Choosing a Career in Bitcoin Open Source Development
Speakers: Adam Jonas
Date: April 21, 2024
Transcript By: aassoiants via review.btctranscripts.com
Tags: Career
Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qas090xjdGw
Introduction
Why choose a career in bitcoin open source? My name is Adam Jonas. I work at Chaincode Labs. I’m here to hunt unicorns.
The Current State of Bitcoin Development
We’re gonna start off with a couple of numbers that might surprise you. There are roughly 150 people in the world that work on bitcoin open source infrastructure. Around 30 of those work full-time on Bitcoin Core. I’m looking for 31.
What Drives Bitcoin Core Developers
To find out if you’re this special person, let’s start with a quick inventory. What motivates you?
- Is it money?
- Professional freedom?
- Interesting problems or working in a meritocracy?
- Building for the long term?
- Having impact or prestige?
If these things (professional freedom, interesting problems, meritocracy, building for the long term, impact) light you up, then we should talk.
The Vision of Bitcoin
Now I think it’s a reasonable thing to say that in many ways our modern world is a ridiculous place.
- Isn’t it ridiculous that your money loses 10% of its value every year?
- Isn’t it ridiculous that I can’t send $5 to billions of people around the world?
- Isn’t it ridiculous that every single digital payment that you make is tracked?
- Isn’t it ridiculous that any government can extrajudicially seize your money if you speak out against them?
If you agree that these things are ridiculous. If you think there should exist the ability to freely send a digital transfer of value between two consenting parties, then you probably recognize that our money is due for an update.
Money is a technology that’s been around as long as society itself. It’s awe-inspiring to imagine reinventing our money from scratch in an open digital form. Bitcoin is narrowly focused on being a true native currency for the internet age rather than contorting our old money into something ostensibly digital. Bitcoin is not a refactor, it’s a rewrite.
This isn’t disruption in the way that you’ll find in the standard pitch deck. This is a rejection of the status quo. So, while bitcoin is a peaceful resistance, it’s a resistance nonetheless.
The cyberpunks discussed this kind of project for decades. Then, one of them made it.
Bitcoin is a check on the powers who seek to control their citizenry through financial controls and mass surveillance. Bitcoin was created to cause trouble. Bitcoin is here to do nothing less than pull off one of the biggest hacks of all time: to replace the world’s money with a new money, a better money. Built by an ideologically driven group of nerds who think that they can do better.
Building the Digital Cathedral
I’d argue that this is a unique period in the arc of this project. I’m not entirely certain that we’re going to be able to realize the audacious goal of making this new money the default standard for the world. But you’ve got to admit, we’ve gotten surprisingly far.
People are using bitcoin in real ways to evade repressive regimes and store their savings in a sovereign way.
To pull this off, we need to build something that can last. Something that can weather the changes of history and outlive us all. We’re building a digital cathedral. Something beautiful, something full of meaning and purpose. Something to be proud of.
From the start, this was not meant to be a move fast and break things kind of endeavor. The cryptography is battle-tested. The pace of development is deliberate, because this is our one chance. This long-term vision was coded in the first release. The halvings are programmed until 2140. Have you ever heard of a piece of software that was designed to last over 100 years?
Contributing to Bitcoin’s Decentralization Properties
For this to succeed over the long term, we need craftspeople who care deeply. Not because someone told them to care. Or they’re trying to collect accolades for their resume. Or looking for a promotion. But because they believe in what they’re doing and are willing to raise their hand to do the work that needs to be done.
We need people that will defend the decentralization properties that makes this valuable over the centralized alternatives.
What the world sees is an ultra-reliable network with no service interruptions. And since software is supposed to break at some point, the fact that bitcoin just works has outsiders assuming that nothing is being changed or updated. What they don’t see are those stepping up to write that fuzz test, to attest to that reproducible build, to monitor the upstream dependencies, and all the other things that keep bitcoin going. They don’t see the decentralized swarm, each individual choosing how to contribute and what needs to be done.
There is no manager to tell you what to do. No one saying how to define your success, how to direct your attention and focus, how to structure your day. This kind of freedom requires initiative and self-awareness. It takes a special person to be excited by such lack of constraints.
Joining the Bitcoin Community
So if this speaks to you, the good news is there are no gatekeepers, no HR screens, no minimum requirements, or pedigree required. There’s nothing preventing you from jumping in. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re able to add value. This means that you’re going to work with some of the most talented people on the planet. And they don’t care about your experience or your background.
The People of Bitcoin
A few examples to illustrate my point.
I met Gloria Zhao in the spring of 2019 as a junior at Berkeley. Soon after I rejected her from the Chaincode residency program because she hadn’t made any real effort to contribute to bitcoin open source projects. But a few months later, she compiled Bitcoin Core for the first time and got hooked. Luckily for us, she had a lot of downtime in 2020 and spent most of it on Bitcoin Core. Over that summer, she’d wake up at 5 AM to get her work in on Core before her Google internship started. After excelling at both jobs, she turned down an offer from Google to work full-time on bitcoin at Brink. Two years later, she was nominated for maintainership, and today she’s one of five people on the planet that can merge code into Bitcoin Core. She had the drive, she made the time, she acquired the skills, and she earned her opportunity. Bitcoin is better because Gloria is here.
As you might imagine, in a privacy-focused project originally authored by a nym, nyms are pretty common. Their contributions are just as useful as anyone else’s. ZmnSCPxj, more easily referred to as Zman, showed up in 2017 on the Lightning-dev and Bitcoin-dev Mailing Lists. Zman’s posts were long, thoughtful, and deeply, deeply technical. For years, no one knew who Zman was or where he came from. But seven years on, Zman is as trusted as anyone. Bitcoin is better because Zman is here.
There’s Hebasto. In 2018, Hebasto started contributing to Bitcoin Core on nights and weekends while working IT at a university in Ukraine. He contributed a lot of code and a ton of review, and was able to transition to full-time work on Core. When his country was invaded, he had already spent years building the very technology that allowed him to walk his life savings over the border in an undetectable way while others struggled to access their bank accounts. Bitcoin is better because Hebasto is here.
There’s Ishaana. Ishaana started working on Bitcoin Core as a 15-year-old. Her ideas have far outpaced her experience. She taught herself the code and started to concentrate on the Bitcoin Core wallet. A couple of years in, she’s one of the most promising contributors to the project. Not because of how many years she has in software or even on this earth, but because she’s curious, humble, and driven. Open source isn’t about your credentials, it’s about what you can contribute. Bitcoin is better because Ishaana is here.
Recruiter’s Pitch for Working in Bitcoin
Each one of these contributors matters a great deal. It’s not a mystery of how to become valuable. Do useful work, tackle hard projects, develop expertise in complex areas that need work to be done. If you can do that, then you will create immense leverage for your effort.
Let me try to say this another way. What if a recruiter showed up and delivered this pitch? We are a 15-year-old organization with a track record of reliability. We have product market fit as an inflation-resistant savings technology. And we have our sights set on becoming the default payment rail for the world. We’re growing. Our market cap is $1.2 trillion, and has doubled since last year. That makes us equivalent to the eighth most valuable company in the world. There’s no egocentric founders to worry about, no VCs to satisfy. Our engineering team is made up of just 150 remote devs. As a member of that team, you can choose to work on whatever you think is the most impactful. No need to interview for a role with us. If you’ve got the skills and the drive, you can start right now. Are you ready to sign up?
Bitcoin Tackles the Most Interesting Problems
Maybe the most compelling part of this is that bitcoin has the hardest and most interesting problems.
Bitcoin sits at the intersection of economics, game theory, philosophy, security, and of course, computer science. It’s a distributed system deployed in an openly hostile environment that values privacy and intends to scale across the globe.
In short, it’s a big challenge. It’s not just a theoretical challenge. Bitcoin is the biggest honeypot in history, and yet there hasn’t been downtime in more than 10 years. This is despite tens of thousands of nodes running on strangers’ Raspberry Pis and Amazon data centers, gossiping transactions and blocks in the most adversarial conditions imaginable. With a code base that anyone can audit.
And yet, bitcoin just keeps running. And it’s not like people aren’t trying to break it.
Examples of Challenges Bitcoin Seeks to Address
Bitcoin is where the theory of computer science and security are put into practice. A few examples.
I told you that we need to defend the decentralization properties that make this valuable over the centralized alternatives. So the question is, how do you incentivize decentralized mining by reducing the latency of block propagation?
Answer: the fiber network is a network optimized to propagate blocks quickly among miners. It takes advantage of erasure coding and forward error correction to do set reconciliation across the network’s participants. These are relayed over strategically located nodes using UDP. It’s so efficient that the bottleneck isn’t computation or bandwidth, it’s the speed of light.
I told you that we value reliability because the expectation is that bitcoin cannot stop working. So the question is, how do you ensure that nodes have a sufficiently diverse set of peers to prevent network partitions and Eclipse Attacks? Answer, the ASMap project aims to map which ISPs control which IP addresses across the internet. This raises the bar for an attacker that could take advantage of the fact that ASNs have addresses in multiple /16 network groups.
I told you that bitcoin values individual privacy. So the question is, how do you privately reuse bitcoin addresses for donations? Answer, silent payments, a non-interactive address generation scheme without any on-chain overhead.
I told you that bitcoin needs to be able to operate at global scale. So the question is: how do you take bitcoin transactions off-chain to increase settlement speed and lower transaction fees? An answer is the Lightning Network, a network of payment channels based on multi-sig smart contracts for near-instant and low-cost transfers.
The Broader Bitcoin Ecosystem
But Bitcoin isn’t just software. To think of bitcoin as only software neglects the fact that bitcoin is an ecosystem of both bits and atoms. It’s a network that is constrained by the physical world to protect against large-scale attackers. A network where miners optimize both silicon and algorithms. A network where the economically motivated support the system as a whole.
Bitcoin is a playground of game theory with the incentive structure (that), at least so far, has encouraged participants to be good actors. All with a trillion dollars on the line.
Bitcoin has taken advantage of the available state-of-the-art in computer science, but it’s also paved the way in many other ways. Multi-signature research, deterministic builds, a performant elliptic curve cryptography library, and of course, blockchain itself, all came from bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a good idea and this is an opportunity to join a legacy of troublemakers looking to disrupt the status quo by solving a set of technical problems previously thought to be impossible.
If you’re looking for what to do next, the Bitcoin Development Project was created for that purpose. You’ll find reading and coding tutorials as well as pointers to projects looking for contributors. But while reading and getting oriented is a valuable use of time, the simple formula to onboard onto an open source project is to download the project, run the software, find bugs, and fix them for everyone else.
Will You Be Part of the Change?
The powers that be are rooting for us to fail. They are waiting to tell us that we were wrong. That our little toy is of no real use. That we have no alternative but to turn back to the status quo and the machinations that power it. If bitcoin breaks, this experiment is over.
And so all that remains is to ask the question, are you (Bitcoin Core developer number) 31?
You’ll have the option to join a startup or start your own. Big tech will always be there. But selfishly, I’m here to recruit you because I want you to be part of a structural change to bitcoin open source development.
Together with Gloria, Zman, Hebasto, and Ishaana, you can usher in a new era of builders. Who lend new energy and fresh perspectives to the problems that bitcoin is designed to solve.
If you’ve gotten this far, then you have all the tailwinds behind you to do great things. So I have no doubt that you’re going to succeed.
The question is, will it matter?
There’s a career waiting for you that requires no interview and can change the world as we know it. If you think you are 31, it’s my job to help you.
We need more troublemakers. So I hope that you’ll join us.