Thanks for taking the time to do this, really appreciate it.
-If you could tell me a little about yourself?
I’m a software engineer. I’m the co-developer of the altcoin portfolio tracker countmycrypto.com, the co-host of the London Women in Bitcoin meetup and I’m a frequent speaker and trainer on all things blockchain. I live between London and Berlin and I am originally from Wales.
-When you speak at events what do you talk about?
It depends on the event. For example, next week I am moderating a panel at the Pathfounder Cryptonomics event on cryptocurrency data and media. In the past, I’ve done talks about blockchain and IoT, but one of my main specialities is the subject of testing blockchain applications
-What are you working on currently and in the past?
I’ve just launched an Ethereum QA Engineer course with B9Lab: https://academy.b9lab.com/courses/course-v1:B9lab+ETH-QA-1+2018-2/about that is keeping me quite busy, along with freelance work for various clients
-About your crypto tracker? We are always recommending trackers as there are not to many good ones. Delta is the one I use currently.
My friend Bruce and I started developing Countmycrypto in 2013. It started out as a small script which I wrote to keep track of my own portfolio. I do the back-end development and sysadmin. We’re in the middle of a major relaunch as the site was beginning to look rather dated after four years and we’re adding some cool new features
-that is really cool. The more options we have for tracking the better. Any updates you can tell me about and when are u looking to be done? I would also like to share this out as well
Thanks for asking :) The main change is that people will be able to enter more info about specific trades. So if you bought LTC from five different exchanges on five different dates, all this info would be recorded separately but you’d have one aggregated total for LTC that you could expand to see the different trades. We’re also adding an option so you can see your balance in any major crypto as well as any fiat.
-What got you into blockchain and crypto?
I did a BSc in Economics and I’ve always been interested in economies and financial systems. When I started reading about Bitcoin, I was fascinating, and trading cryptos got me hooked.
-I also got hooked trading.
Dangerously addictive ;-)
-What sort of regulation or government support do you have? Just recently Wyoming passed a law that defined virtual currency as a legal currency. They passed several other bills that helped crypto. They are the first to do this and several other states are following. There is a link if your curious to hear it. https://abovecrypto.com/news/crypto-now-a-legal-currency-in-wyoming/
Thanks for the link. I think regulation is a topic that is going to become more prevalent, but I don’t think crypto needs the approval of governments to survive
-I completely agree
-What do you see for the future in crypto both long and short term?
Short term I think that banks, corporations and institutions will push back and try and force regulations on the industry, but ultimately the decentralised, international nature of crypto will mean that they won’t be able to hold back the tide
-you are right. The world-wide scale of this can't be pushed back in Pandora's box
-How do you think we can get it adopted faster?
As more people hear about it from friends, and as millennials lose faith in more traditional forms of investment, saving and payments, it will build momentum on its own
-Biggest hurdles we may have to get it mainstream?
FUD in the mainstream media. Making some of the interfaces a better experience.
-the fud is ridiculous but to be expected I guess. Def right on the interfaces, not beginner friendly.What kind of interfaces would you like to see?
Wallets can be kind of clunky. Developers should provide more information about why transactions take time to confirm, what tx fees are for etc. It should also be much easier to run a node. The more people rely on light clients, the less secure the networks become. I actually think most exchanges are pretty user-friendly..
-What are your favorite currencies?
Bitcoin, Monero, Cardano
-What is something you wish everyone would know or understand about this industry?
That decentralisation is really, really important, and that you don’t need to be massively technical to use crypto
Thanks again for doing this. Very cool of you.