Welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Today, I am speaking to one of my heroes, John Attack,
a Bitcoin core developer who I wouldn't be here without him.
So, hello, John.
Hey, how you doing?
So, instead of doing the regular letting John tell the world who he is,
I'm going to give you a story about who I am,
And it's going to lead in nicely to this conversation here.
So I started studying Bitcoin in 2016, where I took an online course at the University of Nicosia.
And Andreas Antonopoulos was one of the teachers.
And then I started writing about it on Medium in 2017.
One of the articles about how to take control over your private keys when the whole Bitcoin hard fork happened went sort of semi-viral.
So I kept on writing and I compiled these articles into a book.
And then that was the only book that I had to my name.
And I wasn't very happy with it.
So in late 2018, I figured I should write a proper book about Bitcoin.
And I promised myself to write a page a day for the entirety of 2019 as a New Year's resolution, right?
And as with all New Year's resolutions, you break them after a while.
And I broke mine after 106 days.
And what came out of that was a book called Sovereignty Through Mathematics.
It's my first proper Bitcoin book.
It looks like this, or it looked like this, rather.
Nowadays, it's been slightly re-edited and redesigned.
It looks like this.
And I published it in June, or I think in June, or May or June, and nobody gave a crap.
No one read the book.
Nothing happened with it.
I published the first chapter on Medium, I believe.
And there, John happened to find that chapter, and he really liked it, but he thought my
writing was kind of crap.
And John is a multilingualist who speaks like seven languages fluently and is very good with grammar and stuff.
And the AI wasn't a thing back then.
It's also a thing to know.
Grammarly wasn't invented yet and so on.
So John started helping me rewrite the book to make it better.
And he also had a lot of technical knowledge and expertise and could point out where I was wrong and just make the whole thing a whole lot better.
and after that i took 50 books um 50 of these paperbacks in my uh i brought them in my hand
luggage to baltic honey badger in riga uh the og conference and uh i i sold 25 of them for
cash on chain and lightning payments and i gave the other 25 away to bitcoiners that i liked
and after that the book sort of started to take off and it got a life of its own and i got a lot
of new contacts and a lot of good things happened uh eventually uh michael saylor put it on his
hope.com website when uh when he got into onto the scene i i got a very surprising dm from saylor
saying that he read the book and really liked it and that would not have happened hadn't it been for
John Attacks. So a deep warm welcome to this show, John. I have been wanting to tell this story
since 2019 because you haven't been properly given proper attention to all the work you put
into this book. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything you did there.
Yeah, seven years later.
Yeah, exactly. And the story doesn't end there, though. I'm going to babble on for a bit longer
here because we had conversations from, I believe, from May to August in 2019. That's when we worked
on the book. And you devoted quite a bit of time to it and really did the work. But then all of a
sudden, at one of the very last chapters, I think the very last chapter, actually, you suddenly
pulled out and you said some things that were sort of surprising to me. And I'm going to read
from a DM here. This is John talking. While I understand very well the ideas you express in it
and can relate to them as someone who is also on the spectrum, it is too unnuanced,
too unbalanced, and too unpolitically correct to risk putting my name to it, particularly for any
potential open source sponsors in San Francisco and New York City. This is the sort of content
that has nothing to do with my work on Bitcoin and could be damaging in the same way it was for
James Damore. Do you remember? I hope people remember James Damore. He was the whistleblower
about the DEY stuff in Google, right? If I remember correctly. So what happened there?
Where were you and what led up to you pulling out and not wanting your name on my book?
So I guess that is an interesting segue into our discussion.
I think that was, you said, in August 2019.
So I had been trying to learn to work on Bitcoin Core and contribute to Bitcoin Core starting in February of that year.
and we can backtrack to that and discuss how that actually went down
and what happened during that time
because it was a very interesting time of change.
But I had come back from spending two and a half weeks in the month of June
in New York City in the offices of Chaincode Labs
and I realized that it was probably better for me
as I was at that time non-funded and working more or less full-time for free
trying to contribute to Bitcoin for free
and now that it was without any sort of support of any kind.
And I was no longer working in my previous role
of freelance software engineer,
a very well-paid one at the time before.
And so I was concerned about my ability to get funding.
And at the time, pretty much my only task to get funding
at that point where it was clear
that I was not going to be funded by Chaincore Labs,
my only other real option
was the newly announced creation of Square Crypto.
by Jack Dorsey,
led by Miles Suter,
who I did recommend to Miles
that he select Steve Lee
as the first manager of the new initiative.
And that is, in fact,
it could be just a coincidence,
but in fact, Steve Lee was the first hire.
But my only real chance to have funding at that time,
and there were very few other funding organizations,
was really to convince Steve Lee.
And so I needed to keep my profile
as controversial as possible at a time when there was a strong push for other types of profiles and
identities than mine for developers. And we can get to that later if we need to. I don't hear you, Knut.
Yes, I got a tweet here from Matt Corallo back in April 2018, where he says,
It's long since time the Bitcoin community spent a ton more effort on recruiting and ensuring underrepresented groups,
including women and especially folks with a different background, feel welcome in the community.
So I think this is sort of a start of the DEY culture coming into Bitcoin Core, right?
I think I missed that tweet in 2018,
but I did see the same person
watch a series of tweet storms in May of 2019,
about three months after I had been trying to,
more or less full-time become a Bitcoin core contributor.
That was my one goal.
And so it was very clear to me which way the wind was blowing.
And even the way the process with Chaincore Labs took place,
I had been planning for years to contribute to Bitcoin Core since maybe 2016, when around 2015 or 2016, I don't recall exactly, Vladimir Vanderland, then a longtime mid-maintainer of Bitcoin Core, began to follow me on Twitter.
and to my surprise.
And so I began to follow Vladimir's work on Bitcoin Core
and I very much liked the kind of leadership style
that I saw.
To my mind, that was the best leadership
of an open source project that I had seen.
And I had spent considerable time,
a number of years working on open source
in other areas.
And I wasn't pleased with the leadership style.
And so Vladimir's style appealed to me immensely
and basically inspired me to consider Bitcoin Core as my next path in life.
And at the same time, my work environment,
I was doing a lot of ass-saving, high-profile,
saving missions for large multinationals in Europe
when they would get caught with a bad choice of software team
to implement something key and critical for them.
And so they would call a very small number of people.
I was on that list
of the sort of top little
elite in France where I was
to go and fix things
for them and save them against time
and against space
and the cost would usually be rather
a bit higher than with the Indian
and Ukrainian and wherever
subcontractors they had been working with before
that caught them in the hot water
and so that was getting a bit
well a bit woke
and woke isn't really my thing
and I thought
But both at the same time, I had been saving in Bitcoin for years and believing in Bitcoin, and Bitcoin spoke to me.
And I felt like the cypherpunk ideals of Bitcoin meant that maybe I would be moving towards a team that would be grizzled, gray-bearded sea hackers.
And I thought this was perhaps the place where it's still going to be a bit safe from the encroachment of the—
I don't like to use the word woke or even DEI, but there was critical race theory.
There was all these radical left theories that I had glimpsed during my university days, even way before.
And they terrified me, to be honest.
I never thought they would go anywhere, but they did this slowly, you know, as we all know now,
took over terrain in the academic circles and institutional circles.
And then it sort of exploded during the mid-2010s, more or less.
And that's what I was fleeing.
And I was thinking, okay, Bitcoin seems to be a place where I can maybe avoid this nonsense.
And that turned out to be wrong because just as I started working really full time and stopped doing my previous work to dedicate myself to Bitcoin Core, it came to Bitcoin Core as well.
Yeah.
And so the people funding Bitcoin Core developers at the time, the two companies that come up, Brink and Chaincode Labs, right?
Brink did not exist yet.
Brink did not exist.
So it's Shane Code Labs first.
Brink came about two years later.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm getting it wrong here.
But Shane Code Labs is a private company, right?
I believe the two founders of Shane Code Labs,
they ran a high-frequency trading firm, I believe,
called Hudson River Trading or something similar.
And that allowed them, I believe,
to have the means to have a,
to dedicate part of their very lovely offices
in a New York skyscraper to improving Bitcoin.
And for years, both Sue Asks and Marcos,
I forgot his first name,
were working on Bitcoin as software engineers as well.
Alex Marcos.
Marcos.
Yeah.
I mean, around the same time here as Corallo's tweet in 2018, Adam Jonas comes to the scene, who is a guy that was taught at a school called the Flatiron School in New York, a coding boot camp that was started in 2012, I believe.
Yeah, a very iconic building in New York.
The thing is, so I'm not sure, but at the time, Jonas, he prefers to be called Jonas and not Adam.
Jonas was, I believe, relatively new to Chenko Labs.
He came just before that residency.
John Newberry, I believe, began working at Chenko at around 2017.
And so in 2018 or late 2018, perhaps to very early 2019, or perhaps earlier, Jonas was hired.
But, you know, John was very, very, very active. He had a lot of energy. He was creating a lot of initiatives. Not only was he very prolific as a contributor to Bitcoin Core, he also created the residency.
He created Bitcoin Optech, which was the newsletter, as well as the enterprise outreach for getting them to move to tap using Tapper and understanding Tapper.
He later created the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club in early 2019 as well which I co with him for the first two years And then he later created Brink with Jonas So John Newberry created the Bitcoin Core Review Club created a co Bitcoin
Optic, co-created what was the main name in Touch Tooth, Brink, in 2021, as well as,
I think, the person behind the residency idea at Chaincode.
And the 2019 summer residency was very ambitious.
They were selecting about a dozen people to spend three months in Manhattan, fully housed, all costs covered, as well as receiving, I think, around $8,500 per month to work, basically to dedicate themselves to Bitcoin for three months.
It was very ambitious and very well funded.
And it only ever happened once.
Yeah.
The reason I mentioned this school that he came from is that they were very into the DEY thing.
on their website, there's explicit race and gender-gated fellowships,
BLM era DEI task force.
I mean, New York City, academia, what do you want?
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, but just to mention that this is, I mean, it was in full bloom back then, right?
They had Feelings Friday.
What is a Feelings Friday?
We had Freeling.
he must have taken that with him from there then yes he did so so what what is a feelings friday
i mean i think it was just where people were were encouraged to become vulnerable and express what
they were happy and not maybe not so happy i don't remember exactly it was sort of a circle
we all went around i think it made people both feel good and maybe it was a form of bonding but
There was also vulnerability and sharing.
I wasn't entirely comfortable with it because, well, I don't know.
It's just, it's not like a bro kind of thing, definitely.
Not that I'm a bro kind of person either, but it's just, I don't know.
I don't know how to be.
How do you behave in a situation like that?
I mean, as someone who's maybe a tiny bit on the spectrum, I wasn't the most comfortable I could be.
No, and I imagine a lot of developers to be sort of more introverted than extroverted and maybe not.
Yeah, I mean, personally, I'm only happy working alone.
I can't get things done well working in an office with a bunch of people around me.
That probably was how most Bitcoin Core developers were.
And that is no longer the kind of Bitcoin Core developers we have today, perhaps, because most of them are now in offices.
So either they're all miserable as I would be if I was in office, or maybe they actually like it, or could be a bunch of nuances in between.
But that has completely changed.
But back to Change Code.
So I'm hesitant to discuss on Newberry too much because I owe him a lot of gratitude in a way.
Because Adam Jonas, my first contact with Jonas was an interview for the residency where he basically told me in the first three or five minutes that I would not be going further in the selections.
This was in early March 2019 because they were looking for long-term contributor material and I didn't fit the bill.
What I did not realize at the time was how I did not fit the bill.
And I do believe, based on what I saw afterwards, that they were looking for certainly younger, less, perhaps less independent, more malleable, moldable, maybe more compliant or willing to be in an office.
I was an experienced, independent, mature adult, you know, and I had responsibilities.
I had mortgages.
I had things to pay for.
And so I didn't fit the bill.
And I believe now that ultimately we're looking for something, they had a specific mission in mind.
To put it gently, I believe that their idea was that Bitcoin Core should professionalize and become a bit more like Google and corporatize and offices and professional people who otherwise would have gone to Google was sort of the idea, I think.
and I think there was a more specific idea as well
in the minds of people like John
who created the residency
and Jonas who was hired by John
to help co-run that residency
and Jonas was running the interviews
so I was rejected
and there are only two funding organizations
in all of Bitcoin that have rejected me
over the past seven to eight years
and that was first one was Chainco
and later on the next one was Brink
but and all the other ones
I'm very grateful to have said yes.
But I didn't fit the bill without even knowing more about me
based on more or less who I was.
So things that I probably couldn't change about myself.
And then John, to his credit,
saw that I was doing more reviewing and commits on Thor
than probably half to all of the rest of the group combined
over the next two months.
They were working, meeting together two or three times a week online, preparing for the residency during spring of 2019.
Me, I was at home in France working on Bitcoin Core without any supervision whatsoever.
And I was starting to rack up the reviews as best I could as a new contributor, learning, reviewing.
And then I started getting some commits.
Jonas did say to me, look, we don't know you.
You should get some commits.
Maybe you should do a podcast.
You should get your name out there.
all I wanted to do was work on
four I didn't care about being famous
playing the fame game and that's basically
how I've done it for the last seven years
that was a mistake
fame is very helpful
and more so in El Salvador in fact
but in general
but yet I believe that my work was speak for itself
and it did and within two or three weeks
I got a call from J-Code Labs
and it was basically Jonas saying
hey John Newberry has
watched what you've been doing and he would
like to know if you want to speak with him and I said sure
And Mr. John encouraged me and said, you should be more ambitious, team higher, you could do this, keep going.
And so I did.
And then late May, right around the time when the Blue Mat was writing about diversity in DEI,
they did call me back and say, hey, you're kicking ass more or less.
You want to come to New York City?
So the rejection turned into come participate even though you're not in the full program and getting your costs covered.
and you're not going to earn $8,500 a month.
But I was still invited to come for two and a half weeks
to the Bitcoin part of the residency,
the Bitcoin seminar before they would roll,
receive some work every day in the office.
And so I covered my costs of travel and I did go
and they did place me in an apartment in Queens
with the other residencies, residents.
They called themselves the resis.
Residents, the resis.
And it was a very interesting experience.
in many ways.
I did come out of it a bit depressed.
I can explain why.
But yeah, and so my experience with John
was very helpful to me,
and I'm very reluctant to.
My goal is not to,
and I've always been reluctant to,
to come out with the other things I know
because I'm grateful.
There's a lot of nuance here,
and of course people have
different political opinions and stuff.
I'm just very interested in the connection between wokeness and moral relativism.
And I think like for Bitcoin plebs, they are mostly, I mean, they're leaning towards freedom values and, you know, anarcho-capitalism and such things, which is something I don't see in shitcoiners at all.
And if I look at Brink's sponsors here, for instance, you have Coinbase and you have Zappo Bank, the Draper Foundation, and Marathon, and OKX, and Nexo, and BlockFi, and Gemini.
At the time, there were very few funders.
And to be frank, well, Zappo was one of the only other organizations willing to fund Bitcoin Core developers.
They were funding Anthony Towns, H.A. Towns at the time.
And OKEx was also one of the few that was willing to fund and did fund for a time.
And Coinbase said they would, but they never really did it well.
And they were pretty flaky.
And they left some core developers out to dry, all of a sudden cutting off the funding, if I remember correctly.
So Coinbase was never very good about fulfilling their promise to support developers on Bitcoin, open source developers.
But OK, X did.
Sapo did.
And, you know, I'm uncomfortable with some of the criticisms.
Yes, there may be shit corners funding.
But as far as I have seen, and you have to be fair, I have never, ever felt any coercion in any way.
Maybe I was lucky, but I don't believe I heard it.
I haven't heard from others either.
People telling them to.
I think that sort of coercion happens more in terms of soft power, soft influence, friendships, social friendships, time hung out together.
Not so much because your funder asks you to.
I've never heard of a funder putting strings on their grant.
No.
Apart from doing work.
no no and i i don't believe there's a direct like i'm not accusing anyone of being corrupted
directly and getting a bag of money for for doing corrupt things but but no if if there is corruption
and corruption with quotes i don't want to use overuse air quotes but but if there is sort of
that sort of thing going on it's on a social level yeah but that's sort of what i'm getting at like
Is there a problem if the funders are shitcoiners and then probably not as freedom-oriented?
I don't think anyone at Kraken sees Bitcoin as important as a Bitcoin maximalist does.
If you think that these other things have value too.
Actually, Kraken had a very base founder.
Chesty Howell was base.
Yeah, maybe that's a bad example.
Yeah, and I'm going to do a lot of bad examples here
because I'm not very good at understanding what these things are
in terms of what the companies do.
But I'm interested in the connection between softening up core to DEY values.
And I think in the beginning, Bitcoin core developers were very,
what's the word?
When you're
they weren't afraid of conflict
let's just say that. They were
disagreeable is the word and they managed
to somehow cooperate anyway
and I feel this DIY
thing is a sort of a forced
agreeableness upon
the whole thing. I don't know. What are your
thoughts around that?
That isn't what
concerned, that isn't what impacted
me i i have been personally i felt very very very impacted by the dei push the number one
issue for me for working on core has been a small number of people who are pushing
i wouldn't say purely necessarily for dei but that the result of their they desired a social
change in court that they then enacted and the problem was that if you were not on board
See, someone like me was expected to support this.
I wasn't going to be, at the time, I wasn't going to be the next maintainer because it was quite clear that at the time it was very desired for a female maintainer to be the next one or two maintainers.
And in my eyes, it was quite clear based on many things I saw up close in person as well as in interactions on the repository and other things that the goal was to train up and groom a certain person who was chosen to be groomed as a maintainer at the time, probably for the peer-to-peer layer.
And then that person, at some point, another person appeared on the scene who was also chosen.
and we were more or less expected to support and promote that
and help market these people who benefited from immediate runway of funding,
media coverage, podcasts, articles in the press.
And I personally helped promote them because I was contributing for two years to Bitcoin Optech.
And so I wrote articles that were favorable to their work.
and then after two years of this, I realized that, hey, it took me a little bit of time
because first I just wanted to become a contributor and find funding
and as I wrote to you, I had to be very careful and self-censor
and once I did manage to succeed and find my place,
I became less and less comfortable with the role expected of me
because I felt it wasn't the right thing to do.
didn't think it was a pure meritocracy
if there were people who were chosen
based on their relationships
or based on their identity
who we were expected to support and the problem got much worse than that I can kinpoint it was that time when my Bitcoin poor prolific contributions came to an end
when I was seen as,
it happened on one specific pull request
when I made a review
that was, I believe,
taken personally
and caused a conflict.
Is this, yeah,
Is this in June 2021 by any chance?
Yeah, I mean, it was a full request made by Amidi,
who at the time, I believe, it was pretty clear to me
that she was being trained and groomed.
She had much higher privileges on the repository
than many other people did.
And my review was just technical.
It was not personal.
and it led to a whole bunch of fallout
because, of course, the trajectory of that pull request
changed after my review
because it was an area of code I knew well.
And I realized that I was expected to social approve things
that I didn't technically agree with
and that if I did not,
I was seen as not being supportive of the agenda.
And the whole thing blew up.
It came out that John was actually behind the boy quests because he was defending it rather than Amidi.
And, or he was, he took it on himself.
There was a sort of armor around these people when they were chosen.
It was very risky for you.
See, Amidi had a mentor who was the same A.J. Towns.
and so you would get
John and AJ
and also Fankwik
on your case if you were not seen as
supportive of these people
and there was a sort of a tight
group of
there was a
violence of Roman soldiers
ready to step in and protect these chosen people
if you were not supportive
and they all came to a head
at that one full request which we can
name
that changed the course of my career
so you mean they defended
them because of their gender
or because of their cultural background
and not on technical
you know I think it was
a mix of this person was picked
they were assigned them a mentor
or a mentor would agree to come and help them
I think they were handpicked
whether that was based on their gender or not
I mean
it looked that way
because it didn't appear like the person was exceptional.
The people they picked were not exceptional in other ways.
But, you know, how can you say?
Maybe they just had a special relationship.
Maybe they were mutual fans of each other.
You know, this is human.
There are nuances.
But the problem was because the pattern kept repeating.
And it was very clear to me that I had to be very careful.
You were basically operating on a minefield.
And that is still the case.
It's just a little bit attenuated.
But the PR in question, the pull request that changed the course of my trajectory working on Bitcoin, was Bitcoin Core pull request 22,245.
And there was fallout from that.
I mean, Andrew H.L. acted, Peter Wheeler acted, Ben DeCarmen acted, Marco Falke acted, John Newberry acted.
The whole list of the thing was going to be merged.
Reacts. One neutral comment by Vladimir, the lead maintainer. More comments. And then I made one review comment. I didn't say knack or anything aggressive. I just suggested that this wasn't the right direction.
and i got a bunch of private angry messages from john he took to he took me to the case to me on
the bitcoin board of irc uh myself as well as vassil dimoff as well as the lead maintainer
vladimir and then after that a bunch of people agreed with me suhas daftour who was the expert
in peer-to-peer agreed with me people started lining up with my comment and the port was closed
instead of merged after it had five
acts by the most political contributors.
So I got
a shit ton of hate for that.
And what was the pull request about?
It was
to stop, it was a
sort of a fine
P2P
stop sending send adder V2 message
to block relabel me peers.
It was an area that I knew well
for having reviewed it
intensively and that Vasav Dimov
knew well because he was told he had written
and Lidinger, Van der Landry, well
because Lidinger
had merged it.
So, yeah.
So the three people who really knew it well
didn't agree and then everybody else aligned
with my review. But my review
bucked five acts
by future
maintainer and project owner
Ed Chao, by Peter Wella, who was also
project maintainer and
owner Marco Falke, who was also
maintainer. So three maintainers
that already said yes.
John Newberry said yes
Of course it came out that
John had actually suggested to Amiti
To do this change and so Amiti was just
Proxied and I don't think that
I think it came to light that
A lot of that was going on where basically
John was suggesting things
The problem back at Chaincode that I saw
Was that we were
Expected to help people
That were being
The hand chosen people
We were expected to help them
And that came in the form of private requests to help understand Bitcoin for technical details or to help review code or to help maybe help them figure something out with the code.
And I asked around and it wasn't just me.
It was happening to the other residents who said, yeah, yeah, they asked me too.
And they asked me too.
And basically our role was to help train and support the handpicked people.
But I didn't realize at the time, I just realized that after the months that came after that, nobody was funded except the hand-picked people.
And all the guys were just unemployed and wondering what to do, and there were no perspectives on finding funding.
And I believe three people from that residency are still active on Bitcoin Core and Funded NAN.
But it took me almost a year, and the other two, it took them literally years, maybe three years, to find funding.
and these guys are active today
but it was crazy the sacrifice you had to make
at the time to find funding
in terms of financial sacrifice
and so it was very blatant to the people
who were spending a year, one year, two years, three years
with no income trying to make it work
that's really painful, my dude
that is super painful
that is fucking painful
And I say that with real feeling because I went from earning a lot of money to earning zero money because I was a senior engineer and technically saving assets at multinational corporations on intense missions that were very well paid to being basically a free software open source developer.
And we were watching as the hand pit people would just glide right through with zero financial loss, zero drop in income from maybe their previous job or maybe just straight out graduation later on, right into funding with zero financial difficulty or sacrifice.
And so to my eyes, it was relatively blatant.
And I don't want to speak for the other people, but we were all discussing it.
Like we were sharing our difficulties that we were experiencing in life because here we are.
We wanted to work on Bitcoin or Bitcoin Core or Lightning, as it were, depending on the developer.
And there was no funding and no support.
And we were all struggling.
And so we were taking freelance missions and discussing what we can do and supporting each other.
and while the chosen ones just glided right through on the red carpet that was rolled out.
And it was a little bit disgusting, to be honest.
I mean, yeah, there is bitterness.
And would I have done it again? Probably not.
As much as it was my goal in life, all I wanted to do in life was work on Bitcoin.
And did you apply for funding from Brink here?
Did you get it? What happened?
It didn't exist until...
I think Brink was created the same year as that whole request I cited
that pretty much ended my career in core.
And I didn't explain how that happened, but that could be explained.
But it marked a before and after, a very clear before and after.
I was extremely prolific up to that point.
And after that, everything changed.
And was that just the funding or did you feel like...
I was funded at that time by Spiral.
That was called Square Crypto at the time.
Oh, yeah.
But then Brink was created a little bit after that.
No, Brink was created before that, late 2020, early 2021.
And I had applied before that pull request that I cited.
That pull request I cited was in June 2021, June 14th.
How interesting.
That's my birthday.
It was created on my birthday in 2021.
So I think the week or two before that whole request, I had received word from John, again, that I was rejected.
I did apply to Brink, and I was rejected.
So the only two funding organizations ever rejected me, and thank you to all the other ones,
our chain code labs that said no to me, and then later sort of said yes.
And then to, thanks to my working super hard.
and then um brook i applied to bring in and somebody said no but what was it only the funding
or did you feel a motivational hit there or like were you depressed by this whole thing is that why
you became less prolific i started being funded in march 2020 after on my in my 13th month of
working more or less half-time to full-time on Bitcoin Core.
It was all I wanted to do.
In my 13th month, I received my first funding
with a grant that began with Square Crypto.
At the time, it was $80,000 a year.
My first grant was for $80,000 for one year.
So definitely not in the upper echelon of core developer pay,
but it was a start.
And I could, you know, yes, it was several times less
than I was learning previously as an experienced developer.
But it was something.
And so I was already funded, thankfully, by that time.
And Spiral, Square Crypto, which became Spiral later on,
did fund me for four years before dropping me.
Some people within Spiral nowadays are not very friendly to me.
So, yeah.
But did you feel less motivated after that?
Like, what did you feel internally?
The most demotivating thing,
as soon as you have even a little bit of funding
to make ends meet,
then it no longer really demotivates you
until you see maybe someone else
hitting three times more
who's also a new developer.
Just because the red carpet
was rolled out for that person
and not for you.
But it might be twice more,
maybe three times more.
some people sacked grants very effectively i was actually accused of being the record of older in
sacking grants i wasn't the first i only did it twice actually every other year of the eight i was
on one single grant as i am currently uh with open stats and that is something i'd like to point
out i see a lot of people criticizing all the funding organizations cancel all the funding to
developers on court and i disagree with that and i'd like to mention something and this this this
This criticism does come from the, I would say, the NOS or the BIP-110 side.
They lump all of the funding organizations together.
But they really aren't all the same.
They are very different, in my humble opinion.
So some are more independent than others.
Let's say for the sake of, let's say there's a core orthodoxy.
Let's say there's the core, these are the people we want core.
There are some that will follow that orthodoxy and there are others that are more independent.
And happily, someone wants to remain independent.
And I would say the more independent ones would be OpenSats, notably, and perhaps HRF Foundation.
They have their agenda.
It's not so much tied to core as it is to other things, I would guess.
and then on the other hand
you have the more core-centric funding organizations
like Brink, Chaincode Labs
and Spiral is sort of in the middle
because Spiral has a focus on Lightning
as well as on design
and so Spiral is sort of in its own category
but the core development side of Spiral
is fairly core-centric as well
whereas OpenSats has
OpenSaaS has been willing for years I believe to fund a Knox developer They have recently begun funding a BitCoin developer to work with Eric Vosel
His name is Philip.
And so that's a full-time grant
to work on another implementation.
And it's my understanding is that the only reason
OpenStats does not currently fund a Notts developer
is because they haven't gotten an application yet
from someone who they felt was qualified enough to receive.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
But OpenStats is, I think, clearly willing to support non-core implementations.
Yeah. I've seen, first of all, a thread from Vitalik Buterin back in 2014, where he explains why he didn't try to build Ethereum on Bitcoin,
because he was basically told to fuck off.
And we don't want that here.
We want Bitcoin to be money and simple and one purpose and stuff.
And I think it's the Starkware guy I saw an interview with
where he also says similar things
that a bunch of core developers back then didn't want that there.
The narrative is sort of like, but now core is much more open
and core is much more willing to innovate and all this and at the same time you have this opnet stuff
and the citria stuff and people building or basically doing shitcoin scams on bitcoin uh and
and and the it's like the attitude has completely changed with this and do you think this is
connected like like how how is this connected to the whole wokeness slide and and like if it's not
the funding what what is it why why has the culture changed from from like protecting bitcoin
as money to to more uh shit coins on bitcoin well first of all the people who were the chosen one
that in my experience speaking with him were much more spoke much more highly of vitalik and
and shitcoinery in general, or Ethereum, if you will,
something that I would.
I always considered Vitalik to be a bit of a soothsayer,
you know, playing the magic flute
and the snake charming the VCs sort of thing.
But if I said that to at least two of the hand-chosen people,
the chosen people,
they would very vehemently disagree with me, and they did.
Some of my arguments with them were over shitcoinery and all that.
I was definitely a Bitcoin-only person.
I always have been.
I have zero interest in Ethereum.
I don't really have a high opinion of the other ones.
And so I'm certainly not an admirer of Vitalik, aside from that he's probably quite intelligent in this particular way, obviously, because he's been successful with Ethereum to an extent.
But that's not something I want on Bitcoin or something that I admire as a Bitcoin core developer.
And so, look, a lot of this goes back to my, as I mentioned in my presentation at Plan B, selection criteria matters.
And when you have an organization that is running the developer selection and training pipeline, the selection criteria they are using changes the way your organization will look.
And there was a clear emphasis on a certain type of person.
It was clear for years that the OG maintainers and project owners were either burning out as maintainers, wishing to set back as maintainers, or perhaps preferring to work more on their strengths like research.
And so new people had to be found to pass the torch to.
But the selection criteria for those new people obviously changes everything.
And so if you choose, if you select for people who are young, like shit coins from academia or from, you know, big cities or blue cities or whatever sort of background, woke friendly.
I believe the people who were making the selection, John Newberry did have a what looked to me like a far left political leaning in his other Twitter profile.
He did have another profile account, which I found looking him up.
And I was like, okay, this guy is like radical left.
But I didn't talk about it to anyone actually until now because I was just keen on trying to make, on optimizing my ability to contribute.
And so if you start attacking people, so I just noted and learned about it.
And I said, okay, this guy's pretty far left.
And he chose Jonas.
Was Jonas far left?
Maybe not so much.
He was into baseball
He was scouting baseball talent
But what do you do when you scout baseball talent?
You're looking at youth
You're looking at young people
And so I think that came through
The goal was
Maybe they were preferring
Certain gender or perhaps they were preferring
Certain racial diversity
Maybe not, I'm not sure
Gender I believe was clearly the case
But they were also having preferences
In age
they wanted youth
the wonderkin
who was selected among the men
was Antoine
Antoine was probably the youngest guy
he was 19 or something
maybe 20, 21
but he was very young
and he was brilliant until he had his following up with Cenkow
which I think everybody knows about
if they don't they can look it up
he was also from France and a friend
and it made me very sad what happened
between Antoine and Spiral
Steve Lee, Matt Corral, and between Antoine and his former employer, Chain Code Labs.
But he was the brilliant guy of the residency, and Chain Code welcomed him.
He was the only one, apart from the two women who participated, who got funding.
And I've lost my train of thought.
No, but it's very interesting to me, these dynamics,
because I view the average pleb hodler as, you know,
the red state shotgun pickup truck guy who wants to be independent
and don't tread on me.
And then you have the developer class that is getting more and more blue-haired
the further down the wokeness, the slide you go.
And then you have...
And I found my... I'm sorry, I found my train of thought.
So if you're selecting for young people who want to live and work in Manhattan,
or San Francisco,
or later on,
bring office London,
you're definitely going to be excluding the people like,
let's say me,
who doesn't want to be,
I no longer want to be in big city.
I had my big city days in Paris.
I did spend some time in New York City.
But that's behind me now.
You're excluding the guy with three kids
who's married,
who has a mortgage to pay,
who's not going to up and move
to the Chenko Labs offices for a year.
You're excluding the guy like me who would rather be building a citadel in El Salvador or surfing in France.
You're excluding a lot of people.
And so what kind of people are you left with?
Well, I mean, it speaks for itself what you're going to get if you select for that.
And so I got some pushback on Twitter from somebody who said,
well, it's pretty odd that someone who wants to make an office in El Salvador
would be criticizing offices.
Well, I no longer really think that I want to make an office at all
because I already have too much on my plate
and it's very hard to be productive already, especially in El Salvador.
El Salvador is its own challenge.
But if you were to make an office in El Salvador,
you certainly would not be attracted to the same profile of people
as Chaincode Labs in New York
and Spiral in San Francisco,
wherever it is over there,
or Localhost in San Francisco,
or MITBCI in Boston,
or London, where Brink is.
I mean, these are completely different destinations and profiles.
Yeah, and then you have the third category,
which is a lot of miners fall into this category, I think.
These are my biases.
I'm showing them to the world here.
and the VC funders that are just the Gordon Gekko types
that are in love with money
and just want to make as much fiat gains as soon as possible.
Yeah, and see, if your office is also in the US
where you have capital gains on Bitcoin,
ChainCodeLabs only pays you in dollars.
They do not pay you in Bitcoin.
Whereas funders like OpenSats and HRF,
they, as far as I know, only pay or prefer to pay only in Bitcoin.
So you're encouraging different kinds of people
If you have the developer in New York City
Who is paid 100% in fiat
And who is in that environment
Versus someone in working remotely
Getting their grant paid in Bitcoin
Or in El Salvador or wherever they are
Far off in the field
Perhaps in some Bitcoin circular economy
You're definitely working more with people
Who use Bitcoin as money
whereas in the U.S.
you have the mentality
of the digital asset narrative
that Bitcoin as an asset
which justifies the capital gains taxes
because it's an asset
which
and I fear that we are
more and more even here in El Salvador
and I spoke about this yesterday
with a friend of mine in the Bitcoin office
who runs the Bitcoin office for Stacey
Mario who runs also the AI office
you know I asked him
And, you know, I feel like the Bitcoin is money narrative is going down here a little bit since the INF deal.
I could be wrong.
And everyone, the talk of the town at the moment is assets on Bitcoin.
Even here in El Salvador.
Oh, and it's awful because, like, I think this is the worry of the shotgun pickup truck player.
But I would sort of represent that as, like, the family man who just wants to say fuck you to the government as much as possible.
like uh we are where because we want to be responsible for our own lives and therefore
we get our freedoms because we we we earn it uh like that's that's why we are into bitcoin that's
why any bitcoin maximalist is into bitcoin in in my view because we understand money and we
understand the importance of not diluting it and uh and all of this stuff and then you have
You hear these horror stories about the blue-haired stuff in development.
And of course, it makes us super worried because you can be as knowledgeable as you want about computer networks.
It doesn't say anything about how much you understand of economics.
So I see a very big risk there.
And I think that's why Notts is at 20%, mostly because people are super worried that this thing has now taken, it has come to the point where the arrogance has taken over so much and they act like they run the show now and they can build whatever bullshit, like multiplayer online games on Bitcoin and stuff that will just make it worse as money.
and to me there are red flags everywhere in this
and it's just sad that it's gone as far as it has.
Well, yeah, to me, I mean, the Oprytron thing
and I try to be not in any of the tribes, right?
I consider myself relatively disenfranchised by Core.
The Core no longer invites me like they no longer invite Blue.
There was a pretext that was used
It was a little bit bullshitty
It was used once
But now since it was used once
Now I'm no longer invited at all
And
I don't really consider myself
Part of the BIP 110
Tribe either
And the other day I got a bunch of hate
From Ordinal SAS because
The Ordinal's BIP
Was closed
But of course they conveniently forgot that only
two months prior, I was the one who closed
the CAT bit draft
for reasons that I amply gave at the
moment of closing it.
You go from being hated
by one side to being hated by the other side.
I got some backstage
heat last week
from my Time B conference talk
because it came out a week ago.
That made some people angry. I got some
heat from CORE. I get heat from
BIP 110 when I
closed the CAT. I got heat from the Ordnals
camp when the Ordnals
and Bip didn't move forward.
I mean, you're going to be hated by everybody
if you're trying to stick to your principles
rather than sticking to a tribe.
And maybe my principles are flawed
and maybe they, you know,
and I'm a very human person,
but it's just what happens.
And, you know, right now,
I've again lost my train of thought.
I've wanted to say that.
Oh, well, I can say thank you
for closing the ordinals, Bip.
Well, I mean, it was obviously a shit show
that nobody wanted to step in.
The Ordnose thing really is smelly because there's a few trolly accounts that go after you and say a bunch of nonsense on social media.
And generally I avoid responding to ankle biting and trolling.
But I did respond a tiny bit.
I never am happy if I cede to responding.
It's better just to ignore it completely.
I ignore the cat stuff.
The cat snipe.
at me. I ignored that
almost completely.
So sometimes I'm better at avoiding
responding to ankle biting and yapping.
I think the cat
had mostly
a trolly kind of
thing to it.
It's like trolling back, sort of.
I don't think it was that serious.
I remember you and Giacomo supported it.
Yeah, I had so much fun
with it. You posted pictures of cats
and everyone on the other side went crazy.
But you just said meow and everyone went crazy.
But yes, back to what I was, I'm sorry, back to my line of thinking.
I do believe the op return was not by itself the reason.
I tried to advise Core to go gently or differently with this in a couple of core dev meetings.
I was told that I was a problem for saying such a thing.
I think some people consider what I said and agree with it.
But by and large, it didn't go along with the collectivist angle.
And Core, for about three years, did have a collectivism that was named as such, collectivism.
And I tried to push back on that in meetings and I sort of met with, well, I was in favor of keeping things ad hoc and everyone having their own opinion.
Well, named collectivism. They called it collectivism.
It was called collectivist action and collectivism.
And I was like horrified privately when I read that during four-debt meetings.
Rightfully so.
And I pushed back on that gently saying, well, no, I prefer an ad hoc approach and everybody able to have their individual, you know.
And I was met with criticism for that.
I don't recall the exact criticism, but basically collectivism was the word and collective action.
And, you know, the signing of the declaration about mempool policy was one such collective action, which I did.
I refused to sign. I was asked in private time. I gave my reasons for not doing so.
But I believe that the opportune, like I believe Jack and Will thinks as well, but I've always felt from the start that the opportune thing was not advisable.
Technically, there may be good reasons to do it.
sometimes you can get away with doing something that has technical good reasons
that will make people upset,
that you can sometimes manage to do it by doing it in a way that is maybe wise.
But the way this happened was too provocative.
And I think it should have been more consensual.
It should have gone more slowly.
It should have been less antagonistic.
But, you know, we're not perfect.
one could say, hey, you're a funny guy.
You made people angry with your ordinal decision.
Or, hey, you made people angry with the cat decision.
So, yeah, it's possible to step in anyway
while still trying to do things wisely.
So it's impossibly perfect,
but I do believe that Op Return was
the straw that broke the camel's back
after a cumulative amount of things
that eroded trust in Bitcoin Core
rather than just on its phone incident.
And many people defending Core
were defending it as if it was
on its own. Whereas
to me it was just the one drop that
too many and
trust in core has been, in my opinion,
been eroding slowly over a long
period of time due to the many things I've
personally been seeing. And I have
not even detailed them at all in this discussion.
But,
and there were points in my talk at
Plan B that I didn't have time to get to
that I would like to cover
perhaps in another podcast.
I may not be able to have time.
You can cover them right here if you want to.
Like, what were you thinking of?
Welcome to Knut's super awesome Bitcoin school.
Should you use fiat money?
Of course not.
It's fake.
It's counterfeited by the state.
And you should buy Bitcoin instead.
How do you buy Bitcoin?
Well, you can buy them off a friend or you can go to an exchange.
We recommend you go to bullbitcoin.com and buy them over there.
They also got an awesome mobile wallet if you should ever want to use your Bitcoin.
So go to bullbitcoin.com and use code infinity for a discount.
If you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, but you want to keep them for a long time,
you should put them in some kind of cold storage.
For that, we recommend BitVault.
BitVault is a wallet that protects you against physical attacks,
and they put your Bitcoin in a multi-sig time lock clever solution.
So you should check them out at bitvault.sv and use code infinity for a discount.
To put your Bitcoin in cold storage, you also need a hardware wallet.
We recommend the Bitbox.
Bitbox is a great hardware wallet that has been around since forever.
It's super easy to use, but also has advanced features and it's privacy focused.
So go to bitbox.swiss and use code infinity for a discount.
If you need further advice on how to do any of all of this, you should go to thebitcoinadvisor.com.
There are friends from Australia and they're great.
They have a multisig setup, a collaborative multisig, so that you can make sure that your descendants and your heirs inherit your Bitcoin when your time is due.
So go to thebitcoinadvisor.com and use code INFINITY for a discount.
So to recap, get rid of the fiat and remember bullbitcoin.com, bitvolt.sv, bitbox.swiss and thebitcoinadvisor.com.
Use code INFINITY everywhere.
And don't forget to brush your teeth.
Over and out.
So my situation is a bit weird because if you see court, and I do, as, let's say, a royal court.
Maybe there's a king, maybe there's a queen, and then you have courtesans, and there's royal intrigue, and there are defenders of the throne.
And at any given moment, I tend to, look, I follow the processes quite closely.
Even when I'm not actively manifesting myself in review or pull request openings on core, I've been watching the interactions for seven, eight years now.
And I really, it's quite clear in my mind, okay, this moment, this person is the defender of the throne.
This person is the king.
This person is the queen.
This person is the king's advisor.
This person currently has the king's ear.
Of course, there are a couple, three kings, if we're going to be technical.
You know, maybe it's more of a commit bureau.
But there's a very hierarchical and I was on the inside of this and I was in the inside conversations where I saw how the process works socially as part of the inner clique, but only as someone who expected to be a supporter.
so and then I sort of took my independence after that famous full request when I realized
my core life was pretty much changing drastically I stepped down as Bitcoin Core Review Club
co-maintainer I stopped contributing to Bitcoin Optech because I realized that the what I was
expected to do was support the narratives and and I basically distanced myself from John Newberry
because I saw things going on that I did not agree with profoundly in the way the open source
project should be governed and should
manage itself. I saw
things that I thought were abusive
and very unhealthy.
I don't want to use the word corruption.
That's not the right word, but there were things that
were very unhealthy for a software
project. I think that the smell,
the tummy tests, passed
less and less for people.
It just slowly
got to the point where I think the opry train was
not by itself
the issue, but
It was just maybe the final straw for a lot of people.
But that's hard to say because that's subjective.
Wasn't there a changing of the definition of up return that upset people also?
Yes, but all of this is all downstream from the complete change of guard in core.
The whole leadership and whose opinion had sway completely changed over the years.
as all of the maintainers, except the most recently named one,
stepped down, and the most recently named one
handpicked their person, and then another person came, and then another person came,
and the whole power structure changed.
And there are things that I just don't recognize that are not core policy
to me anymore, that I see just, even though this week a pull request was
merged, that
the same unhealthy processes are still taking place
where it's behind the scenes, people coming together to...
It's not necessarily based on the right decisions
for the code base or for the users.
It comes down to friendships and cliques and connections
and this person was this person's maintainer.
Sorry, this person mentored this person,
this person then mentored this person,
and this person opened a pull request with a bad change.
I didn't agree with the change,
but their mentor intervened
and the mentor mentors intervened and the whole band gets together and and socially pushes the
change in in my opinion the wrong direction for example um a maintainer literally said in the
poi quest merge this week uh well we it doesn't matter if this breaks something because my
objection was that something was being broken and there's no point in purposely breaking something
that we could with a one-line additional complexity as they called it um keep main backwards
compatibility for, which I believe is extremely important.
It was always the philosophy of Bitcoin that Bitcoin would always be backwards compatible
as much as possible unless it was an extremely...
If there was in any way easy to avoid breaking, then why would you break it?
It was clearly easy to avoid breaking it.
But the justification by the current, I would say, lead maintainer of Bitcoin core, unofficially,
certainly the most longest serving actual maintainer right now was no we we um we this
would be breaking something more than two versions back that's no longer supported by our security
policy and we anyway do not want to encourage people to continue running old versions of core
so we should rather go ahead and break this thing to encourage people to upgrade to a recent version
of bitcoin core meaning v30 v31 and maybe still v29 for another few months but as soon as v32
comes out, then it's just B30, B30, or B32.
My opinion is that that is in no way a justification to break things that are truly easy to not
break.
They literally took the position, let's break it because we want to encourage users to upgrade.
And I think that is not consistent with the way Core's philosophy was for a long time.
No, to me, it sounds completely anti-Bitcoin ethos, all of it.
Absolutely.
And anti-users.
yeah the reason they gotta upgrade yeah no the reason i fell in love with this in the first place
was that it was hard to change like that's and that was backwards compatible to forever so you
could the people who just stacked and waited for a hundred years would win in the end like that's
the beauty of the system like that's the most crucial thing uh i i don't understand breaking
things needlessly
that are trivially easy to not
break. And in fact, there was a version
of the pull request that had listened
to me that did not break anything.
And the
maintainer came along and said, no, no, no, there's no reason
to...
We prefer to encourage users
to upgrade.
Well, you don't do that by introducing
breakage needless.
Even if it's minor. It was minor.
The fix was minor and the breakage
was minor, but it's silly.
I don't understand that.
No, and it sets a precedent, right?
For breaking more things.
Well, it's just on and on, over and over.
These actions, when they accumulate,
A, it looks almost like it's about social process.
Like, let's dunk on this guy again.
Because I was more or less the code owner.
I had written that code.
I knew it as well as anybody because I had written it.
It was in an area of the code base
where I was probably the primary author at this point.
All of my criticisms were overruled.
that's i mean it's it's awful yeah the pr the pr in question is two two six nine eight eight
it was just six nine eight eight yeah
no i i and and two people they didn't even review the code directly so much as they reviewed my
review in order to dunk on it's so scary the things you're you're saying here because like
was it this easy to change the culture that's that it's so it's so depressing that it's it's
so easy to just it's group it's group process it's group process you know the problem is if a
bunch of friends get together and socially support each other mutually on review then you know and
the people who were reviewing there weren't even habitual reviewers of this part of the code base
But because one person, the author of the pull request, was mentored by someone who was mentored and interned by someone else.
And these people sort of got the band together.
And just for that change.
So let me see.
I made a thread like a month back or maybe two months back about the op-return thing.
Just to see if you agree with this framing.
because what I understand, the core argument was that it would be better if they did this
shit on OpReturn than anywhere else, basically.
So therefore, it's good to open the policy.
So it'd be easier to do that because it causes less damage.
The thing I got upset with and I think most people did was this defeatist attitude that we shouldn actively try to stop the spam we should we should just make it less harmful and just accept that it there and and
that change of attitude is is like uh to me that was the thing because like yes if you live in a
vacuum like in an all else being equal scenario uh you're right the it would be better if they just
shifted to Operatorn, four times more expensive for most of it. But let's just say that every
spammer was altruistic and put everything in Operatorn. So the problem with all else being
equal scenarios is that they don't exist in reality. So sending a signal that this is something
that Bitcoin accommodates for and that Bitcoin is okay with, that I think pissed a lot of people
off that that was the at least that's what pissed me off this this like this is okay now for some
reason we shouldn't like try to fight it and when these were clearly exploits and not monetary use
cases what do you think of that do you agree with that framing or would you frame it differently
so i think core i understand core's technical reasons for for doing what they did i also
understand the
position that
culture matters and
signaling matters.
And I
sympathize with both arguments. And there are times
when I read, for example,
there was a recent thread on Bitcoin
slash meta where
someone brought it up saying core could still fix
the rift and a discussion
ensued. And there were times
when I would agree with both the
pro core and the
opposite
view because there are good points on both sides and i i don't see it as black and white
i don't see it as core is right and the others are dumb shits i don't see it as core core is
completely wrong either i think there's nuance i do worry about the shit coinery i do worry
deeply about spam i think one of the the other most depressing period thing in bitcoin core
besides the DEI and the social click, power click processes,
was the introduction of ordinals and the very high fees.
And it seemed like there was nothing we could do.
And I found that sound very depressing
because it felt like Bitcoin was changing from underneath us all.
I don't understand, to be honest,
how anyone could think that ordinals are good for Bitcoin
apart from fee income, perhaps.
but I think that's a short-term way of thinking about it.
Yeah, I'd like your take on my take
about the miner fees also
because the way I see it
it all has to do with time preference.
So there's this narrative
among the shitcoins on Bitcoin's camp
that it's good for Bitcoin
because miners make more fees.
But to me, that's such a ridiculous argument
because we're on, what are we now?
Like if I go to Bitbow here, 885 exahashes per second.
That's 885 followed by 18 zeros guesses on the correct hash per second.
Like, if we lost like 99 miners out of 100, Bitcoin would still be as secure anyway, because it's like orders of magnitude more secure than it needs to be.
And it's also like, it's like believing that Bitcoin cannot go up in value more.
If it doubles in value every four years, the problem is not there.
And I believe if it can keep on being money, it will do that at least until everyone on Earth is on board.
I mean, it's such a weird argument because Bitcoin is not for the miners.
The miners get paid by the users to secure the network and create block space for them.
It's the other way around.
The miners should be the employees of the users of the network.
And so it's such a nothing burger argument, the fee argument.
Yeah, I tend to agree completely. I mean, my focus is on users and people using it as money.
And I thought one of the dumbest things I actually saw tweeted of the past year was,
your note does not matter by someone who is trying to be clever, I guess.
Yeah.
But, you know, I place the user first and foremost.
And at my Plan B talk, I gave a lot of suggestions on how I would, the guidelines for governance or leadership of an implementation, if it was me.
And I actually did have a private meeting recently with the new maintainer of CORE, Sebastian Kahn from South Africa.
And to my surprise, I believe that he and I agree on a lot of the things that we would like to see.
And we were both also inspired by the leadership style of Vladimir Vanderland, the lead maintainer for almost a decade of Bitcoin Core, who was an amazing leader of Bitcoin.
And, you know, when I say that I'm not into the woke stuff, that doesn't mean I'm criticizing, for instance, the transgender, the two transgender people, I believe, on Core are two of my favorite developers.
So, you know, it's not, I'm not against their choices.
I don't actually care if your hair color is blue.
No, and why would anyone care whoever they are?
If they have the merit, then meritocracy is the most inclusive thing ever
because it doesn't care about your race or gender or sexual preferences.
As long as the playing field is fair and everyone sort of gets the same rules and treatment.
The thing that really gets my go maybe more than anything else,
and maybe this is the personal weakness of mine,
is I dislike deeply double standards.
I deeply, deeply, since a child, dislike double standards.
Yes.
And probably the main thing I would want,
I would strive for if I was running an implementation,
would be to try to diminish the double standards.
And no one's perfect.
I'll probably get it wrong.
And maybe as BIPs maintainer, co-editor,
I've gotten it wrong.
But I really try to be fair.
At least it's important to me.
And I think that we've seen some really blatant double standards.
Yeah, but that's exactly what Bitcoin is about.
Like Bitcoin is about equality before the law.
If code is law or really just the network is law, whatever, sound money is law.
If we have fair money, then we have leveled the playing field and the same rules apply to everyone.
Like that's what Bitcoin is for.
it's exactly for that
it doesn't give a shit who you are
that's the whole point
so why would anyone give a shit
about the core maintainer's
gender or sexual organ
because in open source development
there is a thing
there is social capital
and even the readme
of the bitcoin core repository
says that
different people's opinion carries different weight depending on their social capital and
contribution and amount of history with the project. And so there is social capital,
does matter. Everyone is not equal. And some acts carry more weight to maintainers than other acts
do. That is how it works. But I still think that there are other double standards that really get
to me and not that one that some people's act might matter carry more weight because they have
more experience or they know the code better there that's fine with me but still there's other kinds
of double centers like things that you cannot change about yourself like your age or your gender
or where you're from or how well you speak English if you learn English as a second language and you
say, hey guys, not knowing
that, and having
a US person
reply, no, no, there's women present
too. That's a real example, but that isn't
a real example that I saw a maintainer
rebuke a non-moose-seeking
developer for.
I mean,
you know,
I just would lighten up with
the identity stuff.
I don't give a crap what your hair color is,
where you're from. These things should not
matter. It should only matter how much
time you start working on the code and reviewing it and your contribution to review and how good
your review work has been. And just because you're hand chosen, but you've maybe reviewed
several times less than someone else that was not chosen doesn't mean, you know, I mean,
that's the kind of stuff that gets to me. There's some really blatant unfair stuff that's taken
place over the years, and I really dislike that. And, you know, that's criticizable,
and I'll probably be dunked on
harshly for saying that,
but that is something...
I know there's so many things
in my presentation at Plan B
that I didn't get to
that I could cover.
I was taken to tasks
about my comment
that was maybe not very,
very well said
about how bugs,
how you had to be careful
about reporting bugs in core
because it depended
who was the author of the bug
and how they would see
your relationship to them
if you reported the bug
because they could see your bug
as your bug report as being a personal attack
rather than reporting a bug.
And that really does happen.
But that's awful.
You can't handle code like that.
Of course not.
That is how it happens.
I found a bug.
There's one example.
In 2021, in August,
I found a bug I reported on the IRC channel
and then I opened a fit
And yeah, it was just, it was a complete shitshow because I had found a bug written by someone who took it personally.
Who thought I was attacking them for finding a bug.
And the way it went down was very political and very sad.
It's the math is racist thing.
It was PloyQuest BitcoinCorp PR 22831.
And, you know, I was told, hey, it's not really a serious bug.
Don't make a big deal out of it.
And then I wasn't allowed to fix it because my fix, they didn't like the way I fixed it or they didn't like my tests to test it.
I introduced the test to verify that it wouldn't break again.
And a fix that didn't have any test coverage at all was preferred by the original author, who was very upset at me for finding that bubble.
And it's just one example of many.
And that kind of thing just makes me sad.
that just sounds like uh it sounds like ocp you know the organization the corporation that builds
robocop if you remember the robocop movie and that guy who keeps defending ed 209 the robot
that doesn't work and kills everyone like and he just refuses to fix the robot that's what it
sounds like to me you know it's funny i stopped watching any kind of movie entirely after covid
real life was so much stranger
than fiction
yeah yeah yeah Robocop was a couple of years
before COVID though
yeah right but
the COVID thing was a real
a real
it's like you also had a group
of people who could continue going from office to
office because they were
jabbed and boosted and
those who did not
were not doing testing and jabbing
and boosting for
one or two years, could not visit the offices, could not...
They were, during the Core Dev meetups, they were in separate housing or separate meetings,
I understand. I didn't even go. I mean, it really slid Core
down with the vast majority being in the camp of
testing every day and testing all the time
and being up to date with their boosters or MNR.
Yeah, this reminds me of a Free Cities conference I went to
after COVID. So it's the Free Cities Foundation, right? So it's not really a Bitcoin conference,
not at all a Bitcoin conference. It's about Prosperan Roatan, for instance. That's one of the
free private cities around the world. They have this conference every year. And at that conference,
there's a Bitcoiner in the board of the organization who had invited a lot of his
Bitcoiner friends. I was there and Daniel Prince was there and a bunch of others. But there were also
ethereans and and shitcoiners and the funny thing is that they were still wearing masks
most of them so so all the bitcoiners were of course unjabbed and not wearing masks
and the shitcoiners were concerned about about the uh if people had boosters and wearing masks
and it was just an observation that that was much more prominent for shitcoiners there's something
there. Oh, yeah.
It made me very sad that
I mean, I just stayed at home and worked and was
productive, but
it was a real shock to me
the first time I went to a Cordeve meeting
finally in 2022.
A,
how
centralized interactions were. Everybody seemed
to, most people in the room seemed to be people
who were working together every day in offices and
knew each other like as if they were in the same
classroom. You know, and these
were people I almost never met.
And of course that very first and only core dev I got docs to the FBI because the FBI asked the organizer of the core dev for all the identity of the participants because of
the reported theft of Luke Doucher's Bitcoin.
I heard somebody say that Luke doxed everybody.
That is false.
I believe it was the FBI who requested the dox.
Yeah.
And that's just... Speaking of Luke, in April 2021, there was a coordinated effort on the Bitcoin dev mailing list to remove Luke Dasher as a BIP editor.
A role he has had in 2012.
Yes, there was. I was at that meeting.
Yeah. What happened? Newberry was involved, I know.
Publish, we endorsed it.
I mean, in the private OpTec discussions, I mean, they were all vehemently anti-Luke for some time.
I don't think it's a secret.
It's public knowledge, I believe, that David Harding very much disliked Luke.
And he publicly tweeted that Luke was a net negative on the face.
And yeah, basically, I recall that I was there and Newberry called for Luke to be removed, I guess as well, by the project owners.
Who could have done that?
Well, Newberry called on the lead maintainer of Vladimir to do that during the meeting.
And it was an unpleasant and hostile exchange.
And afterwards, I remember Vladimir refusing to do so.
One thing I always respected about Vladimir was that he was a reluctant servant leader.
He was reluctant to use or abuse his power to satisfy someone.
And he did not give John Newberry satisfaction.
in calling for Lutte, literally.
And afterwards, I did have a conversation privately with Vladimir
where I said that was intense.
And he says, I don't know why he was so aggressive with me.
But he was dumbfounded, I think, and a bit tired by the whole thing.
When did you say that was? In July 2021?
No, April 2021.
Okay, well, shortly after, in June 2021,
there was an equally aggressive exchange.
After the pull request that changed my trajectory on court,
John Newberry
on the IRC channel
more or less went after myself
and Vasil Dimov and Vladimir again.
And
Vladimir got tired of it
and he basically signed off IRC for two
or three days. He disappeared.
He's like, I'm done.
I was wondering how long until he would come back because usually
he was always present.
But the aggression
was coming to a head around that
time. I think the
peak... Things are
maybe a little bit better now.
Every now and then
the power clip gets the band together
again to do something
not so cool. It's slightly
improving. Giacomo talked with
Walker on a podcast a day or
two ago where
Giacomo said the DEI thing seems to be fading.
Well,
if he's dying a slow
death, it's a very slow death in court.
And DEI,
I don't know, I might be misusing the
word woke, but
I mean, it's going to take time.
There's at least three key people, I think, that would still need to leave before things would really change.
Three or four.
And I don't know how long that will take.
To be honest, I've been waiting for a very long time for things to improve.
I believe the shift has sailed on my ability to contribute effectively now to Bitcoin Core since years.
Because basically since 2021, my ability was affected.
and so I believe like some other people
that we do need more implementations
to welcome developers
who are perhaps not in the,
who don't have the same politics
as the ones in Bitcoin Core
or who are not socially popular
or who just disagree on views on things.
Right now it seems to be very much dominated
by Chaincode and Brink and
a bit by Spiral.
And local hosts now as well,
which is a newer one. I mean, one of the things
that worries me is we see, I've seen
a few cases of people who I thought were very nice
get hired by Chaincode,
move to New York City, and
change
fairly significantly
during their time in New York.
Become much less pleasant.
I don't know what goes on.
But I've seen
that multiple times now and i have to wonder why are these people changing yeah you would you would
like to know the the underlying mechanisms that that makes this happen because even if you even
if woke is temporarily dead like how do you make it not come back ever what's the cure and when i
say they changed i don't mean they became woke but i mean they maybe became much more aggressive
that arrogant maybe
aggressively tweeting on Twitter
very aggressively
being very sensitive to replies
and not letting
things go
just being
on the whole much
less pleasant people and I don't know what
happens if it's them being
in contact with somebody specifically
or with the group in general or it's the environment
of New York City
maybe New York is a place where people are more aggressive
but wow
I mean I know several people I've discussed this with
they say yeah that person was a nice guy
and they went to Chaincode Labs
and don't recognize them anymore
So you said
you talked about more implementation
so the natural
question there is why not NOTs
then?
What's wrong with NOTs?
The problem
I don't want to say there's a problem with NOTs
but for instance I did mention that OpenSaaS
has been willing to fund NOS for some time.
There are public posts on X by people like NVK
or maybe Matt O'Dell, I'm not sure, on NOS.
But the problem is, my understanding is that
they haven't actually received a good application yet.
So NOS maybe is having trouble attracting developer talent.
And that could be due to Luke being,
look, I consider Luke a friend.
I think Luke is very gentle and soft-spoken in person,
much nicer in person
very nice in person
compared to the persona
people might imagine when they just
read only the posts on X
but maybe not the easiest person
to work with
and I don't want to be criticizing of Luke
I like Luke
but there's also a lot of
social, I mean it looks very much
like Luke's project to people
so maybe that's part of the difficulty
like a personal project
I think that the fact that
Nots has gained so much market share.
I mean, how many Nots nodes do I have right now?
Around 20%, right?
My node right now has like one, two, three, four, five, six Nots spheres,
at least with Nots in the subversion,
out of around 12%, 15% in my personal node at this moment,
but it varies.
So Nots has gained market share.
I think not so much because
I think it's more because of Core.
Core has been the best
marketing for NOS.
And not Core altogether,
but I would say
two or three people behaving like
absolute assholes
for Core on Twitter.
Or X.
I think they're doing great marketing.
I mean, okay, NOS has much
better memes.
I'm not on the NOS side, but NOS definitely
memes much better. There are some Core devs who
I think who want to be memers, who cannot meet.
What's the main reason that you're not on the Nuts side then?
Like, is there a technical reason?
I mean, look, I consider Luke a friend.
And I believe that they would be very happy if I would dedicate my time to contributing to Nuts.
But I believe that I'm not quite fully on board with the way Luke sees everything.
similar to the way that Giacomo is not fully on board
and I believe that BIP 110
is not quite what I think needs to be done
I would be more comfortable working on
or perhaps co-maintaining a fork of core
with perhaps different
types of developers
maybe more older, maybe not in the big cities
Maybe more Bitcoin is money people who are married, who are mature, who have kids and responsibilities and who are not leading with their youthful ambition and ego to make changes to Bitcoin.
Maybe a bit more of a conservative, slower.
Maybe it would pull in some things that Core is doing, but maybe more slowly, conservatively with a bit more another review layer.
I think we do need another implementation that is for developers who don't fit into the current core mold that has been engineered.
All right. Yeah. I mean, Luke is a very special person and I don't agree with a lot of his views, but I do agree with most of his views on Bitcoin.
And I do think that he's a very trustworthy guy or a guy that holds integrity very high.
Absolutely. And even Adam Back once tweeted a couple of years ago, I believe, that you should be very careful if you find yourself disagreeing with Luke on something.
Exactly.
That Luke has been right.
Yeah. And for that reason alone, I find this like pushing him out of court to be such a, like, what are you doing?
Like, this is your most senior guy, like one of the most important people for Bitcoin ever.
Like, everyone agrees on that.
So it's like, how can you get to that?
Yeah, his class of 2011, along with Vladimir Vanderland, Peter Wille and Matt Corral.
These four people.
And I think Luke was the first.
At least he was among the class of 2011.
he hasn't been that active
on Core over the past half decade
because he's also been busy working on
Knots
Ocean Mining
Datum, he's got a lot on his plate
and that's why he also
Bips Maintainer, Bips Editor
he's the OG Bips
editor since
2015 I believe
yeah and to be clear
I'm pro Knots and I'm pro
Bip 110
I've stated so publicly, mostly for the middle finger of it all.
I admit that.
I have no problem with, you know, in hindsight, if it doesn't work or if it becomes a nothing burger that I risk my reputation or anything like that.
I'm passionate about Bitcoin and I'm passionate about what I think is best for Bitcoin.
And that's why I want to send a message, a temporary message that we won't take this.
Like, we're not going to take it, the twisted sister thing.
But having said all that, I still think the more important thing there is that.
Yeah, the more important thing there is datum and fixing the centralization of mining.
Decentralizing mining, absolutely.
That's paramount.
That's the big one.
and it sort of gets overshadowed
by this other debate, of course.
Well, I think a lot of plebs
are on board with you.
They're unhappy with the new core
that was, let's say,
socially engineered a bit
by the selection criteria
of the developer pipeline
centralized in chain code labs
developed by a very small,
less than a handful of people.
And that has led to a situation
where the plebs feel very alienated
And there's definitely a chasm between the new core, maybe not the new maintainer, but some of the loudest voices of the past two years in core has definitely been a complete chasm with the users due to the selection criteria being centralized and so on.
Of course, all that is heavily criticizable and I'll surely be dunked on very harshly for what I've just said.
but it's still a fact
you regroup what you
show when it comes to your criteria
of selection for your new developers
and Core has also faced a
shortage of new talent lately
they've had trouble recruiting new people
to Core
yeah
so I mean there are knock on effects
when you go woke
I mean I'm not saying that Core
when you know they say you go woke
GoPro. Well, I think right now
it's not so much in fashion as it was
back in 2020, 2018, 2019
when the blue mat was calling for
diversity.
And behind the scenes core is still that way.
They're still reaching out and
looking for certain profiles and identifying
and tapping people to be chosen.
Whereas people who
might be Bitcoin
naturally aren't necessarily
the profile that the
Chinko Laps people are reaching out to and looking.
And it's been that way since a long time.
Yeah. No, it's a mess.
Well we just need another probably another implementation which is way easier said than done And that why we don have one And now we in the bear market So funding might be a little tougher than it would have been six months ago But yeah Giacomo evoked it
I believe we need one.
We need a place for people who don't fit into the current Bitcoin core mold.
Now, it's not a uni mold.
There are very good people in core.
I believe that currently, I like all of the main tanners in core right now, except one,
I think they have very good maintainers.
There's just one who I know is hostile.
And, you know, Core could come around, and I hope they do.
My goal is not to punch down on Core the way Core has sometimes punched down on me.
My goal is to help improve Bitcoin.
I'm on Team Bitcoin.
No, and of course that would be preferable, but aren't we beyond that point?
Well, it does seem like the ship has sailed, but, you know, never say never.
No, because they did put this on themselves.
Would you agree with that, that BIP-110 wouldn't exist had Core not meddled with the policies and made decisions that nobody liked?
I think that they were not deft in the way they did their change.
And I think that that change alone would not have caused the issue that it did if they had not been losing trust over years.
I think it was a cumulative action.
Yeah, so it was the straw that broke the camel's back or whatever it's called.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, but still, that it was the straw that would break the camel's back, it seems so obvious that if you do this, there will be consequences somehow.
Right, to you and to me, yes, but not to my colleagues.
No, but to Bitcoin.
Like, if now the change was made to make spam a little less destructive, and people didn't agree with that, then they're taking one thing for granted, but they're only seeing one chess move ahead and not two.
Like, if this leads to that, then that's a worse outcome.
If you're taking this utilitarian approach, why can't you have a lower time preference and see a little further into the future that this will trigger side effects that are even worse than what you're proposing?
From the core perspective, because I don't think anyone in core likes that BIP-110 is now on the table and there's a risk that it will happen.
I think it's a byproduct of the social process.
When the main decision-making is taking place over a lunch discussion in an office in New York City or London, then you're not going to probably come to the same decision as someone who is interacting much more with the plips.
I believe that there is an environmental factor involved where they're all sitting around between themselves.
And when I was visiting Chaincode Labs, there was definitely an elitism.
There's an absolute elitism going on.
And I think that's a bicottlet of the social process.
Like, I'm here in El Salvador.
Who do I meet in El Salvador?
I meet players.
Who comes to El Salvador?
I mean, yeah.
Every now and then, you know, you come or Luke comes or Jack Domo comes or Peter Todd comes.
Those are probably the main developers I see here.
I saw merch here once.
You know, and Merch takes a lot of crap for his core, his argumentation for core.
But Merch is someone who I like very much and get along with.
I have a lot of respect for Merch.
He's someone I can discuss with.
We've had calls where I've talked about, had heart-to-heart talks with Merch.
So, you know, one day Merch is getting heat for defending the core position.
One day I'm getting heat for closing the cat.
We all have our days of heat, but there are some very good people in CORE.
I'm not criticizing.
I would say 90% of people in CORE I like very much.
It's not that they are all woke.
It's just that there was an element that sort of took it over in a way.
And it's not just the developers, it's also the handlers, the people in the offices who
are sort of deciding things like, who will we hire into our offices?
Who's going to get funding?
And I said that as someone who also influences funding decisions since about a year, I help open stats review applications.
But I'm just one opinion on a subcommittee or two.
So I'm not the head of, you know, Brink or Chaincode or local hosts.
But I think it's good to diversify the funding organizations.
And I think it's good to diversify the implementations so that there's a space for different people to feel welcome.
We have to deal with the fact that Bitcoin is on a collision course with a vast number of normies and with Wall Street and with politics.
And that is responsible probably for a lot of the narratives that we see nowadays that are not Bitcoin is money or supportive of Bitcoin is money.
But I hope that we can still come around because I do want to use Bitcoin primarily as money.
And in my node, I don't want to store a bunch of other people's spam.
And if your node runner seems like you actually don't want to, unless you have a limited bandwidth and resources, I did have to start turning my node at one time on my laptop because it only had one terabyte of SSD.
That's not enough nowadays.
No, and this is a forever problem.
And that's why I'm so, one of the main reasons why I hate it so much is like, it's, what do you call it?
Like they're squatters.
Yeah, it's a free rider problem.
yeah exactly it's the problem of abuse of pissing on the commons to make money for your your
stakeholders and that's not bitcoin to me you know human nature people get into bitcoin initially
about greed and no no no not make not make money for your shareholders make fiat for your
shareholders and that's the saddest part they're not making actual money and this is the this is the
Ah, it drives me mad
Like, here you have the best fucking thing in the world
That can benefit everyone on earth forever
And you choose
So like, no, I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be that guy from the Matrix
Who chooses the stake instead
Yeah, but making fiat money
That's the gate, that's the entry gate
I mean, when I made friends with the police
That the neighbor tried to have me arrested
By
What they wanted to know was like the same as everybody else
So, tell us how we can make
More dollars with Bitcoin
Yeah, and it's so sad because this is the tool.
They're all having tough lives because of fiat.
So everyone's life is tough because of the fiat monetary system.
This is still fixed.
So few people see that, right?
People are busy with their lives.
They're not like you and me, most people, thinking about these things.
We're a fringe, and we're on a collision course with the entire world
that doesn't care about these things that we care about.
And it's going to be a challenge.
now so and that's why i think the education is crucial and especially education about
why scams are scams and why you shouldn't fall for them there is no such thing as a non-fungible
token there is no token on the internet at all in fact like all data is copyable the satoshi is
sacred and special for very different reasons it's because they live in your head not on the internet
It indeed makes me sound
it's the good, smart, intelligent developer talent
working on stuff like that rather than...
And that's part of the reason why I think
that it can be a mistake to prioritize for youth
because youth is very good
for innovation and energy and ego and ambition.
But then if it's channeled into making shitcoin
and tokens and things like that,
rather than making the...
The main priority for me
is just making the base layer robust.
having a robust face layer, having a robust
lighting network, robust second layer
for payments.
Robustness. It's not about, I'm not
particularly interested in all the rest.
But, you know, that's maybe
boring to a young person, but I'm not so young.
I'm probably the oldest person in Bitcoin
court. And I just
care about it as money and making it robust
and as robust and as
decentralized as we can. Robustness and
decentralization. AJ Towns wrote that on a blog
post several years ago. AJ got
that full on 100% right.
Robustness and decentralization.
That's where Bitcoin shines
and that's where my attention is.
And decentralization of funding developers,
of developers, of mining,
and making it possible to run nodes
as cheap as possible.
So don't burden everybody
with a bunch of crap on their node.
I mean, Cora was good at that
with the block size war
in preferring to keep things light
for the node users in blocks smaller.
So, yeah, there's definitely been a bit of a change in narrative
by necessity or by other means, but it's concerning.
Absolutely.
I saw in one of the launch posts for one of these shit coins on Bitcoin things,
I think it was Opnet,
that the article said that there are so many sats just sitting there doing nothing.
And it reminded me so much of Christine Lagarde saying that there are so many, you know,
big piles of euros in people's savings account that are sitting there doing nothing,
and we ought to do something with them.
That's what they want to do.
They want to steal your sats.
No, this is the thing that people don't get about money.
It's never idle.
It always provides its holder with a service.
Saving is a use case.
It is, in fact, the most important use case.
That's how it fixes store value.
Like, it's so crucial.
It provides proper incentives and peace of mind and ability, freedom.
And yeah, freedom is important.
And that whole, it's creeping in that that is not important anymore.
And it's so sad.
And it's sort of with the stable coins thing.
What I dislike about that is the narrative is that it's this necessary bridge into the other world and we can bank the unbanked and stuff.
But to me, if fiat is smoking, then stablecoins are nicotine patches.
But if you want to quit nicotine, then you should use SATs instead.
Yes.
You see what I mean?
It's a substitute, but you're still addicted to this drug.
So it doesn't fix the problem.
And I believe that developers, it's healthier if Bitcoin developers are funded in Bitcoin.
Of course.
And what that presupposes is more of them not being in the United States where you cannot use Bitcoin really.
Well, you can.
Well, you can if you're ballsy enough to give the finger to the government and not give a crap.
Like, yeah.
Right.
But, you know, I was actually made an example of, like, my Jonas once in his blog of saying how things can go very wrong when your funding is in Bitcoin and that it's probably a bit safer and wiser to have it in fiat.
And my funder at the time, Square Crypto later became Spiral, did begin proposing to me to take dollars instead of Bitcoin.
I wouldn't be where I am today with this Citadel if I had been accepting dollars.
It's so sad that you're so unique in doing that.
I'm not. There are other developers.
But definitely the ones in the New York City office are obviously not being paid in Bitcoin.
No, and that in itself is such a humongous red flag.
Like, you don't believe in this revolution.
Nor are the ones in the local hosts in South Francisco.
I don't know about the Brink office in London.
And I do imagine, though, that you could probably ask for it to be funded partially or all on Bitcoin.
It's surely possible, but how are you going to use that Bitcoin if you're in London, New York or San Francisco?
Whereas if you're in the global south or some other countries where Bitcoin has, there are circular Bitcoin economies around the world.
There's just not very many Bitcoin developers in those places.
No, and it's so sad because if you now buy your action to accept fiat instead of Bitcoin, show that you don't truly believe in this revolution, then shouldn't you?
That to me is the biggest red flag ever.
Like if you're working on Bitcoin
And you do not accept Bitcoin
Do you even Bitcoin bro?
What are the other incentives?
I think it's the condition of the funding organization
It's imposing fiat
Not that the developer is preferring fiat
It's case by case of course
But I'm aware of cases where the funding organization
Doesn't propose Bitcoin
No and I'm not trying to
Whereas, thankfully, ones like HRF or OpenStats, and I believe, Spiral did fund me entirely in Bitcoin the whole time, four years.
Yeah.
So it is possible.
But sometimes you have to ask where you can push for it.
OpenStats and HRF, no.
OpenStats and HRF, they are all Bitcoin.
That's it.
You want to be paid in something else?
Go pound sand, dude.
You're getting paid in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
No, but I mean, the whole thing, it just stinks.
I'm sorry, but to me, it's very saddening to hear that the fiat mindset is everywhere.
And I do understand that people live in the real world, and people with guns will come and take them if they do something illegal.
So there's that. It's sort of the same thing as the defeatist attitude with Op Return. That doesn't mean you give up. In my world, it shouldn't lead to anyone giving up. So, John, we've been going on for two hours here, and I absolutely love this conversation. Is there anything more you wanted to add to your talk in San Salvador, the points you missed there?
well that could go on for a lot
it's not every day I have you on
so I have nothing against that
so yeah I mean
I'm really not interested in drama
and so I don't really like these topics
but at the same time in general I see
plebs feeling something is off and there's a lot of speculation
on social media and
my impression has been that people will speculate because they don't know
and I don't say everything I know.
I have to hold back quite a lot, unfortunately.
And I'm not interested in gossiping about this stuff,
but I think it's important for people to know what really took place
or has taken place and what is still taking place
to have a more informed view of what really has been behind the scenes.
So my presentation tried to cover some things, and I think we should link to my slides in your podcast if you're willing to.
Absolutely.
A few quick points from my slides.
I talked about the selection criteria being an issue, the leadership transition.
where are the why are the new developers not cypherpunks and sovereign individuals and
citadels spread around all the world all over the world um rather than being in few offices
um there is a myth that the maintainers are just janitors following the reviews
merging things that have had enough review that is not entirely true there are dynamic effects
because maintainers are going to stay a very long time,
five, six, seven, eight years, sometimes 10 years, sometimes.
And there are real social processes that are affected by
when you become a maintainer, things change.
And dynastic effects, I believe that it,
I did believe that for core, it would be a good idea
to turn maintainership to more of a jury duty
where you don't like code,
where you're not responsible for a project,
where you just review and serve others for a limited time
and then you go back to your life as a regular contributor
the way politics should be.
I had an uncle who was a congressman.
He did two terms.
He realized that for his third term,
he would have to make too many compromises to donors.
And so he set back to private life
to keep things sane and healthy.
And I think it would be healthy for CORE
to think about that.
But at the same time,
if you have several implementations
then perhaps the diversification
could be, perhaps the maintainers
would be okay if you had a strong leader like Vladimir
in place for a decade, if they're a good, humble
wise
servant-oriented leader
as long as you have different implementations
offering users choices and options
then perhaps you could have someone long-term in place
without jury duty regular rotation
but if you only have
core that is 95, 96, 98%
as it used to be before
or not increased recently,
then I believe it should have some sort of
regular rotation of maintainerships
to avoid dynasty effects and power clicks flowing.
How maintainers are chosen in core, to be quite clear,
it is not a vote of the core developers.
They are chosen from what I've seen quite clearly
by the existing maintainers,
often by a proposal from one of them
And a strong veto from one of them could be enough to disable a nomination.
So in core, the maintainers are chosen by the maintainers.
With perhaps input from the project owners who are no longer maintainers.
Project owners are the only people above maintainers in the core hierarchy.
They are the owners of the GitHub repository.
As far as I know, there are four of them.
Two OGs and two newer ones.
in quote one thing that I was
quite worried about this past few years has been
an increasing level of opacity in the
communications it used to be
that we had very good public IRC meetings once a week with Vladimir as the lead maintainer running the meetings He was such a good meeting leader in coming to decisions in real life with intelligent honest humble conversations to come to a conclusion during that same meeting and to arrive at something
Since then, working groups were created.
These are private groups that communicate privately on signal.
You have to reply to be admitted to them.
And that's where the real communication takes place now,
in these silos, where someone like me,
who is watching from outside,
cannot see what communication is taking place.
So the communication has become less public,
it's gone private, and it's siloed.
And I find that personally worrying,
so the private working groups have replaced
public discussion in core meetings.
Code of conduct.
But Core adopted a code of conduct that, if I recall correctly, was written, again, by Jonas of ChainCodeLab.
And I initially, I was, I believe, the first reviewer who came out who reviewed that pull request, and I was not in favor of a code of conduct.
I've never been in favor, and if I was running an implementation, I would try to avoid one as much as possible.
Core went just fine without a code of conduct for more than a decade.
Two dedicated moderators were named.
They're good.
They do a very good job. They are good people. I like both of the moderators who work with Foucault. But they are unfortunately caught between a rock and a hard plate because the way they are used is if, for example, I would make a comment that might be misinterpreted personally by a maintainer who then asks the moderators to investigate it, who then come and investigate me over it.
And I say, no, it wasn't a personal thing.
And I would remind the moderators that when in doubt in rib communication, such as in open source development, you by default must assume the most charitable and generous interpretation of what somebody wrote rather than assuming the worst unless proven so.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Basic rule.
And the moderators were, yes, you're right.
And so the maintainer who told you to go after me for my comment
was assuming the worst rather than giving it a generous or normal interpretation.
So there, between a rock and a hard place,
basically the code of conduct is used to protect the powerful against the weak,
when it really, in my opinion, should be used, if at all,
to protect the weak against the powerful.
But that's how rules tend to be.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, the code of conduct sounds like politicization to me, like it's politics creeping in.
Yeah, this came from the introduction, the creeping of woke into these open source projects.
So it comes back to, we need alternative clients with different politics.
Maybe we can have a woke one.
And then we can have one that's maybe more just older, conservative, seasoned people who aren't based on anything related to their identity.
We don't care what country you're in.
If you have two kids or four, what color your hair is or anything.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is your work.
there's a perennial lack of
the perennial constraint
in Bitcoin core protocol development
has been a lack of experienced reviewers
people always cite
the most frustrating thing to them
as being my work doesn't get reviewed
it doesn't move forward
there's no good review
and so I've seen it argued
that we shouldn't have more implementations
because that would disperse the reviewers
across the already resource
we are lacking against over more projects
instead of concentrating the rare review talent.
I disagree with that because in core,
I've seen very good experienced seasoned reviewers
be disenfranchised just because they're more independent.
And then we see what I,
like I mentioned earlier in our discussion,
where people are coming in,
not to review the pull request or the code,
but just to review the reviewer,
to dunk down on their review
to make it possible to ignore their review
or to push it aside.
I believe that there are people
who are very good reviewers in core
who are underutilized
because of the social processes,
because they're not in an office,
they're not in the popular group.
Maybe they are one guy alone in Eastern Europe
or one guy alone in Central America,
and so on.
So there are double standards.
And there's ongoing social signaling
of approval and disapproval,
who should be supported,
who was in, who was out.
That is maybe inevitable in human processes,
but it wasn't quite as bad when I first joined Core
as it became later.
So I have a list of, in my slides,
starting from slide 49, culture, named culture.
I have one, two, three, four, five,
four pages of what I would consider to be
the guidelines for an implementation.
and at the end of the day really having one single dominant client creates monopoly risks it cifles developers who are not in the in group it siphils development maybe we could have one it going to get harder
with more in some cases to introduce softworks probably i could imagine but maybe we're going
to have one implementation that does launch ctv or coven and since the people want that
one that does like not launch something like pip 110 i am not certain how it will help or hinder
innovations, having more clients, more
implementations. But having only one
is clearly seen by
I think a growing part of the community as being an engineer.
They need options.
I mean, more
options is always good, right?
It's sort of like
countries having to compete for talent
if you have more.
As long as you don't introduce
less resiliency with the
consensus rules.
As long as they follow consensus properly.
and don't have critical consensus funds.
But you're right.
I agree that more implementations will have more network resilience,
fewer single points of failure like we do now,
more available choice,
and it will incentivize Bitcoin Core to improve.
Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong,
but if they're not in consensus, they're a shitcoin.
They're a fork, right?
By definition.
Yes, but you want basically,
on part of the reasoning behind the kernel,
isolation project in core has been to have a single kernel that other implementations could use
while innovating elsewhere but they all use the same solid robust kernel
um so it the most important rules and if you follow the consensus ones that as long as the
client is following that then they should be free to innovate in other things perhaps
but overall i think the main thing is to offer more choice and to encourage bitcoin core to
be more careful about what it does
if it's more likely to lose market share.
Right now, Core,
my understanding is that Core
is having problems recruiting new developers.
That could be wrong,
but that's what I've heard.
So Bitcoin maybe is not as much in fashion at the moment.
Or maybe it's just Core is not as much in fashion.
I don't know.
But developing and training,
not only new users, but also more developers,
is going to be important.
It always has been.
And we have to be very careful and vigilant
about where the developers are being trained and educated
so that it's not just one centralized place in one city.
No, and maybe not with emotional Fridays or whatever.
Maybe we should have trained at another school
that doesn't focus that much on feeling Fridays.
If you do have Feelings Fridays for one implementation, as long as you have three or four implementations that sort of have roughly equal market share, I think that's fine.
Guns, steak, and cigars Fridays for another implementation, please.
Feelings Fridays, guns, gun shooting Fridays.
Guns and steak Fridays, yeah, yeah.
I'll disappoint you all. I don't have any guns in El Salvador.
but
and you know
we have also
AI is coming
and that's the real
topic right now
amongst the core
developers
Bitcoin developers
in general
is integrating AI
and that's a whole
other thing
oh yeah
yeah
that's a whole
other box to open
oh my
so
anyway
how is life
in El Salvador
by the way
you're still enjoying
yourself immensely
I mean
I love El Salvador
I love it here
But, I mean, it's a challenge.
It's cost me a lot of money.
It's cost me a lot of time.
It's kind of like moving to working on Bitcoin Core.
Would I do it again?
Knowing how much it costs and how much time it took to become a core developer.
The same could be said for El Salvador.
But it's very compelling if you're a freedom lover.
I don't know how long the freedom window will remain open.
or maybe we will all get rugged.
I do worry that the government will introduce property taxes
and rug all of us people who have been investing in land.
That would be terrible because a lot of the value of the land here
is coming from A, the security, the safety,
and B, the lack of property taxes, which could change.
And I am worried about that.
I think there's a real risk of the safety could go away
and maybe the CIA breaks open prisons.
I mean, too far on that.
or the property taxes could be introduced.
And that would be honestly very sad.
I would say that both those count as the safety going away.
Yes.
And so you don't know.
And it's actually, I've never invested so much in my life
outside of work in terms of time and money as I have here.
No.
But at the same time it pretty cool here I mean there a lot to and it beautiful up there uh i mean that where uh where you live i thoroughly enjoyed that afternoon where where i got to see your house
and and get all sweaty and we had to exchange i had to leave my shirt and and get a t-shirt from
you because my flight yeah yeah my hat is still there right i still have your hat i still have
because they're waiting for you.
If I know you correctly, they're still hanging on that ladder, right?
No, they're hanging on something else.
All right.
That's good to hear.
And I'm so sad that I didn't get to go in November here,
that I couldn't make it to El Salvador.
Or Plan B.
Plan B.
You didn't come for Plan B.
No, no.
It turned out, my bad, it turned out my passport's expiry date
had an expiry date.
so the expiry date was like
five and a half months after my
planned return flight
so they wouldn't let me over there
and I was at the airport and all
stressed out of course
having this thing planned and I didn't want to
let people down
I showed them pictures of me and
Bukele and stuff
just let me fly there
and I'll sort it out while I'm there
I'm sure I can sort it out
but no, they wouldn't let me on the plane
I have to say I'm jealous of you
and Giacomo you guys got to meet the president
I still have not met the president
I'm being called a hypocrite
all over the internet because of that
I'm a statist cuck now
because I went to dinner
you're a statist cuck
of course
that was interesting
my second presidential dinner
if you count the president of Madeira
well you'll be coming next November
then I am sure
for adopting
or for an historical something
will there be a historical next year?
I assume there will be
because they're launching the same thing
but with AI in April
oh, fantastic
I mean, the Bitcoin office
is impressive because
I try to help the Bitcoin office
frequently
and they're impressed with how much they're able to do
with little, they don't have a big budget
or anything, I mean, Bitcoin historical
did look like it had a decent budget, but
in general, they're operating on a
shoestring.
It's amazing the stuff, the innovation
they're trying to introduce to El Salvador
compared to some other world-based
government that maybe are very well-funded or
very much better connected or more close
to the center of power.
And the Bitcoin office are just doing so much
stuff with so little.
It's amazing.
I didn't necessarily
I didn't know Max and Stacey before
and the more I
I work with Stacey, the more there is to love.
It's amazing.
No, she's definitely
a doer.
She makes things happen.
Thank you very much,
Stacey, for inviting me to
Historico.
She's incredible.
I'm doing a lecture for Kubo Plus
on Monday, actually, online.
Online?
I already did one,
which was an interesting experience
like between 50 and 100 students or something.
And they were all, they didn't have their cameras on.
So it's just random anonymous faces.
And I'm like, okay, what do you want me to talk about?
And it's just silence as a, all right, I'll talk about this.
And I just went on ranting for an hour or two
and they seemed to enjoyed it.
That's great.
Well, now the world knows that we collaborated
on your first book.
yeah and i'm so glad we got to get that story out maybe in a yet another revised edition i can put
your name in the book uh i'm eternally grateful for that it sure made me a better writer uh and
a better bitcoiner so once again deep thanks and uh yeah all the love in the world
well i hope to see you soon yes any before before i let you go john is there anywhere on the internet
where you want to send people,
anything you want to direct people to?
Buy my NFTs and JPEGs.
You can follow me on X if you want to.
That's about it.
Yeah, and yes, that's very advisable.
Jonatak, thanks so much for doing this.
And I hope to return to El Salvador as soon as possible
and have a ceviche or two with you
and maybe hop on your motorcycle again.
That was adventurous.
Come out and visit the Citadel.
Absolutely.
Yeah, hopefully I can bring my family one day too.
Oh, fantastic.
I love El Salvador.
It's fantastic.
Yes, sir.
See you soon.
Yes, thank you.
This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Arrivederci.
See you.