Wow, I was reading up on btcd today and now I heard about Decred. Very interesting project!

(I was getting very frustrated having only one implementation for Bitcoin from Core / Blockstream so I was researching alternative implementations, was even thinking of rolling up my sleeves and writing an alternative implementation for Bitcoin in another language, perhaps in some more "academic" language oriented towards algebraic specification and theorem-proving such as Maude for modularity or ATS for performance. I had heard that the code for btcd was much better-organized, so that's why I was looking at btc, as a way to try to get a good example of modular code for a Bitcoin fullnode.)

And somehow while researching btcd I stumbled across Decred, which apparently has some of the same devs as btcd.

Decred sounds great! I expect that given the experience of the Decred devs with the btcd implementation, Decred could become an important cryptocurrency. I especially like the idea of "baking in" the governance into to the blockchain itself - as we are seeing that Bitcoin's governance-by-reddit-posts-and-github-ACKs is proving to be, shall we say, somewhat "dysfunctional."

I hear there was an airdrop which ended Jan 18, so I'm bummed out, did I really miss the airdrop??

I heard that up to 5,000 verified people could receive the airdrop, so far about 3,244 got verified... so please let me know if there's room for any more people to participate in the airdop, I'd love to be involved in this exciting project!

The programming languages I tend to use are functional (ML, Haskell, etc. - more in the area of theoretical computer science, algebraic specification languages, theorem proving, dependent types, etc.) although of course I can also read C++, golang, etc.

I'm located outside the US, but I studied previously in the US.

Hoping to find out any way I could get involved with Decred, and if there is any chance of the airdrop still adding some additional verified people!