Software engineering leader For fun: Ethereum Historian, https://xitter.cf/t.co/vlxDYhca9w Ex @strato_net, @ETCCooperative, @ethereumfndn, @EA
Vancouver, British Columbia
Joined April 2013
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Pinned Tweet
Early Days of Ethereum is teaching me something new every day, even though I am more than a decade into my own journey.
I'll start dropping each of those @ethereum learnings onto a forever-tweet-thread here as they come, as well as on the website. 🧵
earlydaysofeth.org
Bob Summerwill retweeted
so is this useful at all?
not really. but we can now confirm with certainty that the executable people downloaded matches satoshi's published source code exactly 😄
some other archeological fun facts:
- satoshi used windows xp with mingw
- he upgraded binutils halfway through the project
- he shipped a debug build, but turned on max optimization for one file: the hashing used for mining
- the exe everyone calls v0.1.0 is actually v0.1.1 and was compiled two days after satoshi announced v0.1. the original launch-day binary seems to be lost
github.com/t4t5/bitcoin-0.1-…
Bob Summerwill retweeted
i rebuilt satoshi's 2009 bitcoin.exe byte for byte!
afaik nobody has been able to perfectly recreate the executable published in 2009 from source, because we didn't know the exact build environment that was used.
using opus 5.5, i reverse-engineered satoshi's build machine from the binary.
it now outputs an exe with the exact same sha256 as the 2009 release!
Bob Summerwill retweeted
three stories about times that i
FUMBLED THE BAG
(maybe you can relate)
1. Steve Jobs used my song to open a press conference.
2. I made a jingle for AirBnB when they were pre-funding in 2008.
3. I made (and lost) $2.4 million selling my songs as NFTs.
Bob Summerwill retweeted
for a long time it felt like the world was fully optimized against you
you go to buy something, you get a bunch of ads and upsells and micro optimizations to get you to spend more
you go to consume some specific content and the algo puts in things that are hard to ignore and designed to get you to spend more time
agents are the first time i've felt like maybe things can go in a different direction. send your robot into that mess and it can ignore it all and do your task
i'm not naive, this is going to be an insane battle with entrenched interests doing their best to fight it
but there's a small chance that in the end we can finally be free of this (until the next new problem)
Bob Summerwill retweeted
deGoogle track will return at Cypherpunk Congress.
@BobSummerwill will update his FOSS story for all of you. Crafted by years of anti-Big Tech personal journey.
Listen to people. Understand why self-sovereign way is hard. But try it one app at a time.
Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress highlights: @BobSummerwill showed his ongoing escape.
Expect free & open-source software, degoogling, practical software stack & @GrapheneOS
watch: youtube.com/watch?v=AOri8sxx…
event: congress.web3privacy.info
Bob Summerwill retweeted
"[Linux] is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been,
and never will be." — Linus lore.kernel.org/linux-media/…
Bob Summerwill retweeted
People's choice! Thousands want to explore privacy, decentralisation of power & digital rights 🇮🇳
Cypherpunk Congress is a festival:
☑️ 100 speakers from @kurtopsahl to @VitalikButerin
☑️ 80 organisations from @brave to @SFLCin
☑️ visitors from 50 countries 🌏
Celebrate it congress.web3privacy.info
Bob Summerwill retweeted
Bitcoin isn’t one chain. It’s the idea.
True peer-to-peer electronic cash that is fungible, scales, and does everything.
Doesn’t matter who delivers it. Just that the promise gets fulfilled.
@Vladcostea @BobSummerwill
Bob Summerwill retweeted
Libbitcoin is significantly faster validating the full chain provided by 10 peer connections over the p2p network than bitcoind just doing a local reindex of its already downloaded store. #libbitcoin is coming.
Bob Summerwill retweeted
Linus Torvalds says, rules prohibiting AI usage are “UTTERLY STUPID” and “idiotic”.
For the Linux kernel, Torvalds says, “we’re not going to make stupid rules that say ‘you can’t use tools for X’”.
Bob Summerwill retweeted
Drivechains, Dead Ends, and the Price of Waiting
Bitcoin’s development cadence has slowed dramatically.
Roughly sixteen soft forks in the first seven-to-eight years, then only two in the next period.
Lightning never delivered the user experience or fee market that was promised.
The security-budget problem gets sharper every halving once price appreciation no longer reliably covers the drop in subsidy.
Drivechains are the proposed fix.
Merge-mined sidechains with miner-voted withdrawals, so fees flow to proof-of-work miners and new ideas can be tested without touching the L1.
On eCash the base layer stays conservative while the sidechains absorb demand for scale, privacy, and programmability.
Paul is blunt about Lightning: the evidence of failure is already overwhelming and the project is effectively dead, even if many people haven’t admitted it yet. Other non-miner-paying constructions face the same long-term incentive problem.
After years of soft-fork advocacy produced no activation, the hard-fork route is presented as the remaining practical option.
Downside: some drama plus free coins for every Bitcoin holder.
Upside: a live test of whether Drivechains can attract builders, pay miners, and pressure Bitcoin itself if the experiment works.
The SHAD funding mechanism and the three-stage launch (alpha → beta → mainnet) are both attempts to make that test as informative as possible before real capital is fully committed.
Whether eCash becomes a lasting parallel system, a temporary catalyst, or something else will be decided by users, miners, and builders once mainnet is live... not by more podcast discussion.
S17 E21 and S17 E37 with @Truthcoin simply document the reasoning and the concrete plan.
🤖 Made with AI
Honest Opinions on Lightning.
Details of the Hard Fork.
@Truthcoin discussing all these and more in the full episode. S17 E21
Bob Summerwill retweeted
Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is like saying photography is dead now that everyone in the world has a camera in their pocket
Not only is it not dead it's the beginning of the Kodak Brownie moment for software, and we will see an absolute explosion of it
It will be the first generation for who building software will feel no different than using it. This is crazy!
The quality and bar of what we expect from our everyday apps will be raised dramatically, we'll have personal software, we'll have disposable software, and agents will be the foundation for most of it
Tech has always been chaotic and evolving, the people who have been able to adapt and move in front of new opportunities have always excelled, this is nothing new, I'm seeing it now and we'll see it 10 years from now
Find the opportunities in the chaose and disruption, there are countless of them
Bob Summerwill retweeted
A Hard Fork Is one of the cleanest ways of experimenting.
People can choose to participate. The market will decide.
@BobSummerwill solana:otcEcTrA7LvpvAnk3vMmEvuQGY1yjq2szKrfFPrhdS8
Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin's Fork Season
The next episode is here and the guest is @BobSummerwill, Ethereum Historian, former executive director of the ETC Cooperative, one of the major development companies involved in building the Ethereum Classic project and builder some of the best #FIFA games in the mid 2000's.
They discuss Bitcoin's Current Fork Landscape, Ethereum Classic's journey and History Preservation.
Some Highlights from the Show
🪼Code Is Law versus Bailouts
🪼Ethereum Classic: First Minority Chain to Survive
🪼Why the Best Technology Doesn't Always Win
🪼El Salvador's Quiet Bitcoin Regression
🪼The Self-Custody Industrial Complex
youtube.com/live/srVEtBjaFms…
$BTC $ETH
