Bitcoin Developer Since 2012, Tamas Blummer Dies After 3 Year Battle With Cancer

Programmers contributing to the development of Bitcoin’s open-source protocol deserve credit for helping the technology to scale to a large extent after Satoshi Nakamoto brought the network to limelight in 2009.

Tamas Blummer was arguably one of such programmers, having gotten involved with Bitcoin in 2012. He was an active code contributor from then till thirteen days ago when he updated rust-wallet, a library for building a Bitcoin wallet.

However, according to an update from Adamant Capital Founding Partner, Tuur Demeester, Blummer has died after battling cancer for three years. He passed away on January 12, 2020.

RIP @TamasBlummer. These past three years you fought cancer, and you fought it valiantly. I will dearly miss your friendship, wise words, and humor. Thank you for the many lessons on Bitcoin and life. It hurts to say goodbye. pic.twitter.com/k4EXRtSsHk

— Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) January 15, 2020

Tamas Blummer’s Bitcoin Legacy

To be honest, Blummer’s near eight years as a Bitcoin developer means that it is nearly impossible to provide a comprehensive list of all his contributions. 

He ran a Medium blog and BitsOfProof, were he shared countless insights about Bitcoin’s development, and also a Github profile with 24 repositories and several hundred thousands of lines of code all dedicated to Bitcoin.

As Tuur Demeester pointed out, Blummer appeared to be one of the persons to understand the transaction scalability issues facing Bitcoin as far back as 2013. He spoke about using modular scaling for the network, years before the Bitcoin block size debate intensified and any talks of lightning/payment channels sufficed.

Germany-based Bitcoin contributor, Timo Strohmenger also noted how Tamas Blummer invented the first use case for multi-sig transactions. Blummer had suggested multi-sig as a feature of tickets to an event that would commemorate Bitcoin reaching the $1000 mark for the first time.

Tamas Blummer also reportedly created a quantitative measurement dubbed Liveliness of Bitcoin which sought to make it easier for anyone to calculate the movements of old and large stashes of Bitcoin.

Here are some of the best tributes to Tamas Blummer as seen on Twitter.

Although Tamas Blummer is no more, his contributions to the growth of Bitcoin will always be remembered by the community.