Ripple CTO David Schwartz admits that he optimized the Bitcoin code 10 years ago
Chief technology officer of San-Francisco-based Ripple tech giant has turned out to be one of those IT engineers who participated in optimizing the code of the flagship cryptocurrency—Bitcoin—a few years after the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto launched it.
Future XRPL creator modifies BTC code
In 2017, major XRP supporter Tiffany Hayden discovered on GitHub that David Schwartz was among the large group of developers who modified the BTC code.
— (@haydentiff) December 30, 2021
When asked directly on Twitter about it now, the Ripple CTO admitted that he indeed optimized the BTC code for mining pool applications back in 2011. He is on the list together with such BTC developers as Gavin Andresen and Peter Todd.
I did some work optimizing the code for mining pool applications in 2011.
— (@JoelKatz) December 30, 2021
The anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi personally picked Andresen as the “core maintainer” of the Bitcoin open-source code.
In 2012, Andresen became one of the directors of the nonprofit Bitcoin Foundation, which was built to restore Bitcoin’s reputation after it was claimed as a payment tool for criminals and drug dealers.
Founding Ripple Labs
In 2011, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto started working on XRP Ledger, inspired by Bitcoin but hoping to make a better version of it. Chris Larsen then joined them, and they founded OpenCoin, later rebranded as Ripple Labs.