Bitcoin work 2020-2021

Technical

My existing skills are best leveraged in the Bitcoin P2P layer. I have been contributing to Bitcoin Core since August 2020 and am seeking a grant to help continue my journey. See: merged PRS; open PRs. To date, I have focused on the process of seeding peers for a new node and consolidated knowledge on the current state of things. I have also worked on how peers are banned and refactors that simplify our code.

Community and Learning

Bitcoin Core is a codebase, but Bitcoin is foremost, a community. I started my journey in understanding Bitcoin through courses held by Blockchain @ Berkeley and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course. With that foundation and network, and my mentor Amiti Uttarwar’s encouragement I was able to start contributing to Bitcoin Core.

Lately, I’ve felt able to give back to the community as well. I have:

• Been a host for the Chaincode Bitcoin study group after being a student.
• Hosted a couple PR Review clubs.
• Initiated and hosted a C++ book club for members in the Chaincode community
• Learnt about fuzzing and helped a small group established Bitcoiners get started on fuzzing which resulted in all of us committing new seeds. I hope to use similar sessions to get more compute for fuzzing on board.
• Hosted a workshop for the build systems used in Bitcoin