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Jameson Lopp, Lead Software Engineer at BitGo

Jameson Lopp of Bitgo

Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And That’s Okay)

Why is Bitcoin so hard to understand?  According to Jameson Lopp, “Bitcoin is a living protocol that emerges from a melting pot of ideas, philosophies, cultures and politics after they undergo trial by fire.”

At the intersection of cryptography, economic theory, game theory, computer networking and data transmission, Bitcoin — and the blockchain technology upon which it is based — include what Jameson calls “a bit of magic”: a public permissionless consensus system that is considered trustless as long as you can trust everyone in the aggregate.  For Bitcoin Wednesday’s 4-year anniversary on 5 July, he will talk about the impossible task of comprehending Bitcoin, and why such a complex technology has spawned a $100 billion dollar industry in such a short time.  He will cover some of the ideas he discussed in his Coindesk article about the challenge of learning about Bitcoin and why he thinks it defies conventional educational approaches.

Jameson Lopp leads a software engineering team at BitGo, an enterprise digital asset security service based in Palo Alto. In his spare time he waxes philosophical on the nature of Bitcoin.  He is the creator of Statoshi, a fork of Bitcoin Core that analyzes the statistics of Bitcoin nodes and aims to give a DevOps perspective of the Bitcoin network.  He is also a founder of Mensa’s Bitcoin Special Interest Group.  He earned a degree in computer science at the University of North Carolina, and counts paintball, motorcycles and wine making among his interests.

Jameson Lopp of Bitgo