Andreas Markos Antonopoulos | |
---|---|
Born | 1972 (age 51–52) |
Nationality | |
Alma mater | University College London |
Occupation | Tech entrepreneur [1] |
Website | aantonop |
Andreas Markos Antonopoulos [2] (born 1972 in London) is a British-Greek [3] [4] Bitcoin advocate, tech entrepreneur, and author. He is a host on the Speaking of Bitcoin podcast [5] (formerly called Let's Talk Bitcoin! [6] ) and a teaching fellow for the M.Sc. Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia. [7]
Antonopoulos was born in 1972 in London, UK, [3] and moved to Athens, Greece during the Greek Junta.[ citation needed ] He spent his childhood there, [4] [8] and at the age of 17 returned to the UK.[ citation needed ] Antonopoulos obtained his degrees in Computer science and Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London. [3] [9] [10]
He was Senior Vice President and a Founding Partner with Nemertes Research, from 2003 until 2011. [9] While there, Antonopoulos researched computer security, stating that the greatest threat to computer security was not experienced hackers, but overly complex systems that resulted from rapid change in business. [11]
In 2012, Antonopoulos became enamored with Bitcoin. He eventually abandoned his job as a freelance consultant and started speaking at conferences about bitcoin, consulting for startups, and writing articles free of charge. [12]
According to his podcast, Antonopoulos is a consultant on several bitcoin-related startups. [13]
In January 2014, Antonopoulos joined Blockchain.info as chief security officer. [14] In September 2014, he left the CSO role.
In April 2014, Antonopoulos organised a fundraising campaign for Dorian Nakamoto, who was identified in a Newsweek article as the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The reporting techniques used in the article were controversial among journalists and Bitcoin community members. The fundraiser, intended to assist Nakamoto after the attention he received as a result of the article, raised 50 bitcoins, worth US$23,000 at the time. [15] [16]
On 8 October 2014, Antonopoulos spoke in front of the Banking, Trade and Commerce committee of the Senate of Canada to address the senators' questions on how to regulate bitcoin in Canada. [17]
In March 2016, the first edition of Mastering Bitcoin was released by Antonopoulos, in print and online, [18] followed by a second edition in June 2017. [19]
In December 2017, unsolicited donations of over 100 bitcoins were sent to Antonopoulos by over a thousand followers of his work, after Roger Ver made a public post to Twitter on 5 December questioning Antonopoulos's investment choices given his "eloquent" public speaking about bitcoin since 2012. [12] [20]
Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He later worked for PGP Corporation. He was an early Bitcoin contributor, and received the first Bitcoin transaction from the currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that guarantees the security of the bitcoin blockchain. Mining consumes large quantities of electricity and has been criticized for its environmental impact.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed Bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin until December 2010.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It has, in a financial point of view, grown to be its own asset class. However, on the contrary to other asset classes like equities or commodities, sectors have not been officially defined as of yet though abstract version of them exist.
The Bitcoin protocol is the set of rules that govern the functioning of Bitcoin. Its key components and principles are: a peer-to-peer decentralized network with no central oversight; the blockchain technology, a public ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions; mining and proof of work, the process to create new bitcoins and verify transactions; and cryptographic security.
Primecoin is a cryptocurrency that implements a proof-of-work system that searches for chains of prime numbers.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Nicholas Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer known for his research in smart contracts and digital currency.
Counterparty is a peer-to-peer financial platform and a distributed, open source protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and network. It was one of the most well-known "Bitcoin 2.0" platforms in 2014, along with Mastercoin, Ethereum, Colored Coins, Ripple and BitShares.
Bitcoin Core is free and open-source software that serves as a bitcoin node and provides a bitcoin wallet which fully verifies payments. It is considered to be bitcoin's reference implementation. Initially, the software was published by Satoshi Nakamoto under the name "Bitcoin", and later renamed to "Bitcoin Core" to distinguish it from the network. It is also known as the Satoshi client. Bitcoin Core includes a transaction verification engine and connects to the Bitcoin network as a full node.
A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.
Ethereum Classic is a blockchain-based distributed computing platform that offers smart contract (scripting) functionality. It is open source and supports a modified version of Nakamoto consensus via transaction-based state transitions executed on a public Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain and those of other cryptocurrencies. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. It is a peer-to-peer system for making micropayments of cryptocurrency through a network of bidirectional payment channels, without delegating custody of funds.
The Bitcoin scalability problem refers to the limited capability of the Bitcoin network to handle large amounts of transaction data on its platform in a short span of time. It is related to the fact that records in the Bitcoin blockchain are limited in size and frequency.
Bitcoin was designed by its pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to work as a currency, but its status as a currency is disputed. Economists define money as a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and agree that bitcoin does not currently meet all these criteria.
A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.
In blockchain, a fork is defined variously as:
Wakefield Scott Stornetta is an American physicist and scientific researcher. His 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, co-authored with Stuart Haber, won the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software and is considered to be one of the most important papers in the development of cryptocurrencies.
Stuart Haber is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his contributions in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies and widely recognized as the co-inventor of the blockchain. His 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, co-authored with W. Scott Stornetta, won the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software and is considered to be one of the most important papers in the development of cryptocurrencies.
So this is, this is great, it's back to my roots. I was a student here in 1990, but i was actually born in London, and i am half British which you won't hear in my accent any more; Brooklyn changed that.
Brian Rose: Are you Greek? Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes, i am. I lived in Greece most of my childhood. I graduated from high school there. My parents are still in Greece, at the moment.
I've been interested in cryptocurrencies since the early 1990s. In many ways, my interest stems from my experiences growing up in Greece. I saw the way a currency crisis could wipe out the wealth of an entire generation, and it had a big impact on me.
He is a Computer Sciences graduate from University College London.