examples.
Next, a history of Ethereum development will be provided, including the technological advances leveraged from Bitcoin experience and Bitcoin’s shortcomings. There will be particular emphasis on the change of the consensus mechanism (from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake) and the addition of virtual machines and the associated virtual machine state to the Ethereum blockchain (enabling “smart contracts”).
Lastly, the addition of “tokenization” to many crypto blockchains allows not only for the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs), but also for stablecoin instantiation. Implications for tokenization and Stablecoins are deferred to Part Two of this series.
This is a hybrid, aproximately 90 minute talk; physical location is in this notice and remote participation via MSFT Teams is provided below in this event notice.
A lengthy Q&A period will be provided for those participants remaining after the ~90 minute lecture.
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- 16313 North Dale Mabry Hwy
- Tampa, Florida
- United States 33618
- Starts 11 September 2025 04:00 AM UTC
- Ends 08 October 2025 10:00 PM UTC
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Michael Romalho
Introduction to Blockchain, Crypto Mechanics & Smart Contracts
Biography:
Michael A. Ramalho, Ph.D. is an IEEE Senior Member and a recipient of the 2021 IEEE Florida Council Outstanding Engineer Award. Dr. Ramalho has extensive experience as a director, lead/chief architect, and principal investigator in networking, media signal processing, unified communications, packet-based error correction, acoustic spread-spectrum communication and blockchain/crypto mechanics.
Dr. Ramalho was especially active in Internet Telephony in the Web1 era during which time he ran an Internet Telephony research program at Telcordia Technologies, was co-chair of the Voice Over IP Forum, and was Chief Telephony Technologist at Voxware, Inc. during its IPO. He was the first to introduce lossless codec technology to Internet Telephony, resulting in ITU-T Standard G.711.0.
He has also worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and a M.Eng.E.E. from Cornell University. He holds over 59 patents. He has authored many standards in the ITU-T, IETF, and IMTC, and many foundational input documents to ETSI, 3GPP, and ANSI Committee T1 standards.
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