DAN LARIMER: Visionary Programmer of BitShares, Steem and EOS

My name is Daniel Larimer and I am the founder of BitShares. My mission in life is to find free market solutions to secure life, liberty, and property for all.

The purpose of this blog is to help create a free society by encouraging people to join our community which is centered around Bitshares, a next generation fully decentralized crypto-currency exchange. I use Austrian Economics to engineer the economic incentives which make freedom and non-violence profitable.

Dan is one of those rare super gifted nerds (I use the term, ‘nerd’ affectionately in this case) who is so busy working out the details of his next invention that I’m pretty sure he doesn’t make time for things like going out with friends or relaxing with a beer or two. In fact, Dan told me that he has never even touched a drop of alcohol in his life. Well he corrected me recently: he has had wine but never has been drunk before.

Dan’s Background

Daniel Larimer received a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2003. He is currently focused in the areas of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, decentralized exchanges, economic systems and freedom.

In 2009 he was attempting to engineer a digital currency when he discovered Bitcoin. He immediately got involved with Bitcoin and began communicating with Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto in a Bitcoin forum. At this time he was alarmed by the amount of centralized exchanges being arbitrarily shut down. He came to the conclusion that decentralized exchanges would become necessary. It was several years later that he created BitShares and invented BitUSD which is the first trustless cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar. For over two years he innovated and fine-tuned blockchain technology to support a decentralized exchange. The resulting technology is called Graphene and is what powers BitShares and Steem.

Dan Larimer is the co-founder of Steemit, Inc and its CTO until march 2017. He is the main architect of the Steem blockchain and Steem cryptocurrency. He’s also the CEO of Cryptonomex, Inc. which is a blockchain technology consulting company that was founded with his father, Stan Larimer. He founded the decentralized exchange BitShares and Invictus Innocations. He originated the idea of the “decentralized autonomous company” or DAC.

If you’re asking yourself right now, “What is BitShares?” Dan answers this question in his blog. To summarize, BitShares is a network, bank, ledger, company, exchange, software, community, currency and Dan asserts that it’s even a country. It’s not an easy concept for most people to grasp. It’s probably an invention 10 years ahead of its time, but judging from Coinmarketcap today, people are beginning to catch on now. BitShares is based upon many of the same principles as Ethereum’s The DAO.
-Steemcenter, co-written by Steemit community

If you really want to dive into the Dan Larimer rabbit hole, watch this video where he asks Vitalik Buterin some tough questions about Ethereum in 2014:

If you thought BitShares was hard to grasp, EOS, is perhaps even more ambitious and difficult to understand for the average person. It took me several weeks just get a basic understanding of it, but thankfully, the EOS White Paper has just been released.

EOS is easier to understand when you recognize what problems it’s trying to solve. Right now, blockchains have several problems that need solving: they are hard to scale up (look no further than the Bitcoin scaling war), they are costly (Ethereum charges a gas fee to use its network), they lack interoperability and they are difficult for legacy companies to navigate. Blockchain technology is redefining the entire internet, but for most company owners, there’s no easy way to adopt this brand-new revolutionary technology. I believe EOS is trying to make blockchain technology easy to adopt, by creating a blockchain operating system for companies.