For someone who spends his days building the future, Jeff Garzik is a pretty humble guy. In fact, you’d be forgiven for never having heard of him, even if – like a growing number of Americans – you use the products of his labor every single day. In an industry with no shortage of self-promotion and inflated egos, Garzik is an outlier, an unassuming presence in a sea of proselytizing tech ambassadors who are all exalting the future of money.

I’m talking, of course, about Bitcoin. Garzik, the overtly polite family man I met over burgers in Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the people in the world most responsible for making it happen and keeping it together.

Garzik is hard to pin down. The day we met, he had just gotten back from Abu Dhabi, where he spent the previous week meeting with sheikhs and UAE businessmen about Bitcoin and its ever more popular analog, the blockchain. Although we had met on a couple of occasions, I was struck, as always, by his modesty and humility.

Recently, Garzik has focused on the issues of scaling and security, looking for ways to safeguard mining nodes against attacks. After he briefly working to put with the bitcoin in space (his company, Dunvegan Space Systems, would have floated bitcoin nodes in satellites but failed to gain traction) he has formed his first large Bitcoin startup, Bloq, whose mission is currently described in generic terms as “professionalizing the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.”

Garzik has the best ratio of braggadocio to actual accomplishments in the Bitcoin community. That is, he has very little of the former, and a staggering amount of the latter. As one of the most prolific programmers to work with the open-source Bitcoin protocol, he has made over 1,000 “commits” to the system1, and has served as one of the community’s most judicious voices since he got involved back in 2010. He’d be a great candidate for someone to make decisions for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, unfortunately because the idea of a “king” of Bitcoin is antithetical to the ethos of open-source, he’s the last person who would accept such a position.

Science Fiction becomes reality

Jeff Garzik started programming at the age of eight. His father, a fighter pilot in Vietnam who passed away a few years ago, got into IT after returning home from the war.