Blockchain takes the spotlight as new host Carter Morgan joins veteran Mark Mandel in a fascinating interview with Allen Day. Allen is a developer advocate with Google, specializing in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications.

This week Allen reveals how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be applied to a variety of applications like distributed file storage and video services. We also discuss the hype and merits of blockchain + projects that Allen has worked on to analyze cryptocurrency transactions using Google Cloud’s big data platforms. The results may just surprise you.



Allen Day

Allen Day is a developer advocate with Google in Singapore. He specializes in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. Allen studied at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine and earned his PhD in Human Genetics. Allen’s blockchain work is focused on interoperability between smart contract platforms and cloud platforms. He created Google Cloud’s blockchain public datasets program, which allows non-specialist engineers and data scientists to search and analyze public blockchain data.

Cool things of the week


Blockchain.com, scaling and saving with Cloud Spanner blog
Cloud TPU Pods break AI training records blog
Cloud Memorystore adds import-export and Redis 4.0 blog
To run or not to run a database on Kubernetes: What to consider blog
Google to acquire Elastifile blog


Interview


Blockchain site
Bitcoin site
Coinbase site
Ethereum site
$24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200% news article
Blockchain ETL project on GitHub site
BigQuery site
Kubernetes site
Cloud Composer site
Pub/Sub site
Bigtable site
Tensorflow site
Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog
BigQuery public blockchain datasets on GCP site
Ethereum in BigQuery: how we built this dataset blog
Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics blog
Introducing six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets—and how to analyze them blog
Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud blog
Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog
Unchained Podcast podcast
Off the Chain Podcast podcast


Question of the week

What are the four (or six?) types of VMs that exist on Google Cloud Platform? blog and docs

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit, as well as Pax Dev and Pax West.

Carter will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and working on new videos.

Allen will be at Strike Two Summit (Amsterdam), Singularity Festival (Heraklion), and Ethereum Devcon (Osaka).

Sound Effect Attribution


“mysterypeak1.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org
“crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org