The World’s First Bitcoin PhD – Christian Decker, Core Developer at Blockstream

Christian Decker speaks about writing the first PhD thesis in the world about Bitcoin, how a hacker stole 10,000 Bitcoins from him, his first Bitcoin meetups in 2009, changes in the crypto ecosystem since the early days, what the early bitcoiners thought about the future of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin as a science experiment, new coins vs. Bitcoin, how Bitcoin could still fail, prerequisites for mainstream adoption, applications of blockchain technology beyond currency, and what he would be doing if Bitcoin didn’t exist.

Christian is a core tech engineer at Blockstream and a Bitcoin enthusiast from the very beginning in 2009. As a researcher at the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich, he wrote the world’s first PhD dissertation about Bitcoin and the creation of a number of protocols including PeerCensus and Duplex Micropayment Channels. The goal of his research is to improve the understanding of the underlying consensus mechanisms and to enable the network to scale with increasing demands.

• Christian Decker: http://www.linkedin.com/in/christiandecker, www.twitter.com/snyke
• Christian’s Github: http://github.com/cdecker
• Blockstream: http://www.blockstream.com

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