Tag: Mike Hearn
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Hearn has been working on bitcoin for five years. He also did some open source work bitcoin developer mike hearne Linux desktop. Before working full-time on bitcoin, Hearn spent almost eight years at Google, where he was a senior software engineer who worked on a variety of products from satellite imagery and maps to Gmail, anti-spam, and account security. Okay, so the first thing we want to know is, how did you go from an established company like Google to working on bitcoin?
I had an interest in digital money for a long time. It was written by one of the architects of the euro.
I just found the whole concept that you could design money to achieve certain goals to be really interesting. I had always thought of money bitcoin developer mike hearne air, as a law of nature, because no matter where you go there are always currencies, and they all work in the same way. After reading that book, I bitcoin developer mike hearne straight to the internet to learn more; I was sure I would find lots of people who have been thinking about this topic there.
I downloaded that early bitcoin code. It was a bit annoying since I had a Mac and the software was Windows-only. But luckily one of the open source projects I had worked on was Windows emulation for Linux desktop, so I had experience in making Windows apps work on other kinds of computers. After playing with the code a bit, I sent Satoshi a lot of questions and we had a long series of discussions where I asked him all kinds bitcoin developer mike hearne really basic things. There was nothing else back then: What did you want to know?
I just thought it was cool and played around with it. There was a mailing list, and that was it. So I just played around with bitcoin for a few days. What happened to make you start paying attention to bitcoin again? The WikiLeaks blockade happened! So I went online and had a look again, and by this point bitcoin had developed a small community: There was a forum where people were posting, there was even an exchange rate. You bitcoin developer mike hearne buy socks with bitcoin.
I had lost them. So I met up with someone at a bar in Zurich to buy some more, but there were no smartphone wallets then, we both had to bring our laptops, connect to wi-fi; it took five or six minutes just to log onto the network.
We had a beer while we waited. This needs to be instant. So I worked on it. It was one of the first re-implementations of bitcoin ever done. Those people would have just invented a way to send cash over the internet and left it at that. Now what else can I bitcoin developer mike hearne My mind was blown away by how big, how far in advance Satoshi was thinking… I kept encountering things in the code that were just there, without any bitcoin developer mike hearne.
One of those things you encountered was smart contracts — which computer scientist Nick Szabo first wrote about in — where contractual clauses including for physical property rights bitcoin developer mike hearne be facilitated through computing. How did you come across that for bitcoin? He continued emailing with me and Gavin [Andresen, Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation to whom Nakamoto handed over the network alert key] for a few months after he stopped posting publicly.
But eventually he disappeared for everyone. How would you contrast bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto to, say, Linux, where the chief architect of the kernel Linus Torvalds was also the project coordinator? Both bitcoin and Linux also have non-profit foundations behind them to help foster growth and technical collaboration. A lot of the software a lot, not all of it in the bitcoin developer mike hearne space is open source.
I think the open source aspects of bitcoin and Linux are pretty similar in many ways: As for the Bitcoin Foundation, it was actually created pretty early on. I know you worked on desktop Linux which was a flashpoint for a lot of heated discussions before! But I was profoundly affected by that experience! Bitcoin developer mike hearne put a lot of work into desktop Linux, bitcoin developer mike hearne did many other people. So when I began working on bitcoin, I did a lot of soul searching before ramping up my involvement.
The difference was that this time I was in a position to help influence things. Any lessons can we draw for bitcoin, or open source in general? So the open-source-ness and the free-ness of the software become the end instead of a means to an end. Forks are not the best way to resolve these disputes, but it may happen anyway because some of the people who have become involved in the years since Satoshi left feel like the decentralization aspect of bitcoin developer mike hearne is the end and not a means to an end.
They care about what they can use it for, what can they do with it. You mentioned earlier that the internet is littered with open source projects that went nowhere.
What bitcoin developer mike hearne bitcoin different? What can people do with it? Is it really that easy for developers to just get started?
I think the fact that you can just sit down and start writing programs that work with money is simultaneously the most powerful and the most terrifying thing about bitcoin. You can just get started and let the awesomeness show itself. I always read about some really awesome thing that someone has created with bitcoin bitcoin developer mike hearne that they threw together over a weekend.
What would you love to see more developers work on? Network robustness is a big one. Right now we have maybe competing wallets, which is great for decentralization, but most of them are pretty basic. Do we really need so many? If we had more like 10 — but they were all 2x or 3x as good — that might be a better tradeoff. Streamiumwhere you can stream your video directly to viewers without having to rely on centralized players.
This has applications for online education, consulting, mentoring; online gaming; indie films, reality shows, web series, and podcasts. BitRatedwhich provides identity, reputation management, and consumer protection by modeling the social graph of trust relationships between bitcoin users. This bitcoin developer mike hearne people to vouch for that trust putting their own reputation on the line to help create trust with other users, so you trust a friend because I trust them and you trust me and so on.
Apps like these are how we continue to build the case for bitcoin and reach even more mainstream adoption. How did you come across bitcoin? I just emailed him. I just thought I was talking to some guy named Satoshi.
Satoshi had already envisioned the mobile solution? Yeah, he designed all of it up front, way before. You never heard from Satoshi again? Some of the native bitcoin apps I like right now include things like:
