Onward, and Ever Upward2013 was an amazing year; between founding
+Coursefork, building
soundtrack.io and
para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at
+Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as
+Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and
especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO
+Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired:
http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to
+Anthony Pompliano and
+Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former
+Red Hat team member from Raleigh. How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree,
+Derrick Minor?!
[3]:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/[4]:
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts
directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with
+Jason Hibbets from
+Opensource.com that explains the vision:
http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.
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