Jeff Garzik

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Bio

  • Was part of the supporters and even was mentioned as lead developer for Segwit2x and also one of the 6 people who canceled it on 8-11-2017 by a joint statement with Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees.
  • The bug that Garzik, among others, uncovered in BTC block 74638 was Bitcoin’s first inflation bug. Given that the cryptocurrency’s total supply is meant to be capped at 21 million, the addition of 184 billion coins was a major problem to put it mildly. An integer overflow had caused a negative total transaction value. Within two hours of Common Vulnerability and Exposure 2010-5139 striking, Core developers Gavin Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto were on the case, and the 184 billion BTC transaction was purged from block 74638. Within five months of the incident, Satoshi would leave the community he founded for good. 
  • From The Defiant (14-12-2020): 

"Before I get into blockchain, and what led me to it was open-source, working on the Linux kernel, which I did for over 10 years. I was very fortunate to work under Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux. 20 plus years later, Linux is an almost every android phone, every data center on the planet. So I was incredibly fortunate to be there, kind of at the beginning, but in the rough and tumble days. Fast-forwarding that story 10 years, I saw exactly the same thing in July of 2010, when I stumbled on Bitcoin on a website called Slashdot.org: News for Nerds was its tagline. It was at the time, one of the most popular websites on the web.

It was talking about decentralized currency, which maybe a little bit egotistically I thought was not possible. I thought to myself skeptically, this thing, there's no way that it's not, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 servers, maybe spread around the world. But it's still kind of centralized, it's still a multi-computer type of model that at the time was just cloud-based, but I was wrong, and I was happy to be proven wrong. I dove into the source code, and saw just this incredible vibrancy of intellect and design that Satoshi Nakamoto had put into Bitcoin and really converted me from a skeptic to believer, simply by the fact that I could prove to myself without having to ask any other credential third party, that this thing was for real. I could look under the hood, at the source code, at the core of the system, and say that it was math at the center of everything. That's really, you can't get more fundamental than that. 

From there, I dove into the project similar to Linux. I started contributing source code changes called patches. Similar to my first experience in Linux, my first patch was rejected, so my first change was rejected. But the way the open-source process works, it's not just, I don't like this go away, it's there are these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 problems, and if you address those, then I'll accept your change into the Bitcoin software. It's that kind of pull that really motivates open-source developers to do better, to come back address the feedback of the Bitcoin inventor and play some contributing role.

That was my first foray into Bitcoin. A developer always marks their first patch to the software as a real milestone, the first time you touch the software and the project leader puts your change into the software and I was hooked. From there, I was off to the races. So yes, in July of 2010 I started contributing. For the next several years, I worked with Bitpay, one of the early payment processors, trying to engineer how people can spend their Bitcoin, this at the time new and strange digital currency that nobody really understood. I pounded the pavement, like a good activist trying to encourage merchants to accept Bitcoin."

Occupations

Investments

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