Category Archives: cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin, btcd, cryptocurrencies, Golang

2014 Summer Internships: hacking on Bitcoin with Go

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We are pleased to announce our 2014 summer internship program at Conformal Systems. A short summary of the program is as follows:
hacking Bitcoin with Go

  • 2 full-time intern positions are available for the summer of 2014.
  • Interns will be expected to work on remote.
  • Interns can be from any country or timezone, but timezone may be a factor in intern selection due to synchronization issues.
  • Interns will be expected to speak and write in English at a conversant but not fluent level.
  • Interns will work on open source Bitcoin-related projects the entire summer.
  • Interns will be expected to develop exclusively in the Go programming language.
  • Interns are expected to have the “Minimum Recommended Skillset” from the code contribution guidelines for the btcd suite.
  • Interns can either (A) work on projects assigned by Conformal Systems staff or (B) “bring your own project” (BYOP) which we approve as part of the internship.
  • The internships are open to anyone currently attending undergraduate or graduate school, or anyone of similar age. Broadly speaking, we consider anyone age 15 and up to be eligible.
  • Pay will be roughly a “graduate student” level, approximately USD 2,000 (pre-tax) per month.

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Bitcoin, btcd, cryptocurrencies

Redecentralization: building a robust cryptocurrency developer network

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As it was originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was conceived of as a peer-to-peer system that was fundamentally decentralized.  Many past and current discussions about the future of Bitcoin acknowledge that too much centralization is a threat to the Bitcoin network.  To some extent this process of avoiding centralization has been successful, but in several key areas it has not been very successful and it is in need of redecentralization.  The most pressing case for redecentralization in Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies more generally) is the current development community:

  • the number of developers who have experience developing cryptocurrencies is very low, I would estimate there are less than 100 such developers
  • the majority of the developers are located in the US and other “Western” nations
  • the developer incentive structure with successful cryptocurrencies creates conflicts of interest

In what follows, I propose solutions to these issues cited above.  Since we develop our own full-node Bitcoin implementation, btcd, the criticism of the developer community status quo that follows applies not only to other developers, but also our developers who work on btcd.

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