Spas hard at work!
Hey everyone,
Blackbox Here with one of our Top Notch Developers, Spas,
Blackbox - Hi Spas , I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time for this short interview. Working together at the Bitcoin Gold Organization sure keeps us busy. But we all have other jobs to pay the bills as well.
So, could you tell the audience please what your position is and what you do at the BGO (Bitcoin Gold Organization)?
Spas- I’m developer at BGO. For the past couple of years I’ve been working to integrate BTG into different projects. We started with commonly used libraries for Bitcoin and for the better part of 6, may be even more months now I’m working on “lnd” - one of the Lightning Network implementations for Bitcoin. The main idea is to fork it and change the code base to work with BTG, but do it in a way it is sustainable - we can pull latest features and fixes from the upstream (source). We do the same with Bitcoin Gold’s core wallet.
Blackbox- And being such a new technology, there really is no roadmap, to follow. Do you find yourself brainstorming with others, or you pretty much have to figure things out yourself?
Spas- I bounce ideas and problems off h4x all the time. I also try to work closely with the core developers of the project I’m porting for BTG when possible. I remember working on BTCPay Server, Nikolas was extremly helpfull and probably saved me weeks of work, but this is not always the case. With LND so far h4x and I are doing our best to tackle the problems that come up when porting the code for BTG.
Blackbox- I bet this is no easy task! But I hear things slowly coming along? Lol the old saying “Things always take longer than we think.”
Spas- Yea, I think we are finally getting closer to the public LND testnet for BTG. We have still a few broken unit tests and yet another update ahead - this time to the latest 0.8.0 version of LND. I don’t want to give false hope, but I can see the light in the end of the tunnel after so much time and work.
Blackbox- Can you tell us why your work is so important for the present and future development of the project?
Also, for those who don’t understand the technical aspects, can you tell us in plain words, how this new tech your are working on will help BTG users and people in general?
Spas- Lightning network and in particular lnd was identified as strategic project we would like our ecosystem to have. It is great project that allows instant payment over blockchain. Without going into technical details - the sole purpose of lightning is to be fast and to allow multiple payments with minimal fees. What is the biggest problem of any crypto right now? - paying for everyday commodities. If I want to buy ice cream with BTG (or in that matter most of the crypto currencies out there) the vendor may ask me to wait a few confirmations, just to be sure I will not scam him. And while we wait for 6-10 (whatever number) of confirmations my ice cream is melting. With the help of lightning this inconvenience can be overcome. Of course we are I’d say relatively long way from that as of now, but one must have a vision of the future.
Blackbox- We know the BTG family is all behind you, and we can only imagine the pressure. But getting it done correctly always outweighs getting it done quickly! For me, I have a lot of appreciation and want you to take as much time to make it right.
I don’t want to take up much more of your time, as I know there is a lot on your plate. I think this will help the audience understand a little of what you are going through.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat!
Spas -Thanks for the time and the great work you do!
Blackbox- I look forward to seeing the finished product! Thanks again!
I hope everyone found this update helpful. We’ll try to keep you updated as much as possible, but as you can see, the tasks undertaken are huge.
Again I really appreciate the time Spas took for this quick interview.
As usual you can contact us on Discord or Telegram
Or you can visit us at https://bitcoingold.org/
Until next time.
Regards,
Blackbox and the BGO team