Today Forbes posted an article about fiatjaf (npub180c…h6w6) and the creation of #Nostr. While most of the article won’t bring any new information to the Nostr OGs’ table, we’d like to share some interesting facts about Fiatjaf, covered in the story, that we bet you weren’t aware of:
- @Fiatjaf says he was born in 1991 in Brazil’s populous southeastern region.
- While on a field trip with his school to a local Fiat auto factory, he received a hat with the company’s logo. Years later, when choosing a username for an online game, he saw the hat on his desk, merged it with an older identity, JAF, the meaning of which he declined to share, and resulting in his nom de guerre.
- In the early 2010s, while studying economics at a university in Brazil, he grew enamored of the Austrian school of economics.
- Fiatjaf discovered bitcoin in 2011. Immediately, he tried his luck at mining.
“It wasn't very fruitful. I mined for an entire night, and I got 5,000 Satoshis”
- Jaf worked on an experiment called Piln, that let servers charge small amounts of bitcoin for storing files on a decentralized database.
- He also worked on the Etleneum project, which integrated bitcoin with smart contracts, letting developers write sophisticated transactions.
- Jaf’s path started leaning towards Nostr when software developer Arc asked for help hacking Pac-Man arcade game to make it accept bitcoin.
“Months later,” Arc recalls, “when I was reading the protocol, I was like, ‘Dude, this is like Diagon Alley,’ and he said, ‘That's one of the things which helped influence the creation of Nostr.’ So I instantly had a vested interest.”
“A lot of the things people wanted to see built on bitcoin, actually could just be built on Nostr.” – Ben Arc
Read Fiatjaf’s Nostr Manifesto: https://fiatjaf.com/nostr.html
Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/05/30/bitcoin-social-network-nostr-creator-fiatjaf-/