Inspiration: So walking into the hackathon I suggested that we make a blockchain as a joke. It turns out that blockchain is no joke. Its not just a corporate buzzword. After talking our ideas over with a recruiter from GSK we decided to go all in on the blockchain idea and apply it to some of the data storage issues which the health industry suffers from.
What it does: Our application is over HTTP using GET and POST commands. Blockchain has several important features that needed to be implemented. Perhaps the hardest was making an proof of work system. The proof of work system hashes a guess with the previous proof and hash so that the blockchain is connected. This prevents someone else from making a larger chain easily which would override consensus chain.
How we built it: We built this using the Flask and Python. We used some starter code to get the framework of a blockchain in python but fixed some errors up and also added code to use Flask and encode the data which is being set over using JWT.
Challenges we ran into: Figuring out what exactly we wanted to do and how to make a significant impact on our society. After talking to Kevin from GSK we really wanted to make a product which would better others and while also learning about a cool new technology being used around the world today.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: Building a blockchain. It was at first a really intimidating feat but learning went smoothly and we are all proud of how our product turned out.
What we learned: BLOCKCHAIN. (and a bit of flask).
What's next for HealthBlok 101: Next up would be adding more GET and POST options for our blockchain. For now we ignored things like a private key encryption and instead favored simple Json web tokens for our encoding into a block. Also the UI needs to be fixed up as right now its just plain text on a screen. We also ignored making a wallet for potential miners and our own coin but that feature is coming soon :)!
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