Hi there. My name is Andrew DeSantis. I've been a holder of Bitcoin since 2011 and I have been working in Bitcoin full time since mid-2013.
Some of you may know of me as the guy from Alabama who created an unofficial app store (Bit Store) for iOS and Android in response to Apple's ban on Bitcoin wallets.
In 2014, I spent nearly half a year in Toronto working on various Bitcoin projects with individuals at the Bitcoin Decentral Accelerator. It was there I saw the genesis of Dark Market (now OpenBazzar) and Ethereum first hand.
At the end of 2014, I had the opportunity to buy Bitcoin Magazine with some friends of mine from Alabama and together we started BTC Inc. (the parent company of BTC Media).
As the CTO of BTC Inc. I led the development of the CMS that now powers Bitcoin Magazine. This task was particularly difficult because at the start of 2015 all of our websites (ybitcoin.com, bitcoinmagazine.com, btcmedia.org) came under what went on to be an 8 month long DDoS attack. We opted for a complete rebuild of our systems because a majority of our legitimate traffic at the time either routed through TOR or disabled JavaScript by default.
In addition to my duties as CTO, I served as the Tech Editor for both yBitcoin and Bitcoin Magazine, as well as a member of the Bitcoin Foundation's Grant Selection Committee. On rare occasion I would write for the Magazine.
While working at BTC Inc. I attended countless Bitcoin Conferences, helped organize the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl.
At the end of 2015, I decided to move to California and I took a job working at 21 Inc. There I assisted with a class at Stanford on Bitcoin Engineering in addition to doing architecture and security work.
As of now I am the CEO of DeSantis Inc and I'm working on various stealth Bitcoin projects with a team on the east coast of the United States. I continue to write and code side projects indecently though.
How I came across Steemit
A few years ago I started an IRC channel in order to keep up with bitcoin friends whom I've met while traveling. For the past week or so Steemit is all they seemed to want to talk about. I ignored them at first but finally decided to see what all the fuss is about.
Last night I compiled and started running a Steemit miner. I plan on auditing the code in depth this weekend and writing a tutorial (or creating a build script) so that others can try it out as well if they desire.
Additionally I plan on annotating the white paper and auditing the Steemit source code in order to get a better understanding on how it works. I'll try to have something written up as soon as possible.
I am not particularly a fan of appcoins, but I have learned to audit code before judging a project. So that is exactly what I am doing with Steemit!
Looking forward to learning more and writing about the platform as the week goes on. Also, you can find me on Twitter at @desantis.
Greetings, Andrew, and welcome to Steem! :)
My name is Nathan. I'm one of the two architects (the other being Dan) of the Graphene Blockchain Framework upon which Steem is based. While I am not a Steem developer, I know the Graphene code base better than pretty much anyone except Dan (and perhaps Ben/theoretical, who was instrumental in implementing Graphene).
Being a blockchain framework (not a blockchain itself) Graphene was designed to be highly extensible and customizable; to serve as a platform with which anyone who wants to make a new chain can skip all of the boilerplate (crypto primitives, P2P networking, basic structures like blocks and transactions, etc etc) and get directly to implementing their unique ideas, only having to integrate with a few well-defined points in the code.
Unfortunately, all of this is not particularly well documented, so I welcome your efforts to make it approachable to others. To that end, I'll be happy to make myself available to you as you as you work through the code. If you have any questions or would like any guidance getting familiar with Graphene code, let me know and I'll gladly help out.
Also, to respond to your point about appcoins, I agree in general, but I think you'll find that Steem innovates in several ways far beyond the capabilities of any existing chain. For the most obvious example of this, Steem has no transaction fees, and this has been integral to its success so far, so clearly it could not have been developed on any of the usual blockchains.
Hello and welcome to Steemit! (She says, a newbie herself)
I cannot deny that your post was like reading another language, but some of it made sense and I will endeavour to work my way through the rest!
Very interested in this miner. Going to look into it more so will be following to see the results!
Having seen a lot of your work, Andrew, I'm excited to see what your audit shows. I'm skeptical about Steemit, even though I want to believe it can succeed. Here are a few things I want to understand:
I'm pumped to see what you come up with. Please make another post when you do. :)
Read the whitepaper.
And the roadmap of its future.
https://steem.io/roadmap/
Hi Andrew, maybe this will help you spread the word
https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptotony/steem-link-first-steemit-short-url-service-with-bunch-of-features
Welcome!
@zoso okay, i think
haii andrew
"I am not particularly a fan of appcoins, but I have learned to audit code before judging a project. So that is exactly what I am doing with Steemit!"
Can you expand a bit on the code auditing? Is it a process which you do for yourself like due diligence, is it something that will be published, or something that will be given to the dev team for review? I'm curious...
Hello! Saludos desde Mexico! :)
Entiendo poco de español, pero muchas gracias!
Hello, welcome onboard.
Glad to read you join us. This is an very great comunity, where we need peaple like you onboard.
I hope we can get more than 1 million user in long term run. Who knows if that is happen.
Me self join BTC in 2013 also, i remember good the price was 13$ per BTC.
That was an funny time, i use Silkroad some times, and i also lose 93 BTC on MTGox. So i stil waiting for the refound from Japan.
I hope you enjoy this place, and have a god time here with us :)
-Kind Regards
Wow $13 dollar coins; those were the days! I am glad to see there are some OG Bitcoiners around.
I too hope you finally receive your refund, I know that has to be tough.
Thanks for the kind words!
--Andrew
Yess, it was way to cheap, should bought more. But i would have it on gox so it would also be hacked :p
Tanks for that, jess i hope i get it. So i can start something out of it. Invest in difrent coins etc. Spreed the risk lol.
You welcome mate :)
-Christian
hey @zoso welcome, i'll follow you 8]
Audit! Sounds good!
I'm glad you think so!
Looking forward for your report. Thanks Andrew and much appreciated.
Not a problem! I'm glad I can help!
you're cool guy!
I really do appreciate that 😎
I can finally tell my Girlfriend that I made it!
Welcome to Steemit! My Friend- Greeting From @dog
Thank very much ... 🐕
Welcome You to Wonderful Steemit World !
Welcome You to Wonderful Steemit World @xem!
Thank you, thank you very much :)
Hello welcome to the community! https://steemit.com/bittrex/@arcaneinfo/steemit-com-cash-to-bittrex-to-bitcoin-in-less-than-5-minutes Happy Steeming!!!
Look forward to your feedback on the white paper and welcome.
It won't be too much longer! Last night I got caught working on the witness/miner software!
Really looking forward to your audit of the code. It's always good to be skeptical and not a sheep.
welcome! great to have you on board.
I'm very much looking forward to reading your thoughts on steemit considering you have been in the field for a long time, are obviously knowledgeable and with a healthy scepticism of appcoins.
Can't wait to read the next post.
Welcome to Steemit! @zoso
Nice. good job @zoso! excellent. upvoted! XD
Hi Andrew, nice to read your post. Hope you will bring improvements to steemit and make it becoming a long-term successful app-coin platform.
Welcome Andrew, and congratulations for the post , nice to have you with us
Andrew, Im a simple chap and people are saying negative things about STEEM, A expert to look under the hood would be super. Look forward to your next post.
@Andrew pls create windows software to minning steemit easily , iam not a hitech user but want to mine some steem
Welcome aboard! Someone with your knowledge and skills will be of great help!
Welcome!
Welcome,
It always amazes me when bitcoin purest assume that the only innovation that can happen are on the bitcoin chain. It seems they approach other coins or projects the same disdain that the uninitiated have approached bitcoin at first. I will be the first to admit that is a lot of garbage out there when it comes to non-btc coins, but to totally dismiss everything is just as bad. I am glad you are taking the time to check-it out,.
Thanks for giving us an opportunity to show our muster! My most recent post titled The Emotional Roller of Investing.
Greetings, Andrew, and welcome to Steemit! :)
Hello my fellow bitcoinier, welcom to stemmit. This is the worid we celibrating now
So when do we hear something more about steemit from you perspective?
I stumbled on Steemit due to pure gamble on markets. I enjoy watching graphs and drawing out trends buy in low and sell high. I think Steemit has got a lot of potential as a social media platform. But what I find annoying is that Steemit just needs completely authentic posts and it does not support any reposts or reblogs whatsoever, which is sad. Anyways keep posting.
It will be interesting to see what you come up with!
good
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I can definitely try to do all of these things :)
Thank you very much!