New Spiral Grantee: Amiti Uttarwar
Amiti Uttarwar focuses on coaching other Bitcoin contributors as well as improving the security and privacy of all bitcoin nodes by harnessing the benefits of alternate networks.
- "Amiti Uttarwar (@amizi) is a brilliant bitcoin dev who supports brilliant devs. She currently coaches five bitcoin contributors, teaching them the ropes while only wearing track suits," Spiral Twitter account wrote.
“Every time I felt like I was about to hit a wall, Amiti taught me how to build a ladder and overcome whatever technical, emotional, or social problem I was facing.” - Stacie Waleyko, Bitcoin developer and educator.
Amiti also focuses on unlocking Bitcoin privacy and security improvements via alternate networks. In her own words:
- "Building on my years of experience in P2P in Bitcoin Core, I am working to improve support for alternate networks in
bitcoind. Within bitcoin’s lifetime, the number of bitcoin nodes estimated to use Tor has increased by 2 orders of magnitude." - "We have also introduced support for other networks, namely I2P and CJDNS. While bitcoin users can run nodes on multiple networks right now, the benefits are limited and often require a deep level of understanding from the node operator."
- "I am working, in collaboration with Martin Zumsande from Chaincode Labs, to improve the security and privacy for all bitcoin nodes by better harnessing the benefits of alternate networks. Our current project is to enable automatic connections to nodes on every network that a user has enabled. With our work in #27213, if a user has enabled clearnet (IPV4/IPV6) and Tor on their bitcoin node, the node will strive to ensure at least one of their 10 outbound connections is to an onion peer on the Tor network."
- "Other potential improvements involve utilizing alternate networks for stronger privacy in initial broadcast, changing the rebroadcast logic, and much more."
- "We are also working to increase the number of outbound block-relay-only connections that a node enables by default."
"I look forward to discovering what progress we can make over the course of the next year to improve support for alternate networks in Bitcoin Core," Amiti wrote in her GitHub overview.
