Jeff Garzik, a veteran Linux contributor and early open source developer who contributed to the Bitcoin project from 2010 to 2017, has released a series of new videos discussing his collaboration with Bitcoin’s anonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Garzik joined the project in July 2010 and contributed to the early software releases, submitting notable pull requests, including the first proposal to block size limitas well as the first proposal to abolish subsidies for free transactionsDuring Satoshi’s tenure as admin, Garzik accepted pull requests, including those for separating the mining code from the Satoshi client.
The most notable thing about the new videos is Garzik sharing memories of his time with Satoshi, including new commentary on whether Satoshi was indeed an individual or a group.
“As a programmer, Satoshi is more of the ‘A Beautiful Mind’ type, a lonely genius,” Garzik recalls.
“When I was in computer science, we thought highly of ourselves as programmers, and we noticed that some of the other disciplines, the chemists, the biologists, the physicists, had to do it, but they didn’t approach it as a profession. Satoshi was the same.”
Garzik says that in this way, he believes Satoshi knew what problem he wanted to solve, but he lacked an understanding of “modularity,” “unit testing,” and other basic principles that “computer scientists learn.”
“He very wisely took cryptographic solutions off the shelf that were known and well studied, and he put them all together in a new and interesting way,” Garzik saidand added:
Elsewhere, Garzik testified to his belief that Satoshi was a “self-taught” programmer, claiming that the Bitcoin founder humble about his limitations.
In other statements, he spoke about Satoshi’s temperament and methods, emphasizing his strict focus on Bitcoin.
“Satoshi would never stray from that topic. He would never divulge personal information, never talk about his mood, the time of day,” he says in one clip“It’s always been 100% about Bitcoin.”
In total, the memories span a period of 6 months, starting when Nakamoto resigned from the project in January 2011. At that point, Garzik’s friend and collaborator Gavin Andresen took over as lead maintainer.
The videos come a year in which other early Bitcoin contributors have come forward by releasing correspondence with Satoshi, including Martti ‘Sirius’ Malmi And Adam Back the publication of hundreds of pages of never-before-seen emails in connection with a public trial in the UK
While Garzik has not yet released any emails with Satoshi, the videos, produced by a new company he founded, Hemi Network, represent the most public discussion the developer has had on the topic in a long time.
The Hemi Network, which launched in July, is billed as “a modular Layer-2 protocol for superior scalability, security, and interoperability, powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
The work follows a period post-2017 in which Garzik became more interested in blockchain networks that are not tied to a specific base-layer cryptocurrency, a path that includes Metronome, a 2017 project that also sought-after compatibility with multiple blockchains.
Garzik left the Bitcoin project that year after serving as chief administrator for a hard fork of the Bitcoin protocol which, despite early support from the startup ecosystem, was never formally launched.
The full video playlist can be found below: