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, _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
