Experts

Jennifer Greenberg is Founding Chief of Staff at RainCards.

Rain

Jennifer Greenberg

I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.

In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin. At first, I was skeptical, and did not understand how it could possibly have value without physical backing. But slowly I became more and more interested. I started writing for a blog called Bitcoin Weekly initially at a meek wage of $1.5 per hour, and soon with Mihai Alisie cofounded Bitcoin Magazine.

In 2012, I entered the University of Waterloo; in 2013 I realized that crypto projects were taking up 30h/week of my time, so I dropped out. I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realized that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general - hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since.

Vitalik Buterin

Ari Paul is the CIO of cryptocurrency hedge fund BlockTower Capital. Prior to his time in the crypto space, Paul was a portfolio manager for the University of Chicago's endowment, as well as a derivatives trader. He is interviewed about his views on crypto regularly by publications like BusinessInsider and Forbes.

Ari Paul

Elizabeth Stark is the founder of Lightning Labs, which develops Lightning, an open protocol layer for blockchain. She is also a fellow at Coin Center, a cryptocurrency policy institute. Stark is an advisor to numerous AI and blockchain startups, and previously taught at Stanford and Yale, and holds a law degree from Harvard.

Elizabeth Stark

Tone has worked on Wall Street for almost 10 years starting as a Risk Analyst at Bear Stearns and later becoming a VP at JP Morgan Chase in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

His expertise is in Economic Trends, Trading and Risk Analysis. Ever since getting involved in the Crypto Currency ecosystem in early 2013, he has been very active in spreading the relevance and importance of this technology as it helps promote economic freedom. Tone has been featured in several Documentaries like Magic Money & Bitcoin - Beyond the Bubble.

Tone is now an independent content creator at ToneVays.com and on his YouTube Channel focused on sound economics & finance. Tone holds a Masters Degree in Financial Engineering from Florida State University along with Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics and Geology.

Tone Vays

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.

After a long career at Sun Microsystems, where he became a Sun Fellow, Diffie served for two and a half years as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (2010–2012). He has also served as a visiting scholar (2009–2010) and affiliate (2010–2012) at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he is currently a consulting scholar.

Whitfield Diffie

Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur and investor.He first gained attention for innovations in banking and startup finance. Today he is known as the mentor of the PayPal mafia of entrepreneurs, as well as for his warnings of a coming technology deficit with severe economic consequences. He works to accelerate innovation to prevent such a crisis by identifying and funding promising technology ideas and by guiding successful companies to scale and dominate their industries.

In 1998,Thiel made e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure by co-founding and leading PayPal, which now has more than 128 million active financial accounts. In 2002, he sold PayPal to eBay and founded a global macro fund, Clarium.In 2004, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, which offers platforms for finance companies and intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to integrate, visualize, and analyze the world’s information.

In the same year, he made the first outside investment in Facebook, a social networking hub that now has more than a billion million active members. He serves on its board.

Building on his personal success as a venture capital investor, Thiel co-founded and manages Founders Fund, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital fund that has pioneered new methods of venture financing that benefit founders. Through Founders Fund, as well as through his private investing, he has helped the next generation of tech companies, such as SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, RoboteX, and Spotify.

And in 2012 he co-founded Mithril Capital Management, an international technology investment fund.Thiel established and funds the Thiel Foundation, which promotes freedom in all its forms. He sponsors the Committee to Protect Journalists, The Seasteading Institute, and the Human Rights Foundation. He funds the artificial intelligence research of theMachine Intelligence Research Institute.

He also aids work against violence through theOslo Freedom Forum and through the research of philosopher René Girard, which is extended and promulgated by Imitatio. He also promotes better health by funding the longevity research of Dr. Cynthia Kenyon and the SENS Research Foundation.Thiel created the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, which nurtures the tech visionaries of tomorrow. And he formed Breakout Labs to help independent scientists, engineers, and inventors advance their most radical ideas.

Thiel earned a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and technology and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution.

His articles have appeared in Policy Review and the Wall Street Journal. He co-produced the film Thank You for Smoking, was rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, and received the Innovation Award from the Economist in 2010. He lives in San Francisco.

Peter Thiel

Charlie Lee is Creator of Litecoin, ex-Director of Engineering at Coinbase.

Lee created Litecoin while working at Google, where he served as a Software Engineer. He worked on YouTube, Chrome, and Play Games.

Although Lee was immediately excited by cryptocurrency, he was unhappy with the early altcoins. He claimed that most didn’t offer any true differences or advantages over Bitcoin.

Thus, Lee created Litecoin in 2011. Its Scrypt proof of work function was meant to keep mining distributed and fair. Unlike most altcoins at the time, Litecoin was launched publically and had no premine. Lee also cut Litecoin’s block time from Bitcoin’s 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes.

Despite being the creator of Litecoin, Lee claims “that in order for Litecoin to succeed, Bitcoin must first become adopted by the mass”. He currently spends about 95% of his time working on Bitcoin projects.

Charlie Lee

Andrew Poelstra is a Mathematician at Blockstream. He has dabbled in software development for the last twenty years, in open-source cryptography for ten.

He became involved in Bitcoin in late 2011, and joined Blockstream cofounders Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille in developing the high-performance cryptography library libsecp256k1.

His latest major project has been Mimble Wimble which is described as a blockchain design with no script support and blinded amounts. Like proverbial black holes, transaction outputs have no hair. This simplicity allows aggressive compaction and aggregation, resulting in a blockchain with much better scalability than any other design to date.

He has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Simon Fraser University. While completing his Masters of Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote and co-wrote several papers about Bitcoin, practical cryptography and mathematics.

Andrew’s other interests include jazz piano, cycling and exploring the world. He hopes one day that blockchains will enable private and censorship-free transactions for all people regardless of their political environment.

Andrew Poelstra

Jeff Garzik is Builder, Co-founder Bloq Inc, Space Chain & others, proud son of a USMC F-4 pilot.

Husband, father, futurist, author, bitcoin core developer, Linux kernel engineer, cloud computing hacker, armchair foreign policy nerd, kinda sorta libertarian.

Jennifer Greenberg

Chief of Staff at RainCards.