1
00:00:10,300 --> 00:00:13,300
And I first heard about Bitcoin from this 
article,

2
00:00:13,400 --> 00:00:16,900
which came out in Infoworld on May 24th 2010.

3
00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:20,500
which was an article about 7 interesting 
open source projects.

4
00:00:20,600 --> 00:00:22,600
I don't remember I stumbled across the article

5
00:00:22,700 --> 00:00:27,500
It's probably one of the many blogs I read 
linked to it.

6
00:00:29,200 --> 00:00:32,400
So about a month later, I had launched the 
Bitcoin Faucet

7
00:00:32,500 --> 00:00:37,300
which probably you all got a few, well depending 
on how early you were,

8
00:00:37,400 --> 00:00:42,200
either 5 Bitcoins, which was how many Bitcoins 
the faucet was giving at the start,

9
00:00:42,300 --> 00:00:46,200
or if you got them last night, then one micro 
Bitcoin,

10
00:00:46,300 --> 00:00:48,900
which is how much the faucet is giving out 
today.

11
00:00:50,400 --> 00:00:53,800
So when I heard about that article in May,

12
00:00:53,900 --> 00:00:56,100
and decided that the faucet be a great first 
project

13
00:00:56,200 --> 00:00:59,300
to kind of get my feet wet in playing with 
Bitcoins

14
00:00:59,400 --> 00:01:02,700
I just kind of got sucked in and got more 
and more involved in the project

15
00:01:02,800 --> 00:01:05,100
, got involved in the Bitcoin forums and 
community,

16
00:01:05,200 --> 00:01:07,100
, started to submit patches to Satoshi,

17
00:01:07,200 --> 00:01:12,000
who would then rip them apart and send them 
back to me and say no you did it wrong and 
reimplement it

18
00:01:14,200 --> 00:01:17,000
All the way through kind of December 2010

19
00:01:17,100 --> 00:01:19,700
when Satoshi started to step backwards.

20
00:01:21,900 --> 00:01:22,900
He did it in an interesting way.

21
00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:26,700
He actually sent me an email and asked me 
if it'd be okay if

22
00:01:26,800 --> 00:01:30,800
he could put my email address as one of the 
people to contact on the Bitcoin.org homepage.

23
00:01:30,900 --> 00:01:35,700
I said "Sure. Yeah, no problem. You could 
put my email address there." So he did that

24
00:01:35,800 --> 00:01:39,900
And then at the same time, he took his email 
address away.

25
00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:42,800
which I didn't expect to happen,

26
00:01:42,900 --> 00:01:47,700
but I think it was kind of his way of saying, 
kind of pushing me forward.

27
00:01:47,800 --> 00:01:53,200
And the last email I've talked to Satoshi 
was in April 2011.

28
00:01:53,300 --> 00:01:58,100
So it kind of gives you the history of the 
project so far.

29
00:01:59,400 --> 00:02:03,000
So why me? Why am I the lead developer of 
Bitcoin?

30
00:02:03,100 --> 00:02:05,500
Well Jeff pushed me.

31
00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:10,400
He kind of encouraged me, I think because 
I have a pretty thick skin

32
00:02:10,500 --> 00:02:15,300
So you can call me an idiot and whatever.

33
00:02:15,400 --> 00:02:17,400
Because I know I'm not perfect,

34
00:02:17,500 --> 00:02:21,600
so I tend not to rush into things rashly

35
00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:24,200
because I screw up quite regularly.

36
00:02:24,300 --> 00:02:29,100
but I think my virtue is that I will listen 
to you if you tell me I'm screwing up.

37
00:02:29,200 --> 00:02:31,700
And also because nobody else frankly stepped 
forward

38
00:02:31,800 --> 00:02:36,600
and decided to say I'll be the guy who tries 
to herd the cats.

39
00:02:37,800 --> 00:02:43,700
I should stress it's not because of any prior 
experience, either open source software or 
the financial world.

40
00:02:43,800 --> 00:02:48,600
My background is in kind of a serial entrepreneur 
in different startups

41
00:02:49,100 --> 00:02:53,500
oh I did have a prior experience

42
00:02:53,600 --> 00:02:55,800
that actually reminds me a lot of Bitcoin

43
00:02:55,900 --> 00:03:00,700
And that side was a chief architect of a 
virtual reality modeling language standard

44
00:03:01,500 --> 00:03:05,100
which never actually kind of went anywhere.

45
00:03:05,200 --> 00:03:09,200
but just dealing other greater diverse community 
and trying to get people to agree on

46
00:03:09,300 --> 00:03:14,100
kind of what the direction to go in, my VRML 
experience reminds me a lot of Bitcoin

47
00:03:14,200 --> 00:03:17,900
So I guess I do have some semi-relevant prior 
experience.