Bitcoin Gold’s Origin Story

A Chat with Bitcoin Gold’s Martin Kuvandzhiev

What made you interested in joining the team that built Bitcoin Gold?

Martin: I was initially fond of the idea because I’m a big fan of cryptocurrencies. I was a fan of them in general, even before starting to work with the Bitcoin Gold team. The thing that first got me interested in Bitcoin Gold was that the other co-founders wanted to build a system that was more decentralized than the original Bitcoin. I also had mining rigs in my office and apartment. My passion for mining Bitcoin is the way that I met my cofounders. They were also crypto miners, and they wanted to enable the Bitcoin network to be mined by GPUs again. That was my incentive to start contributing to that project. I also liked that this project is not only about the money. Everything is open source and there has been a great community around it. We had been exchanging numerous ideas trying to find the best solution for making a system that encompasses all of this, and that is why I joined the project.

How did your co-founders find you?

Martin: Actually they didn’t find me, we found each other. I found their site for the Bitcoin Gold project and liked what they were building. I started making improvements to their project and after that, they started messaging me about different ideas and we concluded that it was beneficial for us to collaborate.

So you were already contributing improvements to the Bitcoin Gold project?

Martin: Yeah it was actually before the hard fork. I was engaged in the whole network setup of Bitcoin Gold for weeks. I’m not going to give all of the technical details, that’s not necessary, but I was working on some of the custom protocols for the mining they were developing.

What makes you like cryptocurrency in general? You mentioned you were a fan of it, but what specifically about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is more attractive to you than say doing Artificial Intelligence or other types of software engineering?

Martin: In our world, the whole financial system is centralized by the world’s banks. I’ve experienced many different problems with the banks here in Bulgaria, and some of them I had to pay about 3 percent exchange fee when I received payment for my work in US dollars. After the exchange rate, I also have to pay for all the different taxes on top of that. With the crypto there isn’t an exchange rate, you’re just buying and selling something that is a store of value. This was one of the best features that initially attracted me to it. Another great thing about it is it’s completely transparent.

Another issue when you’re using the current bank system is if I want to pay you some money for a job that you did for me, I send the money to you, but you have to wait at least 3 days for the money to clear in the US. In the blockchain world, you see the payment instantly. As soon as one party of the transaction sends it through the network, the other party can see and verify it and immediately be able to use the funds. I have also worked with AI for weeks. I have been interested in understanding how trading bots work. The total the price movement is made by the demand on the market, but also made by the bots. If you’re making a speculation, then you need to have to watch the number of buy orders or sell orders at the same time. I was also working on taking some of the graphics for different cryptocurrencies and trying to find the pattern about how this is being done. I wrote an Artificial intelligence algorithm that is using machine learning to follow this data that they have collected.

Oh, wow, that sounds very interesting. Can you tell me more about it?

Martin: I tested this, and it had something like a 50 percent success rate, which is actually great for such a system because I spent one week on this. So I’ve not dug deep into it. So artificial intelligence is more than hype. The financial products of the world are always going to be relevant. We always will have the need to pay for goods and to receive money and to be paid for the work that we’ve done. So a transparent system for storing and sending/receiving value is something that is a really cool idea and the blockchain is the best way to do this.