Scott Shapiro’s Blog

I recently joined Matt Zahab on the Crypto News Podcast. We covered all things big tech, crypto, Coinbase, and more. Check it out!

Crypto Career

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Last week, I started working at Coinbase in San Francisco. My new job is to lead the core consumer app product team. We are working to make cryptocurrency more useful for everyone.

Crypto Career

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I’ve spent the last three weeks on parental leave. It’s been awesome getting to know our daughter Ava better. But in between the hundreds of diaper changes, bottle feeds, and 5 S’s, I managed to explore some cryptocurrency projects. Often early in the morning or late at night when mom and baby are sleeping.

Note that none of this is about price or trading, but rather application and utility of cryptocurrency. That’s so much more interesting than candlesticks and ICO’s. So let’s all focus more attention there!

Below are seven of the adventures I undertook:

1. Ava’s birth announcement on the blockchain

Beyond posting on Facebook and Instagram, I wanted a way to memorialize Ava’s birth using cryptocurrency.

Crypto Bitcoin Lightning Network

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I’m addicted to the smart home, but have struggled for years to find a solution for our heater in San Francisco, USA. Nest wouldn’t work. Here’s how I resolved it.

My thermostat is old and analog. I wish I had a Nest

I live in an old house, built in the 1950’s. But I’m making it smart. The first step was Alexa, with TP-Link smart bulbs and Sonos. Then I integrated my rooftop solar system with Messenger.

Now that Winter Is Coming, it’s time to focus on heating: pre-heating the house before we get home from work, and again before we get out of bed in the morning.

Hardware IoT

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Bitcoin hit $3,000 earlier this week. Then it dropped by 30%. In honor of that arbitrary high watermark and even higher volatility, I wanted to share the first year of my journey into cryptocurrency.

I first discovered Bitcoin in February 2013.

On a cold winter morning in Menlo Park, a colleague was talking about blockchain this and crypto that. It didn’t make any sense. Miners and block rewards? What? But I remembered seeing a couple headlines on YCombinator’s Hacker News and figured this was something to learn about. So I went on Coinbase, which had just recently launched. I paid $21.65 for 1 bitcoin.

Crypto Bitcoin

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I recently started building a Messenger Bot. This is a series describing how I approached it and what I learned.

Why build a bot?

I had a specific problem to solve: was my rooftop solar power system working?

Wait, what does a bot have to do with power production? That sounds like a ridiculous question today. 10 years from now it won’t. Bots are going to be the future of how we interact with products and services.

Bots Coding

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