The early Bitcoin developer supports the Satoshi Nakamoto theory

Jeff Garzik, a veteran Linux contributor and early open-source developer who contributed to the Bitcoin project from 2010 to 2017, has released a series of new videos detailing his time working with Bitcoin’s anonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Joining the project in July 2010, Garzik contributed to early software releases, introducing notable mining requests, including the first proposal to increase the block size limit, as well as the first proposal to remove subsidies for free transactions. During Satoshi’s time as a maintainer, Garzik received pull requests, including work on separating the mining code from the Satoshi client.

Most importantly, the new videos find Garzik sharing memories of his time with Satoshi, including new comments about whether Satoshi was really an individual or a singular group.

“Satoshi, as a programmer, is more of an ‘A Beautiful Mind’ lone genius,” Garzik recalls.

“When I was a computer science major, we thought very hard as programmers and noticed that some of the other disciplines, chemists, biologists, physicists, needed to do it but didn’t get around to it. as a profession. Satoshi was the same.”

In this way, Garzik says he thinks Satoshi knew what problem he wanted to solve, but didn’t understand “modularity,” “unit testing,” and other basics that “computer science majors learn.”

“He took well-known, well-studied cryptographic solutions off the shelf and put them all together in a new and exciting way,” Garzik said, adding:

“My impression was that he studied the existing people on the internet and tried to figure out how to combine the existing crypto-primitives in the field to create Bitcoin.”

Elsewhere, Garzik attested to his belief that Satoshi was a “self-taught” programmer, arguing that Bitcoin’s founder was humble about his limitations.

In other statements, he spoke about Satoshi’s temperament and working methods, noting his strict focus on Bitcoin.

“Satoshi would never deviate from the subject. He wouldn’t let any personal information slip, he would never talk about his mood, the time of day,” he says in a clip. “It’s always been 100% about Bitcoin.”

In total, the memories cover a 6-month period through Nakamoto’s resignation from the project in January 2011, at which point Garzik’s friend and collaborator Gavin Andresen took over as lead maintainer.

The videos come in a year in which other early Bitcoin contributors have gone public with their correspondence with Satoshi, with Martti “Sirius” Malmi and Adam Back publishing hundreds of pages of never-before-seen emails in connection with a public lawsuit in the UK.

Although Garzik has yet to release emails with Satoshi, the videos, produced by a new company he founded, Hemi Network, represent the most public discussion the developer has had on the subject in some time.

Launched in July, the Hemi network is touted as “a modular Layer-2 protocol for superior scalability, security and interoperability, powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum.”

The work follows a period after 2017 when Garzik became more interested in blockchain networks that are not tied to any specific underlying cryptocurrency, a path that includes Metronome, a 2017 project that also sought compatibility with multiple blockchain- hate.

Garzik left the Bitcoin project that year after serving as the lead maintainer for a hard fork of the Bitcoin protocol that, despite early support from the startup ecosystem, was never officially released.

The full video playlist can be accessed below: