Community Highlight #2, cgi-bin
This is episode #2 in our series of highlights where once in a while we put the spotlight on one active member of our community. This is an opportunity for us to showcase their contributions to our ecosystem, what drives them and what they are passionate about! You can find episode #1 here, #3here, #4 here, #5 here and #6 here..
Today we thank CGI-BIN, a recognizable voice on our Telegram & Discord channels, as well as on Twitter! A very helpful and reactive presence, knowledgeable about Alephium in particular and crypto in general.
What can we call you and where should we picture you?
Right now my nickname is cgi-bin, but I love changing my handle so maybe in a few years it will be completely different. You could picture me working on a computer surrounded by Swiss mountains.
Tell us about yourself/your persona.
I can relate to a curious person that loves being bored, because when I am bored I find new projects or ideas that motivate me and learn things.
How did you find out about Alephium?
From one of my colleagues and soon after that I started a fullnode and began mining in the testnet. I started exploring Alephium at the beginning of the mainnet.
What is exciting to you about Alephium?
The innovations Alephium brings with blockflow and sharding, it is disrupting the actual ecosystem. Alephium is inspired by the things Bitcoin does best and for me it’s the most important part: to use established technologies and to improve on them in different ways while keeping the same base.
How do you contribute to the Alephium ecosystem?
I started by developing a small bot in Python to get some stats for the miners. Then I developed a Telegram and Twitter bot to share insights from the chain and send alerts when a certain amount is transferred or bought. You can find the code of these projects here and you can see it in action on telegram here and here.
I built another application that publishes some stats. Like the list of active addresses ordered by their amount or the initial balance of the genesis addresses. The code is here. It uses the tool that powers Wilhelm Källberg’s Alph Top.
There’s a public fullnode that I’m running available for people who want to learn and contribute without having to start a fullnode and a public backend explorer. The idea is to allow them to become independent and to help to decentralize the network.
Last but not least I’m a community moderator for Alephium.
What makes you excited about the future of Alephium?
The bridges and the possibility to develop smart contracts more easily on it, in order to grow the Alephium ecosystem. I already have some ideas.
You are an active builder and social contributor to many open source projects, what motivates you to do it?
I’m not considering myself as an active builder but more as an active tester. (imposter syndrome hello :) With this kind of project there is an opportunity to learn a lot without having to retro-engineer the applications first.
For me, the open source and libre ideologies are proof that together humans can achieve bigger things than by themselves. Using a federated/collective intelligence is a solution against data exploitation, centralization, censorship and the various threats to integrity. And if my brain-cells can be a part of that, I consider it as an achievement.
