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Jeff Garzik, a longtime Linux contributor and early open source developer who contributed to the bitcoin project between 2010 and 2017, has released a series of new videos detailing his time working with bitcoin's anonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Garzik joined the project in July 2010 and contributed to early software releases, submitting notable pull requests including the first proposal to increase the block size limitas well as the first proposal of Eliminate subsidies to free transactionsDuring Satoshi's time as a maintainer, Garzik received accepted pull requests, including for work separating mining code from Satoshi's client.
Most notably, in the new videos Garzik shares recollections about his time with Satoshi, including new comments about whether Satoshi was in fact a singular individual or a group.
“Satoshi, as a programmer, is more of a solitary genius, like 'A Beautiful Mind,'” Garzik recalls.
“When I was studying computer science, we thought of ourselves as very good programmers, and we realized that some of the other professionals, like chemists, biologists, and physicists, had to do it, but they didn’t consider it a profession. Satoshi was the same.”
Thus, Garzik says he believes Satoshi knew what problem he wanted to solve, but lacked an understanding of “modularity,” “unit testing,” and other basic concepts that “computer science students learn.”
“He very wisely pulled cryptographic solutions that were well known and well studied off the shelf and put them all together in a new and interesting way.” Garzik saidadding:
Elsewhere, Garzik attested to his belief that Satoshi was a “self-taught” programmer, arguing that the bitcoin founder was humble about his limitations.
In other statements he spoke about Satoshi's temperament and working methods, highlighting his strict focus on bitcoin.
“Satoshi never strayed from that topic. He never let slip any personal information, never talked about his mood or the time of day,” he says. A clip“It was always 100% about bitcoin.”
In total, the memories cover a period of 6 months until Nakamoto's resignation from the project in January 2011, at which point Garzik's friend and collaborator Gavin Andresen took over as lead maintainer.
The videos come during a year in which other early bitcoin contributors have gone public with publishing correspondence with Satoshi, with Martti 'Sirius' Malmi and Adam Back publishing hundreds of pages of previously unseen emails in connection with a public trial in the UK.
While Garzik has yet to release any emails with Satoshi, the videos, produced by a startup he founded, Hemi Network, represent the most public discussion the developer has had on the topic in some time.
Launched in July, the Hemi network is billed as “a modular Layer 2 protocol for superior scalability, security, and interoperability, powered by bitcoin and ethereum.”
The work follows a post-2017 period in which Garzik has become more interested in blockchain networks that are not tied to any specific base-layer cryptocurrency, a path that includes Metronome, a 2017 project that also Compatibility with multiple blockchains was sought.
Garzik left the bitcoin project that year after serving as the main maintainer of a hard fork of the bitcoin protocol which, despite initial support from the startup ecosystem, was never formally launched.
The full video playlist can be accessed below:
