Overview

The Korean RChain / Rholang workshop will be held at the new Blockchain / AI Tech Center in Gimcheon, Korea, from December 10 - 14, 2018. The workshop features five hours of instruction per day over the course of five days. The main focus will be centered on blockchain development through the lens of RChain, a fully-concurrent smart contract platform. Instruction and support are provided by four in-person leaders and two English-Korean translators, in addition to presentations by remote experts. Participants can expect to receive at least 25 contact hours with the discipline.

This workshop introduces participants to general concepts such as decentralized consensus, process calculi, formal semantics of programming languages, decentralized application (dApp) development, and node operation. All of these topics are key to taking full advantage of the RChain platform and coding in Rholang but are also relevant to working with many other blockchain platforms.

There will be three phases of learning:

Phase 1 builds a shared foundational knowledge through lessons, discussions, and lectures. Participants will explore consensus protocols through gameplay, become familiar with developer tools, and complete basic Rholang exercises.

Phase 2 departs from the traditional teacher-student formula and moves toward teams of participants competing to solve challenge problems. During this competition phase, learners are able to choose which challenges interest them most and follow their own curiosity. Instruction continues in the form of optional breakout sessions that will be run throughout the day.

Phase 3 will be spent designing and building final projects in which participants will apply the knowledge and skills developed during phases I and II. They will form teams, propose final project ideas, and peer-review each others' proposals for scope and technical design. Learning will continue to happen through breakout sessions led by both instructors and participants as well as project status presentations.

Link to proposal for funding from RChain Coop

Target Audience

Approximately 20-25 attendees were selected from 50 applicants. Technical participants should have a personal computer with an up-to-date version of mac OS, Linux, or Windows 10. Technical participants are expected to be familiar with programming and software engineering. Prior experience with Rholang and smart contracts is not required. Some familiarity with Boolean logic is required and exposure to lambda calculus would be helpful although not necessary.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the workshop, we expect that technical participants will:

• Understand the fundamentals of mobile process calculi and how they are expressed in RChain¡¯s Rholang programming language. Rholang is currently used for RChain smart contracts but is quickly becoming a general purpose programming language.

• Understand the unique advantages and challenges of a mobile process calculus-based programming language such as Rholang, e.g. nondeterminism.

• Possess the ability to code basic and moderately complex algorithms and contracts in Rholang.

• Possess the ability to build a complete working distributed application on the RChain platform.

• Understand the launch of the RChain network as well as the purpose of the genesis ceremony.

• Understand how RChain (w/ Rholang) is fundamentally different than Ethereum (w/ Solidity) and why it makes a difference.

Attendee Feedback

We will be soliciting feedback from learners and tailoring the workshop based on feedback received both in advance and regularly throughout the sessions.

Pre-Workshop Questionnaire

• What operating system do you use? (Minimum OSX , Linux like Debian 9 or Ubuntu 18.xx, Windows 10)

• How much background do you have in each of the following areas?

  • Functional programming

  • Imperative programming

  • Formal Logic

  • English

  • Blockchain

  • Git / github (do you have a github link?)

• What would you like to learn during this workshop?

• Which of the following terms best describes you? (Student, Professor, Professional Programmer, Enthusiast, Government Official, Other)

Daily Questionnaire

As the workshop progresses the exact questions on the following daily baseline survey will change.

• What were some of the most unexpected concepts you encountered today and how did you feel about them?

• What did you really enjoy learning today?

• What concepts could use some more clarification?

• How well did you feel you could communicate? (English / Korean / Translation)

• How could today¡¯s sessions be improved?
  
  

Curriculum Overview

Detailed Content Outline

Phase 1

The first 1.5 days are a highly structured agenda similar to a class or conference. There is still time for hands on practice, especially Monday afternoon.Topics to be covered are:

Introduction / Bitstory

• Very brief hello, welcome, etc (10 min max)

• Bitstory (15-30 min)

  • Isaac and I demo, show photo of previous

  • TODO HJ: Get some good video of the game for future documentation purposes

• More formal Introduction

  • Isaac / Joshy background

  • Brief history of RChain

  • This place is a construction zone, so you¡¯ll have to wear your hard hat

  • We¡¯re all gonna learn a lot together

  • We¡¯re introducing you to a community

• Summary of Three phases

• Review Survey results together

Rholang Hello World

• Go to rchain.cloud

• Differences between Proof of Work and Proof of Stake

• Casper Binary Consensus

• First several lessons of Rholang tutorial

• Using Rchain.cloud / Cryptofex

• Pi calculus and RHO calculus

• Pi calculus in the K-framework

• How to install and run RNode

• Participate in a blockchain genesis ceremony

• Bonding (if it works)

• Running Rholang by REPL, eval, and deploy

• Basic principles of dApp development / Nth caller

• Object capabilities

Phase 2

The next 1.5 days are less structured and will revolve around teams working together on solving challenges and earning points. Points will be tallied at the end of the phase. Simultaneous, optional breakout sessions will be utilized for participants who need extra help with a specific topic. Topics will be suggested by participants and organizers and sessions will be led by organizers.

Near the end of this phase, students will begin to suggest final build projects for phase 3.

Planned optional breakout sessions

• Rholang fundamentals revisited

• RChain¡¯s CBC Casper Consensus Protocol

• Casper the Friendly GHOST

• Formal semantics of Rholang

• Current state of RChain Platform Development

• The ¡°Alice pays Bob 10 RChain Revs¡± demo (RChain purses)

• Byzantine fault tolerance

• English/Korean technical vocabulary exchange

• Advanced topics in Rholang

• Cryptography (highlights from Boneh¡¯s course)

• Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget

• Type systems, pattern matching, and programming languages (cool highlights from Grossman¡¯s course)

Point Ideas

• Any advent of code problem in Rholang

• Add Casper friendly binary consensus game to bitstory consensus games

• Various contracts for librho

  • splitString

  • intToString

  • Gcd

  • Numerical recipes stuff

  • (extended) Euclidean algorithm

• Add single-argument version of string.slice to Scala code

• Add head-tail pattern matching to the Scala code

• Casper friendly finality gadget

• Get status dApp running

• Remove nonce field from Status dApp frontend

• Find a specific preimage or prove that it¡¯s computationally infeasible

• Translate important RChain or blockchain documents? Rholang tutorial lessons?

• Fix bug in nth-caller where subsequent callers are told they won

Phase 3

Collaborative learning in teams using basic Rholang. This phase is focused entirely on building collaborative projects. Participants will be in teams of 3 or 4. Topics will be primarily suggested by the participants at the end of phase 2. Topics may also be suggested by the organizers.

Breakout sessions will continue to happen during this phase, but no topics will be pre-arranged, all are suggestions will happen in real time. Breakout sessions may be led by organizers or participants (Korean sessions welcome).

Greg Meredith could give closing speech. Topic ideas: Praise participants, let them know we¡¯re looking for contributors and are happy to have them, don¡¯t make it seem like they¡¯re waiting on us to deliver. Make it clear that we¡¯re all in it together to deliver. Greg may also give breakout sessions.

Phase 3 Project ideas

• The Rholang contract bounties Kelly Foster (RChain¡¯s Development Program Manager) posted in JIRA can offer attendees a way to apply what they have learned to earn funds and contribute to RChain development in class or later

• A Proof of Concept  interpreter to create a minimal Rhocal/Rholang-like language

• A minimal RChain-like project that runs on substrate

• Complete tutorial of issuing a token/ICO on RChain. Like this erc20 one https://ethereum.org/token

• Many others to be added!

External Resources

Translation priority:

0. rholang cheatsheet

1. https://www.rchain.coop/blog/computational-calculi-primer/

2. https://www.rchain.coop/blog/calculus-primer-%cf%80-calculus/

3. https://www.rchain.coop/blog/calculus-primer-%cf%81-calculus/

• rholang cheatsheet

• https://rchain-info.netlify.com/

• Blog posts:

  • https://www.rchain.coop/blog/category/authors/isaac-defrain/

  • https://www.rchain.coop/blog//category/authors/joshy-orndorff/

  • https://www.rchain.coop/blog//category/authors/michael-birch/

• Jake¡¯s RCL GitHub: https://github.com/RChain-Collaborative-Learning/

• E-learning course: https://github.com/rchain/marketing/tree/master/elearning

• Bitcoin whitepaper in korean: https://github.com/wbnns/bitcoinwhitepaper/tree/master/Korean

• Learnblockcha.in -- (Blockchain at Berkley) University course on Ethereum and blockchain

Outstanding Items

Questions

• Funding - secured!

• Where will video recordings be published? TODO: Jonathan

• Translation of pre-workshop written materials? TODO: Johnathon

• Under S. Korean law, do we need to get releases from students to include them in any filming? (Question sent to HJ, videographer)

• How do we maximize probability of getting quality audio/video material that will be of use later? (Question sent to HJ, videographer)

Needs

• Bilingual (both languages in one doc) version of the rholang cheatsheet

• Whiteboards - secured!

• Screen projection - secured!

• Reliable wireless internet - secured!

• Sufficient electrical outlets for all (or at least many) attendees - secured!

• Plenty of dry erase markers. (20 new ones at least)

• Lots (200+) of notecards and scotch tape

• Discord Server or something for easily sending resources to attendees