1. Would you care to introduce yourself and/or provide a picture for this interview?
Hello, my name is Jan, I am 33. I have a lot of websites, but none of them are very personal. My blog is http://coincidental.eu/ but are my personal ideas and opinions.
2. What is your technical/job history background with regards to coding and/or crypto?
I have spent exactly 5 years working in the banking, insurance, and retail industry in positions of application performance analyst and end user experience analyst. That’s where I learned Python. We also did some of the NSA-styled stuff to help analyze user behavior, basically breaking SSL/HTTPS in the process. I have been coding since I was 8 but I only knew BASIC back then. I made a lot of primitive games.
3. What future do you envision for Bismuth?
I would like to keep improving the software so that it’s faster, more secure and offers more functionalities, while also keeping the code as readable as possible. I mainly focus on the technical things. Do I want Bismuth to over take Ethereum? Yes, definitely!
4. What feature would you most like to see added to Bismuth?
Any that users desire, which apparently seems to be master nodes at the moment. I would personally like to see full-blown smart contracts and some unification of the basic Bismuth blockchain language. Minting software for master node blocks will be interesting and hopefully any other modules that will come into existence.
5. What are you currently working on in the Bismuth code base?
I just finished a probability analysis for betting on ZircoDice, the last version of Bismuth adds external indexing for open-field data, which boosts performance incredibly for tasks like token handling and aliases. The feature came from tokens and found its place in the open-field operations related to node globally, which is nice. Now I will work either on master node implementation or multi-wallet support in the interface.
6. Can you give an example use case for Bismuth?
Data storage based on sqlite3 allows for usage of Bismuth as a simple database, which enables decentralized operations because data is shared among all network participants. You can store messages, commands for a script, triggers, documents, fingerprints, delegation. Anything can be done. What has been done is the casino, a transaction anonymizer, HTML bisnet, tokens, aliases and other items to be revealed in the future.
7. Can you give any technical details about Bismuth? Max TXs per second, elaborate on the hashing algorithm? Why was this algorithm chosen? Etc.
Bismuth has a unique structured mempool with an upper limit of 0.6 MB + local transactions. A transaction happens once per minute on average, so that would be something around 6x throughput of Bitcoin’s standard transactions. Sidechains are an interesting idea, which will probably be pursued at some point in the future. See my co-authored paper for more details about Bismuth http://www.mic-journal.no/PDF/2017/MIC-2017-4-1.pdf
8. How long have you been in crypto? Have you contributed code to any other crypto or major tech sector projects besides Bismuth?
Since the 2013 bubble. I made a mining interface for DogeCoin, probably the first of it's kind. I also made a web interface for Cryptocurrency Automatic Trader by sampey, but that is no longer maintained. I should have made my own trading script now that I think of it. I have some issues with C compilation and dependencies so no major contributions to bitcoin forks except for compiling HoboNickels and it’s daemon for Raspberry Pi. But I admire people who keep bitcoin-based projects, aka most of the altcoins, alive.
9. What is your educational background?
I wanted to study philosophy originally but luckily didn't pass the tests. I studied economy for one year but dropped out. I have a bachelor and a master’s degree in English and economy from another university. I also studied computer science as a minor in the master studies. One of the teachers thought I was a history student and the other told me I have the most unique approach to pedagogy she has ever seen.