Cryptonews recently spoke with early Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik, the co-founder and CEO of Bloq and leader of Hemi Network. Garzik shared his experience working directly with Satoshi Nakamoto, and told us how Satoshi remained an anonymous genius.
He also discussed the next big trends, Bitcoin in its early days, today, and in the future, his opinion on Ethereum, and Hemi’s incoming mainnet.
The Next Big Trend
Cryptonews: What drives your interest in crypto?
Jeff Garzik: I feel like we’re all building the future right now. In crypto, in energy, in AI. It’s all science fiction becoming science fact, honestly.
I always loved science fiction. My father would take me to watch space shuttle launches in Florida, which really got me going on the whole STEM, science, science fiction trail.
I’ve had the honor of being at the forefront of the internet itself. I have followed Linux and the rise of internet open source. And I was surfing the Bitcoin blockchain wave in the early days.
Many people know me as a technologist, but honestly, I think my biggest skill is just finding that next pioneering technology and surfing it.
Ultimately, I’m in crypto itself, not for the tech, but for how it benefits humanity, how it brings freedom and self-sovereignty to so many people around the planet.
CN: What is the next big trend that may not be obvious to average Joe and Jane?
Jeff Garzik: The top answer that comes to mind is network states.
A friend of mine, Balaji Srinivasan, former a16z general partner, wrote a book, The Network States. It’s codifying where crypto has been going for many years.
The thesis quickly summarized is that first come cloud communities, and we already have that, many cloud communities on the internet itself. And those can use technologies such as crypto, such as end-to-end encryption, to start to become more than just a community, become a nation.
From there, you’re a virtual nation, and you start acquiring real estate, start making deals with existing countries. And before you know it, you’ve created a new nation-state.
Early Days of Bitcoin
Garzik has been at the center of developing and commercializing Bitcoin-related open-source software. He spent five years as a Bitcoin core developer, ten years at Red Hat, and over a decade working on the open-source system known as the Linux Kernel – the core system running in every Android phone, every computer and data center in the world.
CN: Tell us about that faithful meeting with Bitcoin.
Jeff Garzik: I found Bitcoin in early July of 2010. There was a website, slash.org. It’s “news for nerds.” This was before Bitcoin had a market price. And in my egotism, I said to myself, oh, then there’s no way it’s decentralized. If its claims bore out, which they did, I knew that this was going to kick off a financial revolution. And that’s where my Linux experience came in. I just dove in and started creating changes to the software.
Bitcoin Core was all one application. It was a UI, a wallet, mining, a node. Initially it only ran on Windows, and we had to port to Linux. No unit tests, no stress tests, none of the usual hallmarks. But it was obviously genius. It was obviously thought through at every single level.
Working With Satoshi Nakamoto Directly
CN: What was your experience working with Satoshi Nakamoto?
Jeff Garzik: My very first patch to Bitcoin was rejected. It was increasing the block size of the Bitcoin blocks, which puts a cap on the number of transactions to match PayPal. And that patch […] instantly breaks consensus. That instantly breaks Bitcoin. It was an utterly unacceptable patch.
But Satoshi was very gracious in explaining the new technology that he had invented. And Satoshi was always an excellent leader, never temperamental, never kind of belittling or talking down to contributors. Satoshi seemed to know that this is a brand new thing, Bitcoin proof-of-work, distributed consensus. And it’s going to take a lot of explaining, a lot of patience to new entrants until that second layer of developers understands and could teach the third generation of Bitcoin developers.
That made me ultimately the third most prolific Bitcoin developer in those days.
Satoshi, I thought, was not a great coder but absolutely a genius when it comes to Bitcoin, the system, and a really good project leader too. Satoshi knew how to delegate.
CN: How did you communicate with Satoshi Nakamoto?
Jeff Garzik: No voice chat, no video, none of that. Satoshi was absolutely amazing with maintaining their anonymity. Satoshi would never talk about the latest footballer rugby scores or, you know, the weather is really cold today, [would never use distinct] spelling, anachronisms, or colloquialisms […] nothing that would give you a clue about Satoshi outside of the Bitcoin realm.
And to paraphrase one of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects, the greatest trick that Satoshi Nakamoto ever pulled was stop leaving a data trail for amateur sleuths to eventually pick up on. And that’s how you preserve anonymity is you fade off into the distance.
CN: You think the latest HBO documentary got it wrong?
Jeff Garzik: Totally wrong. I know the person that they have proposed quite well, definitely not, so the mystery remains a mystery.
And I think that’s healthy. You didn’t know who Satoshi was, you didn’t know Satoshi’s resume, Satoshi’s CV, you were forced to focus on the technology and does the technology work. All the information is right there in front of you, and you can make your own mathematical evaluations […] you don’t need an opinion from authority. And so that was another nice thing about Satoshi’s anonymity.
Bitcoin Today
CN: Do you think that the original Bitcoin ethos remains to the present day? What do you think Satoshi Nakamoto would say in regard to the current state of Bitcoin?
Jeff Garzik: The canonical example I use is Namecoin, which was created while Satoshi was still around. Namecoin was a very early Gen 1 token, focused on name registrations, domain name system. Satoshi was very supportive of, you know, create an alternate network, Namecoin. But he didn’t want to put any kind of secondary systems directly into Bitcoin.
I think Satoshi just wanted to finish building out the vision that Satoshi had for Bitcoin. Satoshi was always focused on monetary use cases, programmability, decentralized money, and how and where to use decentralized money.
And so I think Satoshi would, similar to [what happened with Omni Counterparty] just kind of grudgingly accept that it’s impossible to keep people from squatting data into the Bitcoin blockchain. But that wasn’t really Satoshi’s ideal outcome, I think.
CN: Where is Bitcoin in 2024?
Jeff Garzik: What has come out of the past 14 years of crypto? Number one killer app, Bitcoin. It has clearly succeeded. It has clearly gotten a number of users, not only primary users, primary holders, but I judge this in terms of a web or network of businesses, of investment products, of attorneys, of custody companies, other companies that are building on Bitcoin today.
What is a recently emerging killer app number two is stablecoins, […] a complete natural complement to cryptocurrencies. And so what we’re seeing today is the merging of those two killer apps, but there are also a lot of pain points.
In 2024, Bitcoin is undisputedly the king in terms of security, staying power, all the other ancillary businesses, both in traditional finance as well as new finance, such as institutions, institutional custody, certified financial advisors, being willing to play with it.
The only observation is I’d say it’s far less changeable today. It’s maybe even ossified. It’s difficult to upgrade. But to me, that’s not a negative. That plays into its staying power, its security.
CN: Is there something that could shut down Bitcoin?
Jeff Garzik: If you lose the internet, you lose Bitcoin. Going back to the 1970s, the beginnings of the internet itself, it came out of DARPA in the United States, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency–and the whole point was to survive a nuclear war, to have a network that would route around. And so Bitcoin is an internet currency and Bitcoin is going to be the currency that can survive a nuclear war as long as the internet itself survives a nuclear war.
CN: There are so many crypto projects in the world, but how many can truly be successful?
Jeff Garzik: I’ve been through about four crypto cycles at this point. And that cycle is a lot longer, but it’s still playing out as true, meaning that people are coming back to Bitcoin after developing on other systems.
From permissionless innovation, we should encourage open networks and permissionless innovation. But from a macroeconomic perspective, when the cost of digital asset creation is zero, that means we’ll be flooded with tokens. We’ll be flooded with networks. And 98% of those will be worthless. So 1% will have some worth, and the final 1%, the Bitcoins and Ethereums of the world, they will have all the network effect, all the value.
CN: What is your opinion on the Lightning Network?
Jeff Garzik: I’d argue that Lightning was one of the first Layer-2 networks. I’m personally a fan, but I think it has macroeconomic challenges. You still need an on-chain transaction in order to start using the Lightning Network somewhere.
Eventually, Binance, Coinbase, I’m convinced, will allow semi-decentralized trading, meaning that Lightning will let you keep your Bitcoin in your wallet until the moment of trade. So there’ll be kind of a half-on-half-off liquidity model, and Lightning uniquely enables that. So it’s a better model for users. I think it brings more liquidity to centralized exchanges in a decentralized way, and so there are a lot of advantages to Lightning in that regard.
CN: How can we make getting Bitcoin easier for everyone?
Jeff Garzik: Fundamentally, we got to get back to our peer-to-peer roots. And fundamentally, it’s a societal problem, not a tech problem. It’s how do we get to that point where you’re in my trust network and so that’s all I need.
Unfortunately, government regimes have really clamped down on the whole KYC thing. And we absolutely need to push back on that. This is the fundamental freedom of thought that I can transact with whom I want, and I don’t need a third-party nanny making those decisions for me.
Future of Bitcoin
CN: What’s the future of Bitcoin like?
Jeff Garzik: Bitcoin is bomb-proof. No matter what happens out in the world, the Bitcoin system continues. If we were at a high school prom, Bitcoin would be voted most likely to succeed, given all the factors, all the wars, all the politics. It’s gotten the most staying power of any blockchain. Bitcoin’s leading the way in that it’s most likely to be legally considered a currency, not a security, and not some of these other legal categories that are a little bit more troublesome.
I think the future of Bitcoin is more stable, it’s maybe a little bit ossified and a little bit less changing than the other blockchains. And that’s okay. And that’s a good thing, it being rock solid stable and dependable is a massive quality in a world of, oh crap, we got to reboot our blockchain. You’re literally putting a level of trust in the blockchain itself. And so you need something stable, you need something dependable.
Bitcoin and Ethereum: King and Queen
CN: What is your opinion on Ethereum?
Jeff Garzik: We like to say that Bitcoin and ETH are kind of the king and queen of crypto. Bitcoin is that root of the tree, that rock-solid foundation. Ethereum, I say, is the grand central station of crypto – if you’re going to go from one crypto asset to another crypto asset, most likely you’re going to go through Ethereum.
The Bitcoin script is intentionally very limited, that gives it high security. But again, limited is limited. Ethereum, being a lot easier, to program quickly became the home of decentralized exchanges or DEXs.
Crypto exchanges [used to sit] in the driver’s seat in a way that is not really compatible with decentralized programming. Ethereum came along and decentralized that. So that was, to me, proof-putting that Ethereum is a clear component in this total decentralization picture.
HEMI: Merging Bitcoin and Ethereum Nodes
CN: Can you explain to our readers what are Hemi VM (HVM) and proof-of-proof?
Jeff Garzik: The Hemi node itself is both an Ethereum node and a Bitcoin node together. And so it has a live view of the Bitcoin network. To me, this is supercharging Bitcoin and supercharging Bitcoin script because it brings so much more power to Bitcoin itself.
And it’s with full awareness of Bitcoin and Ethereum that we can do that through the Hemi HVM, that integration of a Bitcoin node inside an Ethereum node, something that nobody’s ever done before.
Once [your assets are] on the Hemi blockchain, you don’t have to do that move assets over here and then move assets over here type of shuffle. That’s all too common in crypto and all too annoying, if I may speak freely. So what Hemi does is allow developers to build applications that allow you to do interesting, useful, productive, lucrative things with your Bitcoin assets, your Ethereum assets, ordinals, runes, similar NFTs on the Ethereum side, all within Hemi.
And on the Ethereum side, we’ve got an Optimism-compatible bridge such that a non-custodial user of Ethereum can bridge over to our network and perform all manner of DeFi, AI, gaming, whatever your vertical is.
So it’s a lot fewer steps to accomplish the same thing. It’s a lot less, I’d argue, less risk when you have fewer steps because each time you move your digital assets there’s some level of risk.
Proof-of-proof is the protocol that we use to anchor or secure Hemi to the Bitcoin blockchain. […] There’s like a chain of logic or a chain of proofs. It’s stacking proofs on top of proofs. And so that gives us what we call superfinality.
CN: What is Hemi working on? When can we expect the mainnet launch?
Jeff Garzik: Our incentivized testnet is open and live now, so you can test today without having to expend any money. We’re going live for real, the mainnet is by the end of the year. I don’t want to record a specific date and then get called out, but everything is ready internally. And I think it’s going to make a real splash. I think it’s going to attract both Bitcoin Maxis, Bitcoin moderates, Ethereum heads, and the new innovators that are building the fifth, sixth, tenth app that I haven’t even thought of yet, whether it’s perpetual markets or sports or gaming.
And I’m really excited about some of the AI prospects, AI plus Hemi.
So, all of that’s going to be unfolding throughout the end of the year and into the new year, and I couldn’t be more excited.
The post Jeff Garzik: ‘Satoshi Nakamoto Was Not a Great Coder But an Absolute Genius and a Leader’ appeared first on Cryptonews.
