I am a professional programmer, operations executive, and currently the Program Manager at the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research (CBR).

My academic background is in economics and statistics from Cornell University. I am a self-taught programmer and have worked as such all my career. I have worked for early stage startups and large enterprises, including banks and an airline, and have a strong interest in the tools and methodologies of high-assurance mission critical software systems.

I have worked full time in the Silicon Valley blockchain industry since early 2014, first as COO of one of the early Bitcoin startups (Vaurum, later renamed Mirror), and subsequently as a consultant to various blockchain endeavors, including startups, multinational enterprises, and academia.

My current primary focus is on supporting the development of decentralized systems that improve resilience and reduce systemic risk in critical national and global infrastructure. To that extent I co-organize several blockchain technical and academic conferences, help facilitate events and collaborations between professionals and experts in these fields, and fundraise for related commercial, academic and non-profit endeavors.

In 2018 I helped fundraise for the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, and currently serve as its Program Manager.

Conferences I've organized:
https://cyber.stanford.edu/bpase17/
https://cyber.stanford.edu/bpase18/
https://cyber.stanford.edu/sbc19/
https://cyber.stanford.edu/sbc20/
https://stanford2017.scalingbitcoin.org/
https://tokyo2018.scalingbitcoin.org/
https://telaviv2019.scalingbitcoin.org/
https://cesc.io/
https://rethinktrust.org/

Interests:
Systemic risk in complex systems, decentralization as a possible mitigation, mission critical systems & computer security, and programming languages and systems architectures that do interesting things with assurance, provable correctness and/or fault tolerance.

https://twitter.com/byrongibson