Location: Australia - but will work in your timezone if its a deal-breaker
Remote: 8 years experience working remotely
Willing to relocate: No thank you - unless you're somehow in Pennsylvania!
Technologies: python, linux, blockchain technology, smart contracts, peer-to-peer networking, solidity, dapps, incentive systems, applied cryptography
Résumé/CV: On request - my personal website is http://roberts.pm
Email: matthew@roberts.pm
---
First: I want to say I dislike having to market myself. It feels really embarrassing and egotistical... But let me try something...
Hello, I'm a senior blockchain engineer that likes trying to invent new techniques for solving problems and loves learning a lot. Some things I've invented where I was the first [or one of the firsts] to do so include:
- Designing a secure crypto-asset storage protocol with built-in safe-guards for lost keys, incapacity of its owner, and safe-guards against malicious co-signers. My protocol made use of multi-sig with redundant key pairs and time-lock encryption to provide fail-safe recovery options. Today: this general protocol is what is used by some of the most secure asset storage solutions.
- Designing ways to move money across blockchains that don't support complex smart contracts. One such way is to create a contract on Ethereum that releases payment if a person can produce a particular ECDSA signature. The signature is provably insecure and allows for recovery of its associated private key.
1. The idea is that a counterparty would build an ECDSA deposit address on a third-party blockchain that consists of the ECDSA addition of your public key and theirs -- and deposit funds to it.
2. They would then make a smart contract that lets them claim an ether deposit if they provide the provably weak signature.
3. You would make an ether deposit into the contract and they would then provide the signature for you to recover their private key.
4. By combining your private key with theirs you now have a private key that can be used to claim the coins on the other blockchain.
- A variation on the above contract idea would be to have both sides using Ether as a way to ensure the protocol continues on chains that don't support time-locked refunds.
- A key focus of my work on blockchain technology is how it can be used to solve complex trust problems in the online world. One such example is the use of micro-payment channels to incrementally move money between traders without the need for a third-party clearing-house to hold deposits.
- I am particularly interested in the notion of 'algorithmic corporations' - corporations that are regulated entirely by software algorithms - who allow open participation from computers - and whose 'work' can be verified through algorithms. A blockchain is one such example because all of the inputs and outputs to the system can be measured by software. But there are other systems that also satisfy this definition. For example: 'primecoin' is a coin that pays rewards for finding prime numbers.
My professional background is mostly in decentralized trading systems where I've built crypto-asset, token, and futures exchanges on various popular blockchains. But my skill set covers: smart contracts, applied cryptography, security, crypto-economics, and much more. I am currently working on a new peer-to-peer networking stack for Python 3 that will be released as open source. I am extremely passionate about cool tech and motivated. Hope to hear from some cool teams! Thanks a lot if you read this long post.