Jeff Garzik was the third largest contributor to Bitcoin’s code from around late 2010 until sometime in 2014 and stopped coding for Bitcoin in 2016. He has worked directly with Satoshi Nakamoto on the Bitcointalk forum in Bitcoin’s early days, and based on that relationship believes that Satoshi Nakamoto is Dave Kleiman, who unfortunately died in 2013.
“My personal theory is that it’s Floridian Dave Kleiman…It matches his coding style, this gentleman was self-taught. And the Bitcoin coder was someone who was very, very smart, but not a classically trained software engineer.” -Jeff Garzik
Since Garzik has worked directly with Bitcoin’s adolescent code, he believes that Bitcoin is actually failing at the original intention. Satoshi Nakamoto and other developers viewed Bitcoin as private money to be used in commerce but instead, speculators and investors are treating it as an asset like gold (digital gold).
“It is an organism, it’s something that evolves…It hasn’t evolved in the direction of high-volume payments, which is something we thought about in the very early days: getting merchants to accept Bitcoins. But on the store-of-value side, it’s unquestionably a success.” -Jeff Garzik
In a horror news story similar to the pizza purchase with Bitcoin, Jeff Garzik has admitted to giving away 15,678 Bitcoin seven years ago as payments for developer bounties. In current prices, that’s over $100 million in current prices but says he “has no regrets.”
