Re: Roll call / intro

Super idea!

I'm Stefan Thomas and fell in love with Bitcoin back in 2010. The current
relationship status would be "it's complicated." There are a lot of people
in the community I highly respect, but sometimes I wish there was a little
less zealotry. I'm also coming from a libertarian perspective and I think
that we know a lot less than we think we do.

My first Bitcoin-related project was WeUseCoins, where we made a video
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo> which ended up becoming the
most popular introductory video for Bitcoin. Based on that experience I
wanted to work on Bitcoin usability and created the first JavaScript
implementation of Bitcoin called BitcoinJS <http://bitcoinjs.org/>.

Around that time I realized that I knew very little about how the financial
industry actually works. I joined Ripple in 2012 and working with banks has
been incredibly humbling. Also, Ripple's perspective was less about custody
and more about connectivity. I.e. rather than thinking about how to track
the ownership of assets, we were forced to think about how to connect all
the different custody systems already out there.

Finally, in 2014 we started to get involved with Manu and the W3C Web
Payments work which again shifted my thinking. Standards require simplicity
and abstraction, which is a very different way of thinking than the
crypto-focused engineering that lead to the giant monolithic binaries that
underpin many crypto-currencies. There are a lot of lessons to be learned
from the Web and other standards efforts that have come before. And that
road has lead me here. I'm very excited about the diversity in this group
and the ideas that are going to come out of that!

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Tiffany St.John <tiffany4772@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hey everybody. It looks like there are 70 of us in this group so far.  I
> thought a quick intro would be nice to help us get acquainted.
>
> I'm Tiffany Hayden and I'm very involved in the Bitcoin community. I was
> excited to hear that the specs for a Bitcoin-ILP implementation have been
> written. I'd love to see more volume flow through Bitcoin. I'm also a huge
> Ripple fan and have been moderating the unofficial forum for awhile. I may
> be the only person on the planet who loves both Ripple and Bitcoin. I was
> concerned that there weren't very many Bitcoin supporters in this group, so
> I reached out to a few of the brilliant Bitcoin minds in my local group and
> they have joined as well.
>
> I'm currently working on a project to help bring financial access to
> refugees. If you're interested, you can read about it here:
>
> https://medium.com/@haydentiff/refugees-the-next-wave-of-disruptors-34f3287cf7fe#.fa15ntqjo
>
> I follow everything going on in the fintech space -payment systems,
> remittances, distributed ledger technology, cryptocurrencies. I love it
> all.
>
> I'm liberty-minded, a believer in the non-aggression principle, and a
> member of the Michigan Peace and Liberty Coalition.
>
> I'm also a homeschooling mother and just possibly the last person still
> using a hotmail account.
>
>
>
> Looking forward to "meeting" all of you!
>
> Tiffany
>