Gavin Andresen, the Most Powerful Person in the World of Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Gavin Andresen, the Most Powerful Person in the World of Bitcoin

technologyreview.com

208 pointsprostoalex30 comments

Yeah, Gavin was a guest on EconTalk podcast back in 2011, when bitcoins were still $1. I listened to him talk a few minutes and said "Whatever that guy is doing I'm investing in" even though I didn't really understand Bitcoin until much later...

I still think it's no coincidence that Gavin is spearheading Bitcoin- He is impressive because he's very down-to-earth but still supernaturally smart. I'm not sure Bitcoin would have gone anywhere without him.

I think this is the interview you're referring to.

There's a transcript below the download link.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/gavin_andresen.html

Nah, that's a new one.

Here's the one from 2011:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.htm...

One of the reasons why this talk is so impressive is that the interviewer is also 'supernaturally smart' - every question is on point, and one can see how much the interviewer's understanding of Bitcoin evolves during the course of an hour. Superb interview.

There is a plan in progress that will fix issue with big blocks being a problem for miners. This is a first step of scaling Bitcoin to the level of thousands transactions per second.

And it's also a great read.

https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

I was wondering why he changed his name:

http://www.skypaint.com/baby/andresen.html

Whenever I read "gavin andresen" I think of Schlock Mercenary, where some the early characters were named 'gavin' and 'Andreyasn'.

You're not the only one.

(For reference: http://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/The_Gavs http://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/Kevyn_Andreyasn)

"We wanted the whole family to have the same last name for consistency." then "Michele will continue to go by Michele Cooke for work..." Obviously they can do whatever they want with their own names, but from an outsider perspective it seems weird since now both of them are going to have troubles (at least for the first year I guess) remembering they changed their name, both having dual names because of work history, etc.

What's wrong with Cooke and Bell exactly? I guess I need it spelled out.

Cooll and Belke are both perfectly fine joint names, if they don't want to hyphenate.

I think they're ruling out hyphenating. Cooke-Bell and Bell-Cooke.

Interesting, there's another Silicon Graphics alum. Other Silicon Graphics people include: Jim Clark and Ben Horowitz.

Ken Coleman.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/04/11/ken-coleman-j...

Andresen has an alternative explanation for why there won’t be big changes in the way Bitcoin works. After the transaction issue is resolved, the work of looking after its code will increasingly be a job for caretakers, not master builders, he says.

Doesn't Andresen's response reflect more of how Bitcoin status quo will be maintained rather than actually addressing why it won't change much?

This also seems to ignore the ways in which so-called "Bitcoin 2.0" uses of the Bitcoin-platform-as-ledger will affect the actual nature of the platform, as these uses have yet to be employed on any large scale yet.

> Then he encountered Bitcoin in 2010 ... at the time and extremely finicky to get ahold of and use.

Excuse me, but mining back them was extremely simple. I could be millionaire if I would not lost my wallet.

That's part of being "finicky".

I think it was a joke.

Besides the point of developers' influence, isn't the blockchain getting bigger and therefore easier to filter/block, hypothetically?

I'm not following, sorry. What's the relation between its size and the ability to filter it?

Something is more likely to "slip between the cracks" if it's small. It's an analogy I heard in a Jason Calacanis interview several years ago, that the blockchain is smaller than a pirated video and therefore more difficult to detect.

> Peter Todd, a developer who has contributed to the Bitcoin project, says Andresen seems in more of a hurry than others involved with the project to tweak Nakamoto’s design

Peter Troll. The guy never gets tired of derailing discussions and slowing down all development on github issues. It's always about bringing completely unrelated technical or economical issues, for the sake of saying "look I'm smart!". He also loves to imagine conspiracies, like the block size issue (Nakamoto didn't want to keep it at 1MB forever, but Peter says he says he did and even created a website just for that :s). And he is always accepting donations of course, and contracts with altcoins (they get the press -useful for a quick pump/dump-, he gets the money).

Your response is about the person, not the argument.

I tend to agree: the whole receipts mess is a good example. Bitcoin really should not expand its scope that far - it's inelegant and a bad idea (vs. "do one thing and do it well") - and Gavin has been its champion.

We changed the title to the HTML doc title because it is a tad less baity.

I submitted this yesterday and thought for a while about a better title as I felt the given one was poor. What I came up with was: "Gavin Andresen and the Bitcoin development process". However the submission wasn't getting any upvotes and so I deleted it within the 2 hour limit. I guess this means clickbait titles do work.

Are there good examples of titles which were changed to be less baity than the title of the HTML document? Or a "best practices" guide to titles?

Two examples from today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182754

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183220

I'm not sure they're great examples, though. The thing we try hardest to do is use language from the article and not make anything up. You can almost always use a subtitle or something from the first paragraph.

The definition of a good title for HN is accurate and neutral, which is the opposite of misleading or linkbait.

Thanks, this is the first time I've heard of an active response to linkbait. This could become a web service that maps article titles to their HN replacements, could be used to rewrite tweets via an app or browser extension. Also enables statistics on publishers & topics.

At first I read "Gavin Belson..."

Same here. Got excited and checked the post out. Glad i did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com