Jeff Garzik could be considered one of the guardians of bitcoin. When we caught up with him, he had just finished working with others to stop a network-wide event – a DDoS attack that exploited some stray code in the reference bitcoin client (Bitcoind) to target certain parts of the cryptocurrency’s distributed infrastructure.
He became one of the core developers of the Bitcoin protocol after he began working on the project during its early days. He was involved in many of the early forum discussions with the mysterious Satoshi, and even exchanged a private email or two with him.
CoinDesk caught up with him to talk about Satoshi, the open source development community, and where the protocol is headed. So, does Garzik see the need for any new features in Bitcoin?
“Recurring payments,” he says emphatically. Bitcoin is great if I want to send you some bitcoins once. But if I want to pay regularly for a subscription to, say, an online service, or for regularly updated content, it’s flawed. “Bitcoin is a push model where you push payments to someone else, but it isn’t in the protocol that you pay someone on a regular basis. That needs to be filled in.”
Another must-have for Garzik is what he calls “transaction lifetime determinism” – the retrieval of bitcoin payments from limbo. Transactions on the bitcoin network have to be mined in a block, and the network calls for those transactions to be confirmed. The general recommendation is six confirmations (one per block), but in practice, the number of transactions required by a party is variable.
"I don’t think it’s likely that the second generation will produce any useful, viable long-term cryptocurrency, but I do think that all this experimentation will absolutely inform the Bitcoin ecosystem."said Garzik.
If a transaction isn’t confirmed, it becomes stuck in the network, and you need an expert to help you recover those funds. “A user always needs to know what is going on with their money. If it isn’t confirming after a set period of time, it should just kick the transaction out of the system rather than just sitting around for weeks and months.”
"Bitcoin activists and evangelists like me have a bunch of answers. It’s borderless, it’s irreversible, and there’s low risk of fraud. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to get on the radar of your average person."said Garzik.
Features like these should go into the core protocol, but there are plenty of other features that Garzik wants to see layered on top of the network, without affecting the core protocol.
这些特征应该加入核心协议，但加里克希望看到很多构建在这个网络上而不影响核心协议的其他特征。
Coloured coins is one. Garzik wrote one of the first implementations of this, called Smartcoin. This concept enables attributes to be assigned to a coin, so that it can become a token for ownership. They could be used for everything from exchanging ownership of physical assets, to marking stocks, bonds, and options.