| John has been engaging with audiences in Durban and Johannesburg for the last eight years. He is excellent at communicating complex technology subjects in a simple and understandable way. His speaking journey started in 2018 with the Institute of IT professionals (IITPSA) where he began speaking about blockchain related technologies. |
Experience
| JUNE 2018 UNDERSTANDING BITCOIN TECHNOLOGY The presentation was at Strauss Daly Umhlanga and was an IITPSA KZN event. There were about 30 people at the presentation and was a mixture of technology and business people. The topic was a very technical discussion on how bitcoin technology worked. |
| SEPTEMBER 2018 BLOCKCHAIN TRENDS AND PARADIGM SHIFTS The event was the Richfield institute of technology academic conference. The audience was made up of academics and thought leaders and the content discussed was on the technology behind blockchain and the shifts in thought brought about by the technology. |
| JANUARY 2019 BLOCKCHAIN AFRICA 2019 CONFERENCE REPORT BACK The event was an IITPSA KZN Chapter event held at the Durban Country Club. The event was attended by 30 people and was a mixture of business and technical. The content of the presentation was on Blockchain Africa 2020 and gave a summary of all the presentations held at the conference. |
| JUNE 2019 UNDERSTANDING BITCOIN TECHNOLOGY The event was an IITPSA event held at Vodacom in Umhlanga. The content was a very technical discussion on Bitcoin technology. |
| SEPTEMBER 2019 INTEGRATING INTO SAP USING ODATA SERVICES, The event was the SAP Africa conference held at Suncity also known as Saphila. The content of the presentation was on integration into SAP using Netweaver Gateway ODATA services. |
| JANUARY 2020 BLOCKCHAIN AFRICA 2020 CONFERENCE REPORT BACK The event was an IITPSA KZN Chapter event held virtually via Zoom. The event was attended by 70 people and was a mixture of business and technical. The presentation summarized 10 presentations given at Blockchain Africa 2020. |
| JULY 2020 BITCOIN CRYPTOGRAPHY The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam. The content was a very technical discussion on Bitcoin cryptography and how it was used to prove ownership of Bitcoin. |
| OCTOBER 2020 MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CRYPTOGRAPHY The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar Jam. The content discussed the basic math behind cryptography which served as foundations for the more complex theorems. |
| NOVEMBER 2020 BITCOIN MINING SIMPLIFIED The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar Jam. The presentation explained the Bitcoin mining process in an understandable way. The topics included the proof of work mechanism and discussed the profitability of miners after the halving. |
| FEBRUARY 2021 DEFI SECURITY SIMPLIFIED The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam. The presentation provided basic knowledge of smart contract security that investors could use to evaluate the Decentralized Finance (DEFI) projects they were investing in from a security point of view. |
| MARCH 2021 BLOCKCHAIN AFRICA 2021 REPORT BACK The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam. The event summarized 11 of the most informative and interesting presentations from Blockchain Africa 2021. |
| JUNE 2021 GAME THEORY AND ITS APPLICATION IN BITCOIN The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .The event discussed the basics of game theory and then went into depth on how the interactions on the blockchain network could be analyzed in terms of game theory. |
| SEPTEMBER 2021 ETHEREUM 2 The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .The event discussed the details of the technical changes in Ethereum 2 and whether Ethereum would be the dominant blockchain in the future . |
| FEBRUARY 2022 BLOCKCHAIN SIG-NFTS BEYOND THE HYPE The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .The event explained Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) in a simple way that could be easily understood . There was also the introduction of a simple framework that could be used to assess whether an NFT had good investment potential. |
| MARCH 2022 BLOCKCHAIN AFRICA 2022 REPORT BACK The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .The event presented a summary of the most interesting presentation from Blockchain Africa 2022. Independent analysis and research was also provided on the more interesting topics in what was a very fast paced and informative session. |
| MAY 2022 THE LIGHTNING NETWORK: A BITCOIN SCALABILITY SOLUTION The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .Bitcoin paymens have been limited to about 7 transactions a second because of the nature of decentralizaton and proof of work. The lightning network was created as a solution to this problem. In this presentation it was explained in simple terms how the lightning network operates and John also went into the finer details of the technology. |
| JULY 2022 THE METAVERSE DEMYSTIFIED The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .The presentation clearly defined what the metaverse is and talked about the challenges around digital identity, centralization and the technological hurdles that need to be overcome. The content also discussed the influence of the giant tech companies in social media and and whether this influence would be welcome in the Metaverse. |
| NOVEMBER 2022 LESSONS LEARNT FROM THE BITCOIN BEAR MARKET The event was an IITPSA event held virtually on webinar jam .The presentation discussed the very long and distressing Bitcoin bear market where price fell from a high of 60 000 USD to a low of 19 000 USD. There were some very painful lessons learnt and John broke it down into lessons learnt using a school blackboard style presentation. It covered topics such as the influence of the dollar on the world economy, global macro |
| FEBRUARY 2023 Investigating Cryptocurrency: Tracking and Recovering Crypto Walked through the technical foundations of Bitcoin addresses (public key, SHA-256, RIPEMD-160, Base58Check encoding) and transaction structure, then covered tools and techniques for tracing crypto through the blockchain and approaches to recovering lost or stolen funds. |
| MARCH 2023 Blockchain Africa 2023: Report Back Reported back from the Blockchain Africa Conference (Johannesburg & virtual, 16–17 March 2023) across six themes: Pick n Pay’s crypto payment rollout, development on Polkadot, financial inclusion initiatives worldwide, tokenisation, Mastercard’s blockchain initiatives, and the Reserve Bank’s Project Khokha. |
| MAY 2023 Post-Quantum Cryptography: Defending the Blockchain Covered the quantum threat to today’s cryptography — from the basics of quantum computing through to how factorisation-breaking algorithms threaten current schemes — then introduced the Learning-With-Errors problem and lattice cryptography as the leading post-quantum defences. |
| JULY 2023 Bitcoin Mining Demystified Explained how bitcoin mining actually works: how transactions move from wallets into the pool of unverified transactions, how miners assemble block headers and compete on hashing power, and how new blocks are validated and broadcast across the network of nodes. |
| SEPTEMBER 2023 Green Blockchain: Blockchains and the Environment Quantified Bitcoin’s environmental footprint — an annualised ~62.7 million tonnes of CO₂ (comparable to Serbia and Montenegro combined) and ~112 TWh of electricity (comparable to the Netherlands) — walked through how proof-of-work mining drives it, and weighed different points of view, proof-of-stake included. |
| MARCH 2024 The Bitcoin Halving: Everything You Need to Know Explained the mechanics of Bitcoin’s programmed supply halving (every 210,000 blocks, roughly four years) and the difficulty-adjustment mechanism that keeps block times at ten minutes, then covered halving’s impact on supply and demand, mining profitability, and its cyclical correlation to macro events. |
| JUNE 2024 Smart Contract Development and Testing Set up a basic smart-contract development environment (Remix IDE, VS Code, IntelliJ, Hardhat, a local blockchain node) and walked through compiling and deploying contracts to test-net, dev-net and main-net, plus writing unit tests for the contracts themselves. |
| FEBRUARY 2026 The State of Crypto 2026 Opened with macro and chart analysis — demographics, government debt-to-GDP across major economies, the AI investment cycle and US core inflation — before turning to US policy developments and a 2026 outlook for crypto, closing with open Q&A. |
| MAY 2026 BIP54: A Cleanup of Bitcoin’s Consensus Protocol Covered BIP54, a proposed cleanup of Bitcoin’s consensus protocol, tracing how transactions and blocks move through the network — initiating and broadcasting transactions, independent verification, aggregating transactions, mining, and the decentralisation that keeps consensus honest. |
Education
| MARCH 2018 one on one coaching speaking lessons, Voice Clinic |
