Amiti Uttarwar opened Bitcoin’s code and froze.
She was no stranger to programming languages. Studying information systems at Carnegie Mellon, she spent the first few years after graduation as full-stack developer for Silicon Valley startups. She was proficient in a half-dozen coding languages and had worked for five tech companies in her nascent career. She was working for Coinbase at the time.
This article is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2020 – a list of impactful people in crypto chosen by readers and staff. The NFT of the art, by Osinachi, is available for auction at The Nifty Gateway, with 50% of the sale going to charity.
But she had never read code like this.
“At first I was in disbelief,” she told CoinDesk. “It’s an insanely intimidating project.”
On Peter McCormack’s “What Bitcoin Did” podcast, she likened her baptism into Bitcoin Core – Bitcoin’s primary software version – as more of an introduction to Babel than a revelation.
“Is this…
