[bitcoin-dev] Change in contact info

[bitcoin-dev] Change in contact info

[Gregory Maxwell]

Not really all that on-topic, but since it was suggested to me that
this would be an efficient venue to reach others who might care to
know:

In order to spend more time working independently on deep protocol
work, especially new cryptographic privacy and security technology for
Bitcoin, I resigned from Blockstream last November. It took until the
end of December to wind down my involvement there.

Back when we founded the company I was concerned that there was
significant underinvestment in Bitcoin technology: Bitcoin had a
healthy technical community just as it does today, but lacked the kind
of industry support that projects like Linux have. Without sustained
financial support, some kinds of bigger projects seemed really hard to
pull off with developers needing to share time between non-bitcoin
employment, their families, and their other interests. For the most
part, back then early Bitcoin companies weren't investing in public
technology, at least not effectively.

We hoped that Blockstream could help act as an anchor of support for
technology development, and in doing so help grow the community. I
think that has been a big success. The Bitcoin industry has matured a
lot and today Bitcoin Core gets significant regular contributions from
many organizations (including Chaincode, DCI, Blockstream, Coinbase,
Bitmain, Blockchain, and probably others that I am forgetting or not
even aware of) and a volunteer community much larger and more active
than it has ever been before.  From what I've been told Blockstream
plans to continue to contribute to awesome technology in Bitcoin--as
demonstrated by their Lightning webstore this week--but if they
didn't, that wouldn't be a problem for Bitcoin.

So for me this means that I can go back to working on the things I
find most exciting ... without the overhead of managing staff or
dealing with the many non-Bitcoin blockchain applications which are
important to Blockstream's business. The maturing Bitcoin industry
means I don't need to worry that Bitcoin development could be left
with inadequate financial support.

I'm very excited about all the new and interesting technology that is
coming to production--Bulletproofs / CT, signature aggregation,
improved propagation and synchronization--as well as the continuing
maturation of Bitcoin as a viable subject matter for academic
researchers. I'll be spending more time helping with these and other
things, and will no longer have insight into Blockstream's activities
or a Blockstream email address (I can continue to be reached at my
xiph.org and gmail email addresses as I've used here in the past), but
otherwise this shouldn't change anything for anyone here.


Cheers,