BUIP 225: Re-elect Peter R for Bitcoin Unlimited Secretary
I hereby volunteer to serve another 2-year term as the Secretary for Bitcoin Unlimited (BU). As I have for the past 10 years, I will continue to work with BU’s Lead Developer and its President to ensure that the funds endowed to BU are administered responsibly, efficiently, and as per the wishes of the BU Membership.
My focus remains BU’s overarching goal: the widespread adoption of peer-to-peer electronic cash as described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Seventeen years after the genesis block, the story of how Bitcoin was diverted from that goal is being told more openly. Roger Ver and Steve Patterson’s book Hijacking Bitcoin was the start, and this summer I travelled to Los Angeles to be interviewed for their follow-up documentary, where I spoke for BU’s side of that history and for the scaling work we have carried on since. Meanwhile the technology keeps making the same point from the other direction: Bitcoin as designed can scale to a global payment system, and every year of hardware progress lowers the cost of proving it.
Since my last term I presented at the Australian Crypto Convention in Sydney and at BCH Bliss in Ljubljana. Our Blitz accelerator become a reality that now verifies over 300,000 signatures per second on a single low-cost FPGA at about 3 watts, and we got a Nexa node running entirely on an FPGA, an early sketch of an eventual node on a chip. I also designed a new proof-of-work for Nexa, that can only be mined competitively on reconfigurable hardware, and that same hardware is exactly what a node needs to verify signatures and look up coins, so mining it builds the network’s validation capacity as a side effect.
For the next two years I have three concrete goals. First, get over 1,000 Blitz cards sold and working in the network. Second, activate the new mining algorithm on Nexa, targeted for this winter. Third, share the large body of work we have built on hardware signature verification: two conference talks, plus dev kits with tutorials, articles and videos, so that a community begins to form around cryptocurrency hardware rather than it staying a one-team effort.
I will also continue to keep the BUIP process, votes and records in order.