BUIP 183: Re-elect Peter R for Bitcoin Unlimited Secretary
Date submitted: August 31, 2022
My current tenure as Secretary of Bitcoin Unlimited ends this October. The purpose of this BUIP is to announce that I am running for re-election and to solicit your support.
Ever since discovering Bitcoin in early 2013, I have been a fierce supporter for bitcoin as p2p electronic cash. I have evangelized bitcoin as a “better form of money” free from political influence, actively researched technological improvements, and helped to educate the broader community about bitcoin’s underlying technologies. For a snapshot of some of my work and achievements in the space, see here.
As many of you will be aware, I have been largely absent from Bitcoin Unlimited and cryptocurrency research & development for the past two years. The reason for this is that my wife and I have been extremely busy building a new home for our growing family. We now have a 10-month-old baby girl and a 3-year-old son. Due to Covid-19, the resulting supply-chain disruptions, extreme price volatility of construction materials, and the labour shortage in British Columbia, building this home has been a much more onerous and lengthy process than I initially imagined when I embarked on the project. The home-building project is slowly drawing to an end, however. I look forward to becoming involved again with Bitcoin Unlimited on a part-time basis in late October, and transitioning back to full-time by the end of spring 2023.
Beyond my continuing duties as Secretary, my technical interests are currently focused on the massive acceleration possible for UTXO storage and look-up, and for digital signature verification, with purpose-built hardware based around field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). I look forward to re-engage on my FPGA-based CashDrive project, publish my paper on organizing the UTXO set as a compact-binary-prefix-trie that would permit incremental updates to a UTXO-state commitment, and continue my work towards a simple ASIC for point multiplication on Bitcoin’s secp256k1 curve (elliptic curve point multiplication is the compute-intensive step of digital signature verification).
In addition to these technical interests, I also look forward to writing explainers on the novel and useful tech being developed by BU devs, helping to organize conferences and events, and interacting with the broader cryptocurrency research and development community as an advocate for BU.
If re-elected as Secretary of BU, I will continue to dedicate my time and energy to seeing that Satoshi’s creation of decentralized p2p e-cash succeeds. Let’s fix money.