Recently I had an opportunity to correspond with Edward Blaha the public face of the Fastcoin dev team. This team has a good mix of IT as well as financial experience. There are few times a head member of a dev team of a crypto currency will take the time to answer questions from an individual from the coin's community. However, I've always found this dev team is not the normal dev team when it comes to interacting with their community members. Edward was gracious enough to take the time to answer questions for me and for me to share to the public our correspondence.
To know a dev team, it's good to get a peek into the IT background involved. Edward was willing to give me a history of his background in IT. And I will say, I was quite impressed. Edward has an extensive background in IT that goes back before he even considered it as a career option while in college. While Edward was still in high school he first delved into programming in basic and began building PC's and servers for his friends and relatives. (Not to give his age away but between you and me this was back in the mid 1980's). By the early 1990's Ed was certified with Novell as a CNE (certified netware engineer for those of you like me that had no idea what that meant) as well as being certified with Microsoft as an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) and he began working on IT related project for the university he was attending at the time (York University). After college Edward decided to get into teaching at Seneca College for close to 10 years as a LAN instructor he also worked for several major Canadian banks in the Downtown area of Toronto, Canada as well.
Most would call 1995 to Y2K the golden era of the internet with new innovations coming it seemed daily during this time. It was this time that Edward honed in on his IT skills as he helped support several trading floors for TD Bank, Scotia Bank, RBC and Manulife Financial. It was during this time that Edward began to learn about the concept of high frequency trading and getting an understanding of how speed of transactions in the exchanges gave certain market players a technical competitive advantage. (Wait and fast forward to today, coincidence that Fastcoin is the fastest open source, fairly released never pre-mined cryptocurrency? I think not.)
After Y2K, Edward decided to do some traveling. He traveled to Europe and across North America assisting with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) type implementation for the steel and the paper/plastics industry. Edward also had an IT Director Role in the automotive industry and was helping to lead the development of several key patent pending IT related automotive processing designs.
Edward has a strong appreciation for sound money and tend to consider himself a precious metals bug. Edward first heard about Bitcoin back in 2010 and became actively involved with the project in 2012. With his IT background as well his conservative monetary views, Bitcoin and digital assets became a great fit for him as he became more interested the more he read and learned about the project.
This got me to wondering......what attracted him to be involved with the dev team of Fastcoin? How long has he been involved with Fastcoin? Well again Edward didn't hesitate to answer that for me. His excitement about Fastcoin is evident even through email correspondence. Edward has been involved with Fastcoin from the very beginning of the project (May 28, 2013) almost 4 1/2 years ago. A couple of factors attracted Edward to the Fastcoin project. First being during his involvement with Bitcoin he noticed the transactions were very slow to complete. Why should a crypto currency take 1 hour to complete (this is where I put my plug in that Fastcoin completes in 48 SECONDS). And secondly at the time Bitcoin was trading at roughly $100 USD. He wanted a more cost-effective means of learning about the decentralized block chain technology. With those things in mind Edward felt like Fastcoin would be a better way to do this without having to invest large amounts of money with Bitcoin up front.
There is more to come from me about Fastcoin this is just the beginning, if I were to sit here and type all the information that Edward shared with me it would look as though I've just completed a novel as thick as War and Peace. So, this by no means will be the last post I make about Fastcoin. A coin I personally am very excited about with regards to its future. I will continue to share Edward's thoughts as well as the thoughts of members of our fast-growing community.
Fastcoin is traded on Livecoin.net and Cryptopia.co.nz under ticker of FST.