Jeff Garzik Releases New Videos on Working with Bitcoin’s Mysterious Creator
Jeff Garzik, a prominent Linux contributor and early Bitcoin developer, who contributed to the Bitcoin project from 2010 to 2017, has unveiled a series of new videos that delve into his experiences working alongside Bitcoin’s enigmatic inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Garzik shares unique insights from his time with the project’s founder.
Joining the Bitcoin team in July 2010, Garzik was instrumental in early software releases and made significant contributions, including the first proposal to increase the block size limit and to remove subsidies for free transactions.
During Satoshi Nakamoto’s tenure as the project maintainer, Garzik’s pull requests were accepted, including important work to separate the mining code from the main client.
The newly released videos offer a rare glimpse into Garzik’s recollections of working with Satoshi.
One of the intriguing topics covered is whether Satoshi was an individual or a group of people. Garzik reflects on Satoshi’s coding style, comparing him to a “lone genius” similar to the character portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind.”
“Satoshi as a coder, he’s more the ‘A Beautiful Mind’ type lone genius,” Garzik recalls. “When I was a computer science major, we thought highly of ourselves as coders, and we would notice that some of the other disciplines, the chemists, the biologists, the physicists, they had to do it, but they didn’t approach it as a profession. Satoshi was the same way.”
Garzik speculates that Satoshi understood the problem he aimed to solve but lacked certain foundational knowledge such as “modularity” and “unit testing” which computer science majors typically learn.
Instead, Satoshi is described as someone who “wisely pulled cryptographic solutions off the shelf” and combined existing crypto primitives in novel ways to create Bitcoin.
Garzik also describes Satoshi as a “self-taught” programmer who was humble about his limitations. He notes that Satoshi was highly focused on Bitcoin, never divulging personal details or deviating from discussions about the project.
“Satoshi would never stray from that topic. He would never let slip any personal information whatsoever, never talk about his mood, the time of day,” Garzik says. “It was always 100% all about Bitcoin.”
The videos span the period from Garzik’s initial involvement through Satoshi’s resignation from the project in January 2011, after which Gavin Andresen took over as lead maintainer.
These revelations come amid a broader trend of early Bitcoin contributors sharing their experiences. Notably, Martti ‘Sirius’ Malmi and Adam Back have recently published extensive email correspondence with Satoshi in connection with a public trial in the UK.
Although Garzik has not yet released emails with Satoshi, the videos produced by his new venture, Hemi Network, represent the most extensive public discussion he has had on the subject in recent years.
Launched in July, Hemi Network aims to provide a “modular Layer-2 protocol for superior scaling, security, and interoperability,” powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum. This initiative follows Garzik’s growing interest in blockchain networks beyond specific base-layer cryptocurrencies, as seen in his previous project, Metronome.
Garzik left the Bitcoin project in 2017 after serving as lead maintainer for a hard fork of the Bitcoin protocol. Despite initial support from the startup ecosystem, the hard fork did not formally launch.