Jeff Garzik is an American Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 engineer and Bitcoin

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network over which users make transactions that are tracked and verified through this network. The word Bitcoin also refers to the digital currency implemented as the currency medium for user transactions over this network...

 developer. He studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...

 and currently is employed by Red Hat as a kernel developer. He is also the founder of BitcoinWatch, a website for statistics in Bitcoin.

Garzik wrote the original push-pool daemon used by all of the pooled miners today. He's also the original author of ethtool

Ethtool

ethtool is a Unix command that allows to display or modify a NIC's parameters.- Example :To display the current parameters: ethtool eth0Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP MII ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full...

. As an advocate of Austrian economics, Garzik argues that the deflationary aspect of bitcoin makes it a superior currency and that the decentralized nature means it's a fairer means of commerce.