Luke-Jr is standing for election to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation. If you like what he's contributed to Bitcoin so far and agree with his vision for Bitcoin "as a legal and widely utilized, decentralized replacement for fiat currencies", then: Join the Bitcoin Foundation:
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/support and vote for Luke-Jr
Read Luke-Jr's full statement:
VisionMy vision for Bitcoin is pretty simple: a legal and widely utilized, decentralized replacement for fiat currencies. I've noticed some people are using Bitcoin as an exclusive vehicle for their own ideologies. I dislike that agenda. I'm particularly against agendas of this sort which focus on promoting tax evasion, anarchy, or other anti-government activities. These agendas increase the probability that governments will perceive Bitcoin as a threat and try to make it illegal or regulated more than necessary. While I don't wish to police individuals from political experimentation, it isn't something I believe Bitcoin itself should be wagered on. There are many different ideologies in the world, and I think Bitcoin can be of value to all of them for different reasons.
Since becoming one of the main developers in the mining arena, Bitcoin's decentralization has become more of a focal point to me. I regularly work toward making mining less centralized by trying to reconcile the needs of individual miners (regular/low-variance earnings) with the needs of Bitcoin (no entities who can single-handedly control a substantial amount of the network blocks). I also try to encourage more independent development teams working on their own Bitcoin node/wallet implementations, to try to remove the centralization on a single codebase/team that unfortunately exists right now.
I also think decisions shouldn't be centralized on the board of directors. If called upon to vote or decide on a non-trivial matter as a member of the board of directors for the Bitcoin Foundation, I intend to consult with the community before making a decision, including using polls for non-landslide cases (potentially anonymous, as long as we can ensure no sockpuppets).
ExperienceBefore Bitcoin, I have been involved in the development of many different peer-to-peer and free software projects. Bitcoin has allowed a new area of excitement and challenge for me to which I believe I bring a unique set of skills, knowledge and experience as a developer. My passion for Bitcoin's long term sustainability and continued interest in developing widely used software connect me with the community for what I believe will be the long and prosperous road ahead of us. I've been researching and exploring Bitcoin for what's coming up on 3 years, and have taken an immediate interest to it and its expansive uses.
Below is a snapshot of my experience and contributions to the Bitcoin community, both in teams and, in some cases when my peers were unable to lend a hand, on my own, as a means of broadening the wide usage and accessability of Bitcoin to the general public.
bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt: Over the years, I have contributed a number of improvements to the Satoshi-codebase wallets. These include extending BTC precision from 2 decimal places to 8 decimal places, various mining improvements, and a lot of other under-the-hood improvements and fixes. Additionally, I currently maintain the stable (aka backport) branches of the client, and every so often put together a bleeding edge version called "next-test".
Spesmilo: Before Wladimir released Bitcoin-Qt, I was an active lead developer on the Spesmilo wallet frontend for bitcoind.
Pay-to-script-hash: I participated in the development of the P2SH protocol extensions, and while BIP 16 was eventually adopted over the BIP 17 specification which I championed, I believe a lot was learned in the process.
Eligius mining pool: I founded the 4th ever mining pool in early 2011. We have remained on the leading edge of mining technology, being the first to implement the BIP 22 decentralized mining protocol standard (getblocktemplate aka GBT), one of the few pools to have developed our own mining server software, and one of few to design newer innovative mining reward systems. Eligius is popularly known for its generation payouts, lack of registration required, and low variance zero-fee reward system. The pool serves nearly 1,500 miners with nearly 20 Th/s combined, and finds about 5% of blocks on the Bitcoin network. It has also developed into a lively mining community expanding beyond just the pool.
Eloipool: When the needs of Eligius grew beyond what was capable with simple bitcoind getwork proxies, I wrote custom mining server software, the first to implement its own work generation instead of being a mere proxy to bitcoind. It has grown to be the most featureful open source software of its kind, and supports all major mining protocols (getwork, GBT, and stratum), and is actively used to find at least 11% of mined blocks.
getblocktemplate: Inspired by BitPenny and p2pool's attempts at decentralized mining pools, I set out to create a standard protocol that could be used for decentralizing all mining pools. Following the completion of the BIP 22 and BIP 23 specifications, I also implemented and maintain libraries implementing it for both C and Python. GBT is now widely adopted for decentralized mining, and I continue to develop it further to improve decentralization.
BFGMiner: With the advent of FPGA mining devices, I set out to implement software to make use of them. Based on the popular GPU miner of the time, cgminer, I refactored the internal mining code to support modular drivers, and added the first FPGA driver to make BFGMiner. As the industry has developed further, I have continued to work closely with most, if not all, of the FPGA/ASIC vendors, as well as end-user miners, to provide the best possible FPGA/ASIC mining software. BFGMiner has also grown to add numerous enhancements, and I have taken extra effort to find and fix many bugs and security issues.
Mining hardware: In addition to my experiences with mining software, I helped BTCFPGA completely rewrite their FPGA MCU's firmware, and assisted Butterfly Labs in doing a proper open source release of their ASIC MCU firmware. I have also been working on getting BFL's MCU firmware compiled and installed using just free software. I regularly provide advice to device manufacturers for improvement of current and new mining products.
Bitcoin Magazine: As an effort to improve Bitcoin education, I have been assisting Bitcoin Magazine as a volunteer editor for the past 8 months.
Bitcoin statistics: I maintain a #Bitcoin-Watch freenode IRC channel to monitor transactions in realtime, and have put together a number of realtime graphs to analyze the Bitcoin network.
Cryptocurrency research: I have studied the various aspects of how cryptocurrencies work, including the minor and major variations attempted in various altcoins, and have demonstrated and observed various strengths and weaknesses in them.
