Carla Kirk-Cohen
About
About Me
Being of service to others is how I derive meaning from my experience on this strange, wet, spinning rock that we find ourselves on. I care deeply about people who care, and not much about those who don't. So, I love musical theater and team sports in equal measure because they both represent a community of people committing to care about something together.
In my personal life, this means cooking elaborate meals for my loved ones, showing up frighteningly on time (no matter what the NYC subway throws at me), and honoring my commitments - no flaking, no ghosting. Professionally, it means working on technology that I believe can solve real problems for real people.
Impactful Technology
I was fourteen when the hyperinflation crisis in Zimbabwe sent economic refugees fleeing to South Africa, my home country, in search of work. I was just old enough to understand the injustice of seeing a man holding his PhD standing at the side of the road asking for work as a gardener.
When I entered the workforce, I was drawn to Bitcoin because its value proposition seemed so obvious. Here was a technology that could help.
Things haven't quite played out the way my starry-eyed twenty-two-year-old self imagined. Bitcoin has, by and large, benefited people in the West who are at comparatively less risk of currency devaluation, and it has struggled to make inroads where it matters most.
But there are small pockets where Bitcoin has done exactly what it set out to do—funding the EndSARS protests in Nigeria, funding Navalny's campaign, and paying women in Afghanistan. There are many more small and special stories about how this technology made people's lives better, that have nothing to do with a price ticker or speculation. I'm proud to work on technology that has made a real difference in people's lives, even if it hasn't yet fulfilled the vision that first drew me to it.
Complex and Adversarial Systems
I've spent my entire career working on Bitcoin because it offers an endless supply of interesting technical problems. Open an engineering textbook to a random page - networking, distributed systems, cryptography - and you're almost guaranteed to find a topic that's relevant somewhere in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The TV series Mr. Robot came out during the final year of my undergraduate degree (nearly sabotaging said degree through multiple watches and rewatches) and instilled in me a lifelong desire to be a cool, tortured hacker in a hoodie. Working on distributed systems in adversarial environments has been an absolute thrill ever since.
Ironically, for the age we find ourselves living in, machine learning and AI are among the few topics Bitcoin doesn't naturally expose you to. I've greatly enjoyed starting from scratch in a new domain and learning how many of the same questions around robustness, incentives, and adversarial behavior emerge in a completely different environment. I've also had some fun testing my own work against AI-driven adversaries. At least, when I'm not being thwarted by Fable's guardrails.
People Who Care
I came to my career in open-source development by way of the 2019 Chaincode Residency. My manager, Adam Jonas, took a chance on me, and my life was forever changed for it. Watching someone go out to bat for me in the way that he did was formative.
Since then, I've tried to pay that opportunity forward in whatever ways I can. Sometimes that means serving on grant-giving boards or starting training programs where I think good people can flourish. Sometimes it means working one-on-one with junior developers to help accelerate their growth. Sometimes it just means keeping an eye on who's showing up on GitHub and making sure they get where they need to be.
At the end of my career, I'll be happy if I can say that I went out to bat for people who cared deeply, chose the hard thing over the easy one, and built big, beautiful things together.
Working on
Channel Jamming
My primary focus is the specification, implementation, and deployment of a mitigation for channel jamming attacks on the Lightning Network. This is a decade-old unsolved problem for the network. This work was collaboratively adapted from Clara Shikhelman's original paper. More recently, I've become interested in automating the testing of these mitigations against AI-driven adversaries.
BitDevs NYC
I co-host the BitDevs NYC meetup, where we gather monthly to discuss technical developments in Bitcoin and related technologies. We're proud to provide strong technical signal in an industry that is often overrun with price talk and hype. The meetup follows a Socratic seminar format and is driven largely by the interests and contributions of its attendees.
Rust Lightning
I occasionally contribute to the implementation and review of protocol features in rust-lightning, one of the major Lightning Network implementations. Protocol features I've contributed code or review to include v3 channels, attributable errors, and trampoline routing.
Writing
Sometimes I write about my work
Appearances
Sometimes I talk about my work