Sergio Lerner and QixCoin #487
Description
Yes, you're referring to Sergio Demian Lerner (often known as Sergio Lerner or @SDLerner), a prominent Bitcoin and blockchain researcher/developer.
In early 2013, he created QixCoin (not "Quickscoin" or "Quickscoin"—the common misspelling seems to stem from phonetic similarity or transcription errors in some interviews/discussions). This was an early experimental cryptocurrency platform he designed, notable for being the first Turing-complete cryptocurrency, meaning it supported general-purpose programmable smart contracts (a concept that predated Ethereum's launch in 2015).
Key details:
- QixCoin was a pioneering effort to bring Turing-complete scripting/smart contract capabilities to a blockchain, well before Ethereum popularized the idea.
- Lerner described it as part of his early explorations into extending Bitcoin-like systems with more advanced programmability.
- The original project website (from around mid-2013) is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130716060048/http://qixcoin.com/
- It didn't gain widespread adoption or become a major live network (it was more of an innovative prototype/research project), but it's recognized in his bio and crypto history as a milestone.
- Lerner later went on to co-found Rootstock (RSK) in 2015, a Bitcoin sidechain/smart contract platform (launched mainnet in 2018) that's EVM-compatible and merge-mined with Bitcoin for security.
This 2013 work positions him as one of the earliest thinkers on smart contracts beyond Bitcoin's limited scripting, even influencing or anticipating ideas that Ethereum and others built upon.
If you're looking for more specifics (e.g., technical details from the archived site, his blog posts on bitslog.com, or related discussions), let me know!