Meet The Women Of The Blockchain: Elaine Shi, Chief Scientist at ThunderCore

“As much as I’m grateful and appreciative of the fact that people see me as someone to look up to, I think everyone has their own path in life and all our stories are unique. My advice is to not forget that you’re one of a kind and pursue what brings you the most satisfaction.”

I had the pleasure to interview Elaine Shi, Chief Scientist at ThunderCore

Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory”?

In 2011, a good friend of mine was an early Bitcoin miner. I learned about Bitcoin from him and read the Nakamoto whitepaper. I was very fascinated by Bitcoin immediately. So I led the writing of the first academic paper on Bitcoin called “Bitter to Better — How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency” (Financial Crypto 2012). This paper helped introduce Bitcoin to the academic community and proposed the first fair exchange scheme using the Bitcoin scripting language.

Since then, I was among the first to try to program with Bitcoin’s scripting language and knew it was difficult to work with, when Ethereum came about and was only testnet, I became…