00:10.3
00:13.3
And I first heard about Bitcoin from this article,
00:13.4
00:16.9
which came out in Infoworld on May 24th 2010.
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00:20.5
which was an article about 7 interesting open source projects.
00:20.6
00:22.6
I don't remember I stumbled across the article
00:22.7
00:27.5
It's probably one of the many blogs I read linked to it.
00:29.2
00:32.4
So about a month later, I had launched the Bitcoin Faucet
00:32.5
00:37.3
which probably you all got a few, well depending on how early you were,
00:37.4
00:42.2
either 5 Bitcoins, which was how many Bitcoins the faucet was giving at the start,
00:42.3
00:46.2
or if you got them last night, then one micro Bitcoin,
00:46.3
00:48.9
which is how much the faucet is giving out today.
00:50.4
00:53.8
So when I heard about that article in May,
00:53.9
00:56.1
and decided that the faucet be a great first project
00:56.2
00:59.3
to kind of get my feet wet in playing with Bitcoins
00:59.4
01:02.7
I just kind of got sucked in and got more and more involved in the project
01:02.8
01:05.1
, got involved in the Bitcoin forums and community,
01:05.2
01:07.1
, started to submit patches to Satoshi,
01:07.2
01:12.0
who would then rip them apart and send them back to me and say no you did it wrong and reimplement it
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01:17.0
All the way through kind of December 2010
01:17.1
01:19.7
when Satoshi started to step backwards.
01:21.9
01:22.9
He did it in an interesting way.
01:23.0
01:26.7
He actually sent me an email and asked me if it'd be okay if
01:26.8
01:30.8
he could put my email address as one of the people to contact on the Bitcoin.org homepage.
01:30.9
01:35.7
I said "Sure. Yeah, no problem. You could put my email address there." So he did that
01:35.8
01:39.9
And then at the same time, he took his email address away.
01:40.0
01:42.8
which I didn't expect to happen,
01:42.9
01:47.7
but I think it was kind of his way of saying, kind of pushing me forward.
01:47.8
01:53.2
And the last email I've talked to Satoshi was in April 2011.
01:53.3
01:58.1
So it kind of gives you the history of the project so far.
01:59.4
02:03.0
So why me? Why am I the lead developer of Bitcoin?
02:03.1
02:05.5
Well Jeff pushed me.
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02:10.4
He kind of encouraged me, I think because I have a pretty thick skin
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02:15.3
So you can call me an idiot and whatever.
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02:17.4
Because I know I'm not perfect,
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02:21.6
so I tend not to rush into things rashly
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02:24.2
because I screw up quite regularly.
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02:29.1
but I think my virtue is that I will listen to you if you tell me I'm screwing up.
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02:31.7
And also because nobody else frankly stepped forward
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02:36.6
and decided to say I'll be the guy who tries to herd the cats.
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02:43.7
I should stress it's not because of any prior experience, either open source software or the financial world.
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02:48.6
My background is in kind of a serial entrepreneur in different startups
02:49.1
02:53.5
oh I did have a prior experience
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02:55.8
that actually reminds me a lot of Bitcoin
02:55.9
03:00.7
And that side was a chief architect of a virtual reality modeling language standard
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03:05.1
which never actually kind of went anywhere.
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03:09.2
but just dealing other greater diverse community and trying to get people to agree on
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03:14.1
kind of what the direction to go in, my VRML experience reminds me a lot of Bitcoin
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03:17.9
So I guess I do have some semi-relevant prior experience.
