Jeff Garzik is a Bitcoin developer. He was part of the core team that worked on source code for Bitcoin from May 2013 to December 2014. Afterward, he joined with entrepreneur and venture capitalist Matt Roszak and founded Bloq, which is a company that offers enterprise class blockchain solutions for business and supports Bitcoin-related innovations.
He is currently the CEO for Bloq, and he is working on the United Bitcoin project for a new hard fork of Bitcoin that has improvements, including the expansion of the size of a block to 8MB, protection against repeated transactions, and more. The token Is called UB, and there are supposed to be 21 million tokens issued.
Education and Career
Jeff Garzik studied Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a Web Developer for CNN for two years from 1995 to 1997, where he helped to develop the first CNN website. From October 2002 through May 2013, he was the Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, working on open source evangelism.
He was the CEO of exMULTI Inc from 2011 until 2013, where he worked with Bitcoin. Then, from May 2013 until December 2014, he was involved in Bitcoin core development for BitPay Inc.
In April 2012, he founded Dunvegan Space Systems, Inc, where he worked on building the physical, virtual, and infrastructure that enable space exploration and space settlement. He left in 2015 to found Bloq.
Early Technology Adoption
Jeff Garzik has a history of early tech adoption. In 2010, he started writing software code for Bitcoin after he read a blog post about it. He quickly turned out to be the third biggest Bitcoin code contributor. He also helped get CNN’s first website up and running, and he has been involved in open source software for two decades.
In addition, throughout the early 1990s, he worked for a number of Internet startups and service providers. When he was with Red Hat, he was involved with the Linux kernel, which is used on every Android phone today.
Boards and Presentations
Jeff Garzik serves on the board of Coin Center, as well as the Advisory Board for BitFury, BitPay, Chain.com, Netki, and WayPaver Labs. He has given presentations of blockchain and Bitcoin at State of Digital Money and TEDx. He has also provided information to governments, central banks, corporations, and hedge funds.
Publications
In addition to writing code, Jeff Garzik publishes work on Medium, including “Compliance, Centralization, and the Travel Rule” and “Blockchains vs. Wrath of God Enforcement.” He writes about blockchain and Bitcoin.
Distribution of Bitcoin
Throughout his career, he has given away 15,678 Bitcoins in developer bounties to get people to work on the software. That is the equivalent of more than $100 million at current prices. He finds it more important that Bitcoin is still around than that he has given so much away. He worked directly with Satoshi, the creator of Cryptocurrency. He corresponded with Satoshi until he disappeared in 2011.
Bloq
Jeff Garzik founded Bloq in 2015, and they offer managed infrastructure for building on blockchain networks. They offer these products to anyone who wants to build on multiple blockchain networks. Bloq Connect allows people to accelerate development with blockchain APIs for real-time connectivity to popular blockchain networks.
Bloq Nodes lets people spin up their own private fully managed cluster of nodes so that their businesses have a fault-tolerant data foundation. They have the infrastructure needed by blockchain businesses at any scale, including protocols, developers, and enterprises.
In addition to this work, he makes podcasts and writes articles about blockchain. Bloq has a blog, and he is a contributor. In March of 2020, he published “Delivering Infrastructure Continuity for the OAN.” He writes with enthusiasm about the direction that the company is headed in with its open source platform. He is a pioneer in open source and Bitcoin, and he is enthusiastic about what he does.
