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This interview was longer than expected so I have it cut into two parts, in the first Nicolas and I discuss what a bitcoin is; why Nicolas became interested in bitcoin; decentralized currency; distributed ledger; escrow; mining, variance problem, computing power needed, mining pools, democracy, 51% problem, changing rules; mining as way of making money; commission on payments, loss of value of bitcoin; storage of bitcoins, MtGox, cold wallets; bitcoin for subscription services; scalability, transaction processing limitations and solutions, memory requirements of block chain and loss of decentralization; anonymity; more on the 51% problem, distributed decision making, voting, 51% attack – cancelling blocks of miners, code changes; hard limit on number of bitcoins, decreasing speed of mining; hoarding of bitcoins and deflationary currencies, Friedman vs Keynes.

In part two we discuss NBitcoin, colored coins, other work by Nicolas and one of his book choices – Thieves Emporium

Links to Nicolas’ work – NBitcoin, Code Project, github, colored coin spec.

Book recommendations

Thieves Emporium (The New Badlands), The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering, Windows Internals, Domain-Driven Design, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams