BUIP008: Vote Andrew Stone for Developer
Proposer: Andrew Stone (thezerg)
Submitted: 2016-01-09
Status: passed

Biography: I am Andrew Stone (theZerg on this forum and bitcointalk). I
am a software developer with a Bachelor of Science from Yale University
and with 20 years of experience in startup companies working in
networking and defense related applications. Many of these companies
have been successful, with cumulative acquisitions of over a half a
billion dollars and funding in the 10s of millions. My work is focused
in the high availability and communications area of tightly coupled
distributed applications. Software that I have written is deployed in
every major and many minor telecom providers worldwide, serving at least
10s of millions of customers (due to our licensing agreement, we do not
receive any data for the majority of our installations – the 2
installations we do receive data from serve 10s of millions of people).
I have travelled to 4 continents to consult with companies seeking to
build high availability products. 
In work unrelated to telecommunications, I wrote a game development
system when I was 16 years old
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game-Maker) which was important in
creating the concepts of “remixing” and was used by quite a few kids who
are well-known in the gaming industry today. Recently, I taught myself
hardware design, produced an open source hardware Arduino-compatible LED
driver called the Lightuino, sold 200+ units worldwide, and used it to
create interior lighting prototypes for several BMW and one Rolls-Royce
vehicle.

Bitcoin:
I have been investing and posting about Bitcoin since 2012. Recently, I
have become worried that the promise of Bitcoin as a P2P currency is
being undermined either due to unsubstantiated fears (of network
capacity, for example) or conflicts of interest by major contributors to
the most popular client. I realised that if I wanted change, I was going
to have to get explicitly involved.

I have been instrumental in getting Bitcoin Unlimited from a vision to a
reality, creating the first release and the initial web site. I also
wrote the traffic shaping for XT (although Tom Zander significantly
reworked the GUI portion and made other smaller changes). I have written
(with others’ significant contributions) the “Bitcoin Unlimited Articles
of Federation”, which provides a guiding philosophy and an
organizational system of checks an balances that attempts to make the
take-over or subverting of this group difficult
(http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/articlesOfFederation). I have also
written “An Examination of Single-Transaction Blocks and Their Effect on
Network Throughput and Block Size”
(http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/1txn), an effort to put our ideas of
emergent consensus on firm theoretical ground. I have a large body of
open source software which you can look at
atwww.github.com/gandrewstone.

I hope to help guide the development of the Bitcoin Unlimited client for
the next two years as it grows into a powerful force for returning to
Satoshi’s vision of Bitcoin.

Thank you for your consideration.