15-Year-Old 'Bitcoin Kid' Wants to Make Ethereum Easier

Whit Jackson, a 15-year-old boy, is now attending Brentwood School in Los Angeles, a K-12 co-ed full-time school, where he will soon become a sophomore.

At school, Jackson was different from other children in one way. Everyone called him "Bitcoin Boy". This nickname seemed to have been firmly attached to Jackson, and no one seemed to be able to explain its origin.

“All my teachers knew me as a ‘Bitcoin kid,’ and I told some of my friends, and it spread because I was really passionate about it. I would wear a Bitcoin T-shirt and they would make fun of me,” he told CoinDesk.

Another reason is that after school and on weekends, Jackson devotes his energy to cryptocurrency projects. Currently, he serves as the chief technology officer of Etherparty, a platform designed to make it easier for developers to issue smart contracts on Ethereum, and he also served as a summer intern at Tether, a blockchain asset trading platform.

Jackson, who says he was inspired to work on the distributed application development platform after reading the Ethereum white paper written by Vitalik Buterin, another 21-year-old wunderkind, joined Etherparty earlier this year after an enthusiastic invitation from Etherparty CEO Lisa Cheng.

“The idea of ​​Etherparty is that it’s much easier than Ethereum,” Jackson explained. “When you write your code and deploy it to a server, you don’t have to build your own server and you don’t have to use the command line to build contracts. We can do it very simply.”

He said Etherparty’s goal is to bring mainstream developers to Ethereum.

Inspired by Dogecoin

While Jackson mentioned Bitcoin as one of the factors that motivated his work, another cryptocurrency may be more of a reason for Jackson's interest.

Jackson said that when he first learned about Bitcoin in the fall of 2013, he didn't feel much interest until the popular Dogecoin came along.

“I saw Dogecoin pop up on Reddit and was like, ‘Whoa doge! Whoa!’ At first, I thought it was a joke and I didn’t recognize any other digital currency besides Bitcoin,” he recalled.

“It wasn’t finance that made me interested in Dogecoin, it was Dogecoin that made me interested in finance.”

Jackson missed the "crazy rise" of that wave of cryptocurrencies, but he still remembers Dogecoin sponsoring the Jamaican bobsleigh team at the Winter Olympics.

Soon, he was integrated into the community and appeared on the forum, where he first learned programming experience. Jackson said that at the beginning, he was a complete novice, but others were willing to help him learn.

“I wanted to be cool and learn programming from these developers,” he said. “For me, it wasn’t about libertarianism, it was about ‘Wow, I like dogs.’ I thought it was fun and the community was really great.”

To this day, Jackson remains friends with Dogecoin developers, but he is no longer a supporter of Dogecoin.

“I realized that the situation was not very good, and most of the innovation was happening on Bitcoin. All these altcoins were just for speculation,” he added. “But I met a lot of people because of Dogecoin.”

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Even as Dogecoin has faded from the spotlight, Jackson is still honing his skills.

For a time, he was also a moderator for the Reddit community for Tacocoin (a short-lived offshoot of the Dogecoin community), worked as a developer for Opalcoin (an anonymous cryptocurrency), and even served as a speaker at a high-profile hacker conference.

Cheng, CEO of the Etherparty project, recalled that she was hired by Jackson a year ago.

“The first time I worked with him, he hired me,” she said.

"We were just messaging via Skype and email at first so I didn't know his actual age until we spoke on the phone."

In addition, she also said that Etherparty was just a part-time project for the team during the summer, and Jackson himself had a lot of things to do.

Future wishes

As for now, Jackson is still happily honing his skills, having visited a friend at Google in August and expressed interest in working for the tech giant one day.

While he admits that he’s not the most experienced when it comes to programming, he believes that his knowledge of Bitcoin is enough to land him a full-time job in the field.

“It may surprise a lot of people that I plan to go to college and then get a job working in a Bitcoin and blockchain company,” he quipped.

He is currently an intern at Tether, where he said he has been working on “really cool projects” as well as “complex stuff that he’s not allowed to discuss.”

Tether’s chief technology officer, Craig Sellars, spoke highly of the 15-year-old, calling him a “genius.”

“He really gets the essence, he’s really talented at cryptocurrency, and he has a great attitude and is willing to contribute to the cryptocurrency ecosystem,” Sellars said. “It’s really exciting to be able to work with him.”

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