At one time, Jeff Garzik was Bitcoin’s third most prolific developer. Here we talk about his early days working on cryptocurrency and how science fiction can inspire the next generation of builders.
Few people have had as much impact on Bitcoin’s source code as Jeff Garzik. At one point, his fingerprint on Bitcoin was the third biggest after Satoshi Nakamoto and Gavin Andresen. However, in an interview with BeInCrypto, Garzik said it all began with science fiction.
Garzik was inspired by a book based on the tabletop game Shadowrun, which featured digital currency called the Nuyen (pronounced New Yen). “In the 1990s, this was a very foreign concept. This was before Visa Debit and that sort of thing,” he said.
One scene, in particular, blew his mind and remains with him until this day. One character was paying another character with what in modern terms we would call a flash drive. Although in the book, it was known as a…
