My background:
15+ year developer, originally C/C++. I am cloning the BU repo now and plan to try and compile it the first time soon. I am running a full BU node on a mac. I also have an ubuntu machine I may use for development.
Bitcoin - I read the white paper.
It was very early. I have an undergraduate degree in computer science and my minor was Economics. I have been a free market advocate since the mid-90's when I started college. I had the honor of learning Economics from (among others) Dr. Walter Block, who is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and I have made a somewhat personal study of Economics in our society for the last 20 years in the spirit of the Austrians.
I have played with the client more in recent years. I've set up a testnet. Could intereact with it and create / see transactions, mine, generally configure the client and network, etc. That was maybe a year ago.
I have had a miner running in AWS just to see if I could. Again, maybe about a year ago.
Since then I've been spending more time on web development and extending that skill set. (still fairly immature) Now, I'm drifting back more toward btc and would like to continue to expand my skillset to work with these techs in an integrated fashion.
My interest in Bitcoin as money started early in the project. My interest was primarily in the free market economic implications of money without central planning - more than the technical/programming aspects. Probably b/c I was a full-time C programmer at the time I had my fill of that and I was also doing my Masters. (I have a masters of accountancy and I am a CPA with an inactive license - my full-time gig is still software database design/architecture)
As a computer scientist I did play with mining and building some early in the life of the project. Even then I knew I would never keep up with my wallet keys and did not try, and I quickly became board with its heavily technical nature until recently.
I am happy to answer questions. I have not developed or worked on a wallet. I have been working on my own private thingy (wallet/explorer) in MeteorJS, just to see if I can and to learn that framework and to learn to interact with btc programmatically.
As I've been working on that, my interest has changed a bit in that I think I would like to get more involved in the community both to offer something of what I can to support freedom through the bitcoin protocol and from violent suppliers of monetary services and so that I may also learn more and extend my technical skill set through interacting with others in this or related projects.
I could probably go on and on about freedom and such. As a personal matter, my perspective is informed primarily by my relationship with God and His son Jesus Christ. I believe, in part because of my understanding of His word, that many of our social/governance problems are created by US and for the most part we would be well-served by replacing some human institutions with some that better reflect the will of God for us.
In that spirit, I believe that taking control of money out of the hands of men of violence would increase peace among men and I think this technology is already doing that. I think Bitcoin and derivative technologies are positioned to cause a rapid shift in our social structure - something which I think is timely.
I know you didn't ask for that personal stuff but since I was introducing myself it seemed appropriate.
Let me know if you have any questions or anything.
