The 12 Best Answers from Gavin Andresen's Reddit AMA

Oct 21, 2014 at 22:05 UTCUpdated Oct 22, 2014 at 13:11 UTC. Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen took to Reddit today to engage the community in an ask-me-anything session that tackled a variety of topics both silly and serious.

In his post kicking off the session, the 47-year-old chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation detailed his contributions to the bitcoin space so far.

These included the nine Bitcoin Improvement Protocols he has written, including multi-signature transaction support and the Payment Protocol, plus the thousands of lines of code he has added to Bitcoin Core.

The extended session focused mostly on the future of bitcoin, with Reddit participants asking for Andresen's insights on what they can do to help spread the use of bitcoin and what he sees as the biggest challenges that remain for the technology.

Q: - What is in your opinion the biggest obstacle for bitcoin at this moment? What do you think would be the most important factor in bringing bitcoin to the masses? Where do you see bitcoin is five years?

A: Obstacle/factor: getting to where people are earning bitcoin directly, instead of having to jump through some hoop to trade the currency that they earn for BTC. Bitcoin in five years: uhhh.

Q: - If a country were to "Ban" Bitcoin, how could that be enforced? Is it possible for bitcoin internet traffic be blocked at the ISP level?

Unencrypted bitcoin traffic would be pretty easy to block at the ISP level, but it is also pretty easy to tunnel it through Tor, which is harder to block.

What needs to happen for you to switch from "Bitcoin is an experiment" to "Bitcoin is established"?

Q: maraoz - What are your thoughts on non-financial transactions or uses of the bitcoin block chain?