Wednesday 13 July 2016

I'm still around

You may have noticed that there hasn't been a new blog post for a long time. It's not that I lost interest in Bitcoin or economics, but my goals with respect to its economic research I more-or-less reached. I studied the concept of liquidity and how it relates to Bitcoin. My papers about the topic have been referenced by economists that I admire (Lawrence White, Robert Murphy, Walter Block). I was able to meet many other extraordinary people, in person, including, in no particular order: my dear friend Stephan Kinsella, Jeffrey Tucker, Jörg-Guido Hülsmann, Doug French, George Selgin, Rahim Taghizadegan, Frank Shostak, Philipp Bagus, David Howden, Deidre McCloskey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Konrad S. Graf, Roger Ver, Eric Voorhees, Andreas Antonopoulous, Tuur Demeester, Jason King, Meni Rosenfeld, Johann Gevers, Juraj Bednár, Pavol Lupták. If I forgot to mention you, it's all my fault because I have a bad memory for people. This has been an amazing experience and I'm very satisfied about it.

Last year I rediscovered Bitmessage, a project / protocol for anonymous, censorship-resistant, secure and decentralised communication. I had heard about it before but didn't realise all of the possibilities it opens. I became more and more involved in it. I joined the reference client/software (also known as PyBitmessage) and successfully iterated it through a new cycle with the version 0.6 being released in two months ago. At the moment I'm transitioning into the lead position as the original author of Bitmessage, Jonathan Warren, does not have time for it anymore. I hope that I can help to make it into a sustainable and more formally managed open source project with clear goals and path for the future. I would also like to use this opportunity to thank all contributors, translators, and other people who work on a different Bitmessage implementation (like Daniel Krawisz and Justus Ranvier).

Nevertheless, I am still interested in Bitcoin (my Bitmessage-Email gateway, mailchuck.com, takes bitcoin payments), and the Austrian School. I think that every now and then, I can probably still make a new post about something interesting. So don't delete me from your RSS feeds yet!