Reddit Engineer Explains Why Cryptocurrency Plans Were Scrapped

NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) – Former Reddit Cryptocurrency Engineer Ryan X. Charles (a pseudonym) was recently interviewed on the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast, and he tried to explain exactly what happened while he was working behind the scenes at ‘the frontpage of the Internet.’ The bitcoin community was excited to hear about the hiring of a cryptocurrency engineer when it was first announced, but it doesn’t seem that Reddit had much of an actual plan when it came to what they were going to do with the digital currency. Charles described a state of turmoil from the day he arrived at the company, and the lack of organization could be blamed for the failure of the reddit notes project.
Crazy times at Reddit
Before he was hired as Reddit’s new cryptocurrency engineer, Charles had a chat with Yishan Wong, who was the CEO at the time. He noted that Wong seemed to understand the potential of bitcoin and how it could ‘enable the financial infrastructure of Reddit.’ Due to Wong’s belief in bitcoin, Charles decided to leave his job at BitPay and start working on cryptocurrency applications for Reddit.
Although the company’s CEO was completely behind finding a way to bring bitcoin to Reddit, that didn’t matter when Wong suddenly quit about a month and half into Charles’s time at the company. The exact reason for Wong’s decision is not known, but he made a post on Quora saying that he was simply exhausted. Charles claims that this explanation is plausible due to all of the turmoil that was going on at Reddit during this time.

This post was published at Inside Bitcoins on Mar 2, 2015.