Team Spotlight: Decred, Pedal Steel Guitar, and Thoughts on Bitcoin From an Exodus Developer

We asked Ryan, one of our lead developers at Exodus, what he thought about the blockchain space, the future of Exodus, and how he got involved in crypto.

The following is a transcript of a recorded interview that took place on March 12, 2018.

Welcome to Exodus Movement Radio — easing you into the new economy. I’m your host Davey and today we’re joined by Ryan, one of Exodus’ star developers.

Thank you for being here today, Ryan.
Glad to be here.

What was it that initially attracted you to the crypto-space?
That’s an interesting question. It’s actually a bit of a difficult question to answer, because for most employees [at Exodus] I assume crypto came first and then Exodus. For me it was actually the other way around.

I had gotten to know the co-founder and chief technical officer JP — got to know him doing some open source software. I was looking for a job and so he found out about it and invited me to work for Exodus with one big catch — you have to get paid in bitcoin.

And so I said I’d have to give it a little thought.

I had heard there’s this — some sort of computerized currency that doesn’t exist in physical form and my first reaction was — Well that’s dumb! How would that ever work? I mean everybody knows that once you have something on the computer you can just make an infinite number of copies of it. I mean that’s how computers work.

So I started looking into it and once I read the white paper and really started understanding it, it’s like, yeah this really makes a lot of sense — decided I’d take JP up on his offer and so I started working at Exodus and got into Bitcoin at the same time and have been there ever since.

You know, I think there’s close to 2000 projects out there involving cryptocurrency — any favorites?
Probably either Bitcoin itself or Decred.

Tell us more about Decred (DCR).
Well as many of you probably know, the Bitcoin civil war or scaling debate or whatever you want to call it has consumed a good part of several years and has resulted in a fair amount of stagnation. I mean we’re finally moving forward now with segwit activated, but it really was ugly. And so for me, the big thing that attracts me to Decred is the fact that you can have on-chain voting with all the holders of the coin and they can vote about what hardforks they actually want, what changes they want done.

With that framework in place, it’s actually self-funding whereas there’s a portion of the block reward goes to the development fund and the stakeholders can vote on how that’s going to be spent.

And so, I think it has a potential to really take care a lot of this dog-fighting on Twitter for solving blockchain debate.

How do you envision blockchain evolving and its impact on our future?
That’s an interesting question. I don’t see Bitcoin going away anytime soon, I think it’s gonna continue to grow.

I think more and more eventually we’re gonna see a large percentage of the populace seeing Bitcoin as what it is — digital gold and a superior alternative to gold.

There’s also some other interesting things like Siacoin, Golem, etcetera — decentralizing other things like disc space and computing power.

It remains to be seen exactly how much of an impact those things are going to have on the world as we know it, but I do think they’re interesting projects.

And what about for our Exodus wallets. Any chance we can get a sneak peak into some of the things you’re working on?
Man there’s a lot of things. I mean the sky’s the limit.

Ryan thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today and sharing your thoughts.

I want our listeners to know that not only is Ryan a star developer, but I’ve heard he’s also quite the pedal steel guitar player. So before our interview, I asked Ryan if he’d be willing to play for us a bit.

Ryan, all set up and ready to go?
Sure.

Ladies and gentleman, Ryan on the pedal steel guitar.