Emin Gün Sirer

Bio

• Profession: Software Engineer, Scholar
• Cypherpunk; "I was, I didn't pay much attention to it. I just thought it was kind of boring. A lot of the people were circulating around the same ideas."
• Most well known to be a system builder and has made vast contributions on the field of cryptocurrencies, helping build many functional systems for bitcoin (Bitcoin-NG, Covenants, Falcon Relay System)
• Vocally against Blockstream, saying they are a joke (2019) having done nothing innovative for the space.
• Helped with smart contracts for Ethereum and to expose multiple flaws on the DAO, before the hack. "Me and Vlad Zamfir and Mark Dino, we found nine different flaws in The DAO and we cautioned everybody, we had a paper called A Call for a Moratorium on The DAO. I also found the bug in The DAO, the reentrancy bug."
• One of his students; Ted, designed the protocol used by Libra. Now working on Ava.
• Goes into his background in this interview by The Defiant (1-5-2020) in which he also talks about Selfish Mining:

"And I, with my colleague Ittay Eyal, who is now a professor at Teknion, we found that Satoshi was wrong. Bitcoin is not perfect. In fact, you're better off not following Satoshi's prescribed protocol, but following a slight variant which gives you more coins. This was a mining strategy called selfish mining and then when we published this people went crazy. They attacked me, they attacked Ittay, I got all sorts of threats, all sorts of attacks. They crowdfunded a simulator to show us that we were wrong. And then the guy who wrote the simulator said well, they're right. Everything they said is correct. And the graph he drew is exactly the graph we drew. So it's really cute. This is why I love being a scientist."

Occupations

• Emin is the co-director of IC3 and associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. His main research areas cover operating systems, networking and distributed systems.
• Avalanche (AVA); founder
• Created Teechan, a Lightning Network alternative. "I've worked on layer two. I built something called t-chain. It's still the fastest Layer 2 out there. It doesn't suffer from the problems that Lightning suffers. We were doing 125,000 transactions per second on Bitcoin."
• Worked on NoSQL and data stores (created HyperDex and Weaver).
• Was also behind Karma (2003), the first peer-to-peer currency with a distributed mint, and helped create Nexus, an operating system for trustworthy computing. His research interests span distributed systems, cryptocurrencies, and software infrastructure for large scale services.
• Vaults, “How to Put an End to Bitcoin Theft”, "we came up with this notion of vaults where if your money in your vault is stolen, you can get it back from the hacker."
• Tezos, advisor
• bloXroute; co-founder (19-9-2018), but not on their team page anymore (1-6-2020).

Investments

• RedStone; is mentioned on their website as an investor.