Richard Kiss is a seasoned back-end engineer with 18 years of experience who blends deep cryptographic and distributed-systems expertise with a playful leadership role as CCO of LaffQ.com in Las Vegas. With a strong academic foundation in mathematics (BSc and MA), he has made impactful open-source contributions to notable projects like pycoin and the Chia blockchain, improving signature hashing, segwit handling, and core integer/versioning robustness. He has a proven track record of modernizing legacy codebases—porting BitTorrent DHT tooling to asyncio and refactoring for performance and reliability. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, low-level problem solving around cryptography, networking, and async architectures. Known to enjoy donuts and a relaxed attitude, he pairs that levity with rigorous attention to correctness and performance in production systems.
Python-based Bitcoin and alt-coin utility library.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 reviews, 1433 commits, 141 PRs in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily worked on implementing new functionality and refactoring existing code within the pycoin library. They contributed to the Bitcoin Gold ("BGold") fork, improving the signature hash and the overall functionality of the Bitcoin solver, with a focus on working with Bitcoin scripts, hash functions, and segwit-related features. Their contributions also included improvements in performance and robustness of the cryptographic elements.
Contributions:635 reviews, 348 commits, 131 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily worked on improving the core functionality of the Chia blockchain implementation. Their contributions include adding new features, improving the performance of existing code, and addressing a variety of bugs, particularly those related to integer handling and version control. The user also modified the architecture of the code, migrating from a library to the use of external tools. This suggests they are a key contributor to the core backend functionality of the project.
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