Position: Mathematician, Blockstream
Education: Masters of Arts at the University of Texas at Austin
GitHub: @apoelstra
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.
