Gregory Maxwell: How I Went From Bitcoin Skeptic to Core Developer

Bitcoin holds a lot of promise as a decentralized currency, but there are many technical issues to be tackled as adoption increases.
No one knows this better than core developer Gregory Maxwell, who has been contributing to bitcoin’s software since the early days.
A long time open-source and cryptography advocate, Maxwell was an early contributor to Wikipedia and worked for the Mozilla Foundation. He is now a co-founder of Blockstream, which has raised $21m with ambitious plans to push forward the development of bitcoin to better secure its future.
Maxwell recently talked to CoinDesk at the Future of Money Summit about his early disdain for the idea of digital currency, how he plans to create more core developers and the technical issues Blockstream intends to take on.
From skeptic to believer
Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the concept of bitcoin on a cryptography mailing list back in 2008. Like many members of that list, Maxwell was initially skeptical of a digital currency not requiring third party trust.
He told CoinDesk:
‘When bitcoin first came out, I was on the cryptography mailing list. When it happened, I sort of laughed. Because I had already proven that decentralized consensus was impossible.’
Much of his doubt came from the fact Maxwell was an early supporter of Wikipedia, becoming a contributor to the online encyclopedia in late 2004. He realized during those formative years working on Wikipedia that complete decentralization is hard to pull off.

This post was published at Coin Desk on December 29, 2014.