When I knew I was going to be interviewing Amaury, I saw it as an opportunity to speak with one of the most intelligent people in all of crypto. I was excited to hear his takes on the industry as a whole, but especially about the eCash project specifically.

What I wasn’t expecting was to learn more about Amaury himself. For example, I realized early on in our conversation that he wasn’t much of a dreamer, and more of a doer. He didn’t get into programming because he dreamed of becoming a founder or building a startup, he learned to code because he liked doing it. In other words, he doesn’t do things because of some lofty goal, he does things just because he can.

My second observation about Amaury was he has a lot of humility. But I’m not talking about the kind of humility you might be thinking of. Amaury isn’t the type of person who thinks less of himself, but rather the type of person who thinks of himself, less. Whereas others perceive the world as revolving around them, Amaury seems focused on perceiving the world he finds himself in.

Both of these traits were made evident when he spoke about his experience competing in the Rubik’s cube world championships. In a short period of time, he had managed to become world class in speed cubing, not because he had ever dreamed of becoming the fastest in the world at solving a Rubik’s cube, but because he enjoyed doing it and trained hard to become good at it.

For some, becoming world class in anything might make them think they are better than other people somehow, but that wasn’t how Amaury saw it. Rather than believe he was special in some way, it made him see that nobody was special:

“When I was younger, I had in mind that there were those great people that was not me, and they knew something that I did not, or they had skills that I did not have, or whatever, there was some secret magic potion, you know? When I was young, I was kind of under that impression. What changed that was Rubik’s Cube. So I started solving Rubik’s cube at 18 or 19 or something like that, but within a few years, I was good enough to go to championships and stuff like that. In 2009, I did the world championships, and so on, and I was like okay, those people that are great at something, they are not magic in some way, they are not like special people or whatever. They are just people that are talented and working very hard, and that’s just it. There is no trick. There is no magic. To me that was eye opening, I can do stuff, I can make stuff happen.”

In addition to his humility and his bias to action, the third thing I found interesting was how from a young age, Amaury always had an anti-establishment/rebellious mindset. He saw school as a kind of jail where he had minimal rights and wasn’t allowed to set his own schedule. But it started even earlier than that:

“It’s not just that, right, because even when I was a baby, so I don’t remember, right, but my parents were trying to get me to walk, and I just don’t want to cooperate at all, and one day I just came walking. So I taught myself walking by myself and I didn’t want them to help.”

So to recap, Amaury is someone who likes doing things, who isn’t interested in status, and has a rebellious streak. Sounds like the perfect person to continue the legacy of Satoshi Nakamoto, doesn’t it?

But of course it takes more than just those things to fill Satoshi’s shoes and become the first person to successfully fork the Bitcoin protocol to create a competing chain. You also need to be a world class engineer.

I refer to Amaury as the wise engineer in the title of this article because that’s how I see him. And he isn’t just wise when it comes to software. When asked why he thought the Bitcoin Core developers chose not to scale the network, he explained that it wasn’t due to a lack of engineering knowledge or ability, as he helped me to understand why they might have made the decisions that they did:

“They know that they have something that increase in value and they just want to stay on top of it […] They are worried that if other groups of people take control, they are going to fuck it up, and to be fair, that’s not completely unwarranted as a worry. That leads them to take the road that is the path of least resistance, not necessarily for them, but for people that run their software, because if they are the path of least resistance for people who run their software, then they are gonna stay the software that is in charge of the thing.”

Similarly, when I voiced my frustration with the crypto industry in general, his response was a perfect description of the current situation that few could deny:

“What is the business of exchanges these days, and builders as well? You create some new coins, it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s marketable, and you get some of it for yourself, you distribute some of it to market makers, you distribute some of it to exchanges to be listed, right, then there is the great day where everybody lists it, and this is the day that retail comes, and all the insiders dump on retail, and rinse and repeat. […] This is not something we’re interested in doing.”

It’s this type of honesty that I find so refreshing. Amaury isn’t afraid to speak his mind, but he also doesn’t sugarcoat reality to make things sound better than they really are.

For example, when it came to other blockchain projects, he had no problem saying exactly what he thought of them:

“All the ones I’ve looked into, their protocol is busted in some way, but they just don’t understand well enough what they’ve built to realize it.”

And when I asked him how Avalanche pre-consensus was turning out, he said:

“It’s turning out neither good or bad. It’s turning out pretty much how we expected it to turn out.”

No hype, just what he believes to be true, and it was no different when I asked Amaury what the eCash project needs at the moment:

“I think the project is very solid, actually, and so what would make the difference is mindshare. […] We need to grab mindshare. And it’s a bit of an uphill battle. I explained what is the thing that is happening in the space right now, and it’s not pretty, but it’s what most of the actors are looking for because it’s very lucrative. But nevertheless, it’s an uphill battle, but this is where we need to make progress, and where most of the impact is.”

Thank you again to Amaury for taking the time to speak with me. If you would like to hear the entire interview, click play below. Starts at 3:55 mark.

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