Daniel Larimer (1980–)

On July 28, 2010, a BitcoinTalk user named bytemaster made his first forum post:

“I am convinced that bandwidth, disk space, and computation time necessary to distribute and ‘finalize’ a transaction will be prohibitively expensive for micro-payments. […] 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.”

In the same post he proposed “bit-banks” — trusted institutions that would settle among themselves off-chain, with on-chain settlement reserved for inter-bank netting. The architectural thesis — decouple fast user-level transactions from slow base-layer consensus — would become the design premise of three major blockchain projects he later founded: BitShares (2013–2016), Steem (2016), and EOS.IO (2017, with Brendan Blumer at Block.one). Each implemented Delegated Proof-of-Stake to pursue the same goal by concentrating block production in a rotating set of elected validators. Bitcoin’s own answer to the same problem followed exactly the “off-chain instant, on-chain settlement” pattern he sketched — Lightning, Liquid — but kept the open validator set he was willing to give up.

Daniel Larimer (born 1980) is an American software developer. He resigned as EOS CTO on January 10, 2021.

Later Projects

Between 2013 and 2016, Larimer worked on BitShares, a decentralized exchange platform built on DPoS. In 2016 he moved to Steem, a blockchain-based social media platform. In 2017 he co-founded EOS.IO with Brendan Blumer at Block.one, and served as its CTO until announcing his resignation on January 10, 2021. Each project pursued the same premise: high-throughput consensus by concentrating block production in a rotating set of elected validators.

Significance

Larimer’s 2010 BitcoinTalk posts are among the earliest public arguments that Bitcoin’s base layer would not by itself serve micropayments or retail-speed commerce. History validated both sides of that argument in different ways — Bitcoin layered solutions (Lightning, Liquid) followed exactly the “off-chain instant, on-chain settlement” pattern he sketched, while his own projects pursued it by sacrificing the open validator set for higher throughput. Either way, his 2010 objection marks the point where a coherent counter-vision to pure Nakamoto consensus enters the public record.