On The Brink with Castle Island - John Newbery (Brink) on funding Bitcoin development (EP.150)

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

John Newbery, Bitcoin Core developer and founder of Bitcoin Optech, announces an independent nonprofit organization to support Bitcoin development, Brink. Donate here. In this episode, we discuss the formation and mandate of Brink, as well as the developer funding context that we find ourselves in. Covered in the episode:  John Newbery's core developer story and how he came to found Brink Why John left Chaincode and struck out on his own Brink's mandate and foundational purpose Lessons learned from the Bitcoin Foundation The future of Bitcoin Optech The state of funding for Bitcoin development The accessibility of Bitcoin protocol development today Does the existence of financial incentives cannibalize the intrinsic motivation to work on open source? Why John works on Bitcoin Why ossification might be more remote than we expect Whether Bitcoin's developer funding model exposes it to corporate capture The political implications of Bitcoin having a sole reference implementation The importance of distinguishing the validation element of Bitcoin Core from the other components Is Bitcoin protocol dev meritocratic or technocratic? Why the structurelessness of Bitcoin core dev raises the barriers to entry Is Bitcoin protocol development adequately funded right now? Does developer funding equate to influence in the Bitcoin protocol development The dispersion of Bitcoin protocol development influence Content mentioned in this episode: Joseph Jacks on On The Brink Bitmex Research, Who Funds Bitcoin Development? Nic Carter in Coindesk, Bitcoin's Patronage System is an Unheralded Strength

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to On the Brink. I'm Nick Carter. Today we have a very special episode with John Newberry. You will have seen at this point the announcement that John is setting up a non-profit focused on sponsoring Bitcoin Core Development called Brink. Excellent taste in names, John, by the way. I'm going to put a link to donate in the description. Brink is tax deductible and funds will be used to support Bitcoin Core. We'll actually talk about the purpose of the funds in the episode. I'm so pumped that there are more and more organizations throwing their hat in a ring and getting involved in Bitcoin development funding. In my opinion, Bitcoin funding is at its most robust and most essentialized since I've been paying attention to Bitcoin. Now, we don't just talk about

Brink in this episode. I took the opportunity to grill John on a variety of very squishy topics as a relates to power within Bitcoin Core and how financing intersects with that power. And John was a very good sport. He answered all my questions. These are actually the exact same things I asked him when I first met him in Curacao in 2018. I have always been very curious about how power exists in a largely structural system like Bitcoin Core development. There's clearly power. It's just not formalize. And the funding environment is an interesting lens. which to analyze this. And there are plenty of good faith critics that do take this issue very seriously. And I think it's somewhat under-discussed in the industry. So I found John's answer is here

to be an incredibly useful resource for anybody really deeply trying to understand the nature of power in these systems, whether Bitcoin Core truly is a meritocracy, what the barriers to entry are in terms of being a new developer. Either way, I'm so, so excited that John, has founded this organization. Again, consider donating. Link is right down there. Let's dive right into the episode. Brought down by bad mortgage investments,

Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds, more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. John Newbury, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Nick. It's a pleasure. I'm very excited to have you on. You might actually be the, I don't know, you might be the first Bitcoin core developer we've had on the show, which is irresponsible of us really because this is like our 150th.

episode. I don't know how we've gone this long. Well, I'm honored to be the first. So we've a very exciting announcement. You are announcing a nonprofit focus on Bitcoin Coat development called Brink. That's right. It's a great name, by the way. Thank you. Classic reference. Tell me a little bit about your motives to start Brink and what it entails and why you chose to sort of go that route. Absolutely. Well, I'll go back a few years. I've been working at Chain Code Labs in New York since early 2017, so almost four years.

And that organization has done a lot of amazing work. It's funded by Alex and Suhass, and they've funded Bitcoin Protocol Developers, put on events, run the residency. so they've done great work. And that organization is based in New York. So if you want to work for Chain Code, you either live in New York or you relocate to New York. And as you can probably hear, I'm not originally from New York,

I've been away from the UK for about 10 years, and I felt like it was time to move back to London. So my time of Chain Code came to an end this summer. I moved back to the UK, and I wanted to continue contributing to Bitcoin, both in terms of technical contributions to Bitcoin core, but also in a wider sense, how can I use my knowledge and my experience to contribute to the protocol?

So thinking about what I think Bitcoin needs, which is a weird way to phrase it maybe, but how I can help Bitcoin. One question that keeps coming up time and again is how to fund or how to sustainably fund protocol developments and developers. So that's one of the things that I'm hoping to tackle with Brink. And the other question that comes up is how do we onboard new developers? There's a very steep learning curve to working on the protocol.

And how do we get engineers skilled up to actually make impactful contributions? So Brink is my answer to both of those questions. It is an organization, a nonprofit that will accept donations from individuals and organizations and disperse those donations as grants to establish developers, but also invest in onboarding new contributors and scaling them up and mentoring them so that they can become fully impactful contributors to the protocol. And in terms of the mandate, are you envisioning most of these sponsored developers working on Bitcoin core directly, or would you extend it to sort of ancillary projects that surround Bitcoin, maybe second layer projects or, you know, things like, you know, BDC pay server, sort of related concepts? That's certainly possible. My background is in Bitcoin core on the base protocol.

So that's where my expertise lies. But Brink will fund Bitcoin and Bitcoin adjacent technologies. So if somebody applies for a grant to work on Lightning, they would be absolutely, the grants would be applicable to them. They could apply for that. And we will assess grants based on the history of the person making the application, the history of their contributions, and what we see as their potential for making future contributions.

So the Bitcoin nonprofit space has a checkered history, I suppose, we could say. Anyone that's been around will have memories of the Bitcoin Foundation, which I believe actually still technically exists, actually. So did you give any thought to the lessons maybe to be learned? from the Bitcoin Foundation? Did that loom large in your thinking as you were trying to put this together? It definitely looms large. It looms large over I think a lot of efforts in this space and it's something that I'm very aware of. I started a project called Optech about two years ago, two and a half years ago. And when we were starting that, we were very aware that we did not

want to be the Bitcoin Foundation or perceived as being the Bitcoin Foundation. That was an effort to help encourage, to encourage businesses to use scaling technologies, things like RBF and Segwit and so on, and to try and bridge the gap between what's going on in open source and what Bitcoin companies were doing. But we suddenly didn't want to be gatekeepers and we didn't want to project ourselves as being the foundation or the people we used. talk to if you want to talk to someone, the CEO of Bitcoin or anything like that. We had a very and still have a very kind of narrow and limited focus at OCTEC to work on

disseminating knowledge about what's going on in open source development and helping businesses adopt those scanning technologies. And so similarly with Brink, we have a very narrow mandate. We want to support Bitcoin developers and we want to We want to onboard new contributors, but we certainly are not the Bitcoin Foundation. We're not purporting to direct Bitcoin development or making new decisions about the protocol. We simply want to be a new way of funding Bitcoin developers and onboarding Bitcoin developers. I actually talked to Patrick Mark recently, who was the director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and he had some very interesting stories about what happened there over the years.

I think a sadly three lesson for everyone who wants to work on open source. That's a great reminder. I absolutely have to get him on. Patrick is great. I bear absolutely no ill will in terms of his association with the Bitcoin Foundation, which I believe was done. I mean, it may have been slightly naive to believe that a single organization could purport to represent Bitcoin. But there are a lot of people that I respect that are involved in it.

It just seemed like a bit of an unfortunate outcome in the end. Just on the topic of Optech, actually, I've always been a huge fan of Optech. I love the work you guys did in terms of encouraging service providers and heavy consumers of Blockspace to sort of be more parsimonious in terms of their usage of the blockchain. Are you going to continue your work with Optech? Is that going to continue in parallel? Yeah. That work has always been in parallel with my main gig as a Bitcoin Protocol developer.

Part of what we did with Optech, which was quite a big part and something I enjoyed a lot and thought was very valuable with the in-person events. So we had workshops and events with engineers at these different Bitcoin companies. And obviously, restrictions on travel and meeting have stopped us from doing those over the last few months and probably for the next few months as well. But the newsletter continues. It's obviously the best source of information about what's going on in open source Bitcoin and various other resources we put out there. So yeah, my involvement there will continue. And do you consider Optech a success?

Do you feel that it's sort of guided behavior of sort of these large entities that use Bitcoin, I mean, you know, to be better stewards of the protocol, so to speak? It's not something that's easily measurable. But I think I'm very proud of the work we've done. I think we have been successful in keeping those considerations relevant and talking about, But as Bitcoin blockchain users, you should be trying to be economical with your use of that chain, because one, it's good for you and your customers. And two, it's good for Bitcoin.

And what's good for Bitcoin is ultimately good for you as a business. So, yeah, I'm proud of continuing to put that message across. And I think we have been successful in keeping that message relevant. So before you dive into the Bitcoin, patronage story and questions of governance, which I'm very excited to talk about. Just to summarize on Brink, so this is a 501C3, is that correct? We have applied for 501C3 status. So we're a non-profit corporation.

We've put in the paperwork for 501C3 status. We're hopefully that, obviously hopeful that that will come back. and that would allow US taxpayers to donate tax exempt to the organization. Okay, great. And there really aren't many other avenues for tax exempt donations to Bitcoin protocol development. So this is, I actually often get questions around this. And I've struggled for answers because entities like the DCI are more sort of corporate patronage. innate it's much harder as an individual to contribute and they're not really equipped to handle that.

So at least in my view, you're filling a gap, which many people have felt. Yeah, and I think our mandate is very narrow. We are specifically in the business of funding Bitcoin protocol development and onboarding Bitcoin contributors and nothing else. I don't think there's another organization that can accept individual donations that has that Monday. So speaking of Bitcoin patronage, this has been a very active topic this year. There are a number of new organizations that have jumped into the fray, either offering grants to developers or bringing developers on staff and, you know, with minimal direction putting them to work on Bitcoin. And then

other organizations are giving some developers more structure. So there's a lot of heterogeneity there, but at least subjectively, as far as I can tell, the sort of patronage or support environment for Bitcoin core developers is about as good as it's ever been. Does that sort of comport with your view of the world? I mean, obviously, you're much closer to the ground here. Does my sort of outsider's view match up with yours? Yes, it comports. It matches up entirely. And I wouldn't say about as good. I would say it's better than it's ever been. We've seen quite a few exchanges start funding either on staff or through grant programs for independent developers. Obviously, chain code continues to do amazing work. The DCI continues to fund Vlad and Corrie, who are two of the longest standing contributors and maintainers to Bitcoin Core. Proxstream has people on staff, Lightning Labs, Square Crypto has been massive. They've given out lots of funds, not just to developers, but also to designers and other projects.

So, yeah, it's very healthy. I think Brink still has a role to play. For one, I think more is always better and more diverse models of funding, particularly for a decentralised. system is healthy. Chain code has done great work, but we don't want to make chain code the directors of Bitcoin, and I'm not suggesting they are in any way or have any desire to be. But we just don't want them to have to do all of the heavy lifting. So having lots of different diverse models is definitely helpful. And so imagine you're kind of a young engineer listening to this right now, and you're interested in Bitcoin, you want to maybe work on the project,

what does their path look like to getting involved in CoreDev? Because I mean, I know you've sort of written about this and talked about it a lot. It's not exactly the easiest trajectory. Is it getting easier? Are there sort of more onboarding opportunities these days? Yeah, it's getting easier. And yes, I think it's not an easy thing to be a, a protocol developer, there's a Bitcoin protocol developer.

There's lots of different technologies that you need to know about. You need to know about consensus protocols and peer-to-peer networks and cryptography and mathematics and statistics. There's just a lot there to learn and it's a steep learning curve. But there are the good news is there are lots of resources now that didn't exist even two or three years ago. One project that I started about 18 months ago is Bitcoin Core PR Review Club. which is a weekly meeting for developers,

particularly newer contributors or people who want to contribute to Bitcoin Core to come together on IRC and discuss a pool request. So a pool request is a suggested change to the project or to the code base. And so we meet every week and it's a place where those developers can ask questions. Any questions are welcome,

anyone is welcome if they're there, to learn. And that's a way for people to start on their, I guess, journey of working on Bitcoin core. The Bitcoin Opt-Tech newsletter, I think, is a good starting place for people who want to learn about the technicals of Bitcoin. It's very well referenced to poor requests and mailing posts. So if you're an engineer and you want to work on Bitcoin, you should definitely subscribe to that newsletter. Chain code has run residencies and those are programs for new developers generally run one one per year. But recently because of COVID we've been moving a lot of that material online. I shouldn't say we anymore because I'm got a chain code but Adam Jonas and

Carole have been putting a lot of that residency material online so that's available to developers. So yeah, I think there are a lot more parts now for people who are who have the talents and drive to work on Bitcoin. What do you make of this critique of the existence of funding as cannibalizing intrinsic motivation to contribute? Because obviously in the earliest days, there was no, you know, notion of receiving funding to work on Bitcoin. I guess the only way that it worked was that some developers themselves to mine Bitcoin, or maybe they bought some Bitcoin on the open market, and that was their incentive. They created incentive alignment.

These days, obviously, it's a bit more difficult for a young developer to obtain a meaningful share of the network to get the incentive alignment, but there's the compensating factor where there is some funding available. What's the interplay in terms of your intrinsic motivation to work on an open source project for the sake of it, and this sort of extrinsic factor where there's the actual potential of remuneration. In my experience, the Bitcoin protocol developers

that I know are very intrinsically motivated. And I don't think any of them that I know are for doing it to get rich. I think if you wanted to get rich of Bitcoin, becoming a protocol developer is a really bad, Way to go about it. Not to say that we're poor and developers are generally well paid compared to the rest of the population, but there are much more profitable things to be working on if you have the skill to work on the Bitcoin protocol. So I think most of the motivation is intrinsic, but developers still need to put food on the table and need to get paid somehow.

So all of this funding that I see from chain code and from the exchanges and other companies, I think that just allows developers to spend more time on what they would be doing anyway and what they would like to do full time. I don't think there's a conflict there between being paid and working on something that you're intrinsically motivated to. It's so interesting. I don't know if you've ever consulted the economic literature about people that work on open source projects, but it's been this puzzle.

Economists could never figure out why people would contribute to open source, people who have a very high opportunity cost of their time, because they're very skilled individuals, so their time is worth a lot. There's this whole literature, which is just economists trying to figure out, why are these people spending their time on open source projects? Are they doing it in expectation of a future payoff?

You know, are they doing it because they get their record is recorded and kind of on GitHub? And so it's part of a CV, you know, for future job opportunities. But I guess maybe the simplest answer is that because they believe in the project and they want to support it. I think that's it. I actually listened to your recording with Joseph Jacks recently. and you talk about this, it's very interesting. But for me, I work on Bitcoin because I love working on Bitcoin, and I believe in the mission, and I wanted to succeed.

And given the opportunity to work on Bitcoin, I couldn't imagine spending my time doing anything else. And I think that's not uncommon amongst Bitcoin developers, and I imagine amongst open source developers in general, that you want the project to do well, and you enjoy working on it. And if you can get paid to do that, then great. Relative to other open source projects that you have knowledge of,

would you say contributing to Bitcoin is more challenging because of how high stakes it is? I think so. I think we have a very high bar, certainly in Bitcoin Core. there's a very high quality bar and the project is different from other projects that I have seen or worked on or know about

and I think it's because there's so much at stake. People are very wary about touching certain parts of the code base in a way that makes sense because we're not aiming not to have bugs. We're aiming not to have bugs.

We're aiming not to have bugs and to be fully in consensus with the previous versions of the software, which is a much more difficult task than simply not writing bugs. And it requires a different level of thinking. So yeah, I think it's a challenge. I think it's the most interesting intellectual challenge that I've had in my professional career. And it's endlessly fascinating. I know. I keep asking you questions that are impossible to answer. but would you say that, you know, Bitcoin consensus code is the most scrutinized code that exists, I mean, in any software project?

I'm not sure I could name one that's more carefully scrutinized. I don't know the answer to that question. I know that our review bar is very, very high. and changes as they go into Bitcoin Core are very heavily scrutinized, but I can't tell you compared to code for flying space shuttles or running MRI scanners or whatever because I haven't worked on the project. Yeah, they have bugs too. I think the moon landing, the original Apollo mission,

the software kept crashing, is they were trying to land the module, if I'm not mistaken. Did they try turning it off and turning it along again? To be fair, Bitcoin has bugs too. I mean, we not all the time, but we occasionally have bugs. It does have bugs, yeah, and we fix them and don't always shout about it, but it's software. It was written by humans, and so it has bugs.

and maintaining it is an ongoing task. There's a bit of a fallacy that people think Bitcoin is done, and it would be okay if developers just stopped working on it because it should be ossified and it should never change again. No, there are bugs and their problems to be solved, and that requires developers who know how to work with these systems. Yeah, I mean, my view on ossification is maybe we can try to ossify, once we get Schnorr and Taproot through it, though.

But let's focus on that first. Schnor and Taproot would be very nice, yes. And we're getting closer. Yeah, I would love to pick your brain on the process for including Shorn Taproot and Bitcoin, but we have to stay on message. That could be a whole own episode in its own right. On the question of patronage,

one thing that has been an enormous critique of Bitcoin and the development model is this idea that Bitcoin is exposed to the risk of corporate capture precisely because it's only kind of the largest, or historically this was the case, the largest Bitcoin corporations or organizations that could afford to sponsor developers. And as a result, they clustered in these organizations, you know, historically the largest one being Blockstream that did this. And then, you know, anybody that has paid the slightest amount of attention to some of these rhetorical wars will know that Blockstream was a frequent target of this assertion

that they were capturing Bitcoin. And they had hoarded all the talent so they could make sort of changes to Bitcoin. that were favorable to their corporate agenda. And so if you sort of reason through this critique, it comes back down to the reality that there's no source of funding for developers aside from, well, at least historically there wasn't aside from larger sort of Bitcoin focused organizations like Blackstream. Obviously, that's different today. And, you know, by repeating that critique, I'm not endorsing it.

I don't think it's true by any means. But that was certainly the critique. Is this something that concerns you in the future, let's say, Coinbase and Digital Currency Group end up sponsoring a dozen core developers apiece, and they become the most important centers of power here? Is there any recognition in sort of the community, the technical community, that there's a risk here. Are there any measures in place or any discussion of this potential sort of ever-present risk of corporate capture?

Or is core development so distinct that you don't think it could be perverted into, you know, furthering specific corporate aims? I think it would be very difficult because there are so many eyes on it. obviously any system put in place by humans can be perverted by humans and we're all fallible and potentially someone or some group could come along and try and capture Bitcoin. But I think it's very unlikely. First of all, because it's so open, everything that happens in the development cycle is out in the open.

You can look back at the poor request history. You can look at the mailing list. You can look at the IRC, the chat. And basically every decision that happens in Bitcoin core has a trail. You know, you can audit that trail. You can see whether the decision was made and who had input into that decision. I think we can distinguish between the protocol and the implementation. So Bitcoin is a protocol and Bitcoin Core is an implementation of that protocol,

the reference implementation. And we can distinguish between changes to the protocol, which happened very infrequently. The last one was Segwit in 2017. The next one will likely be Schnawtap Route. But since there's no director of Bitcoin, I can't guarantee. I can't guarantee that that will happen or when it will happen. But those things happen very infrequently and require the economic majority to go along with that change. No one can force the economic majority of the economy.

Bitcoin to make a change to the protocol that they don't want. The implementation on your hand could have changes made to it that people don't like and they wouldn't run that implementation. Again, I think it's unlikely the Bitcoin Core would be captured. But if an implementation is captured, presumably people could fork that implementation. And that would be a very, that would be a big event in Bitcoin because the history of Bitcoin is one major implementation, what we now call Bitcoin Core. and a few very minor in comparison implementations.

But if there was some capture of Bitcoin core, the remedy, I think, would be hitting the fork button or typing Git clone and making an implementation and doesn't make those changes. Yeah, the implementation story is a little bit tricky, I think, because, you know, Satoshi said, not to quote Satoshi's scripture or anything, but Satoshi once said that they didn't believe that a separate implementation would be a good idea. They said it would be a menace to the network, I think. Oh, okay, so you know, you know exactly.

I know the scripture, yeah. Someone should number it like we do biblically, you know, Satoshi 628. And then a lot of the theory behind Ethereum was, well, actually, we should have as many implementations as possible because just having one major reference implementation is sort of coercive in a way because if you control the implementation, you control the protocol. That was, you know, something that was frequently said. But what was interesting with Ethereum is that it then sort of collapsed back down to one dominant implementation like many people had predicted. And of course, we see this kind of repeated time and again in other coins. It's very, very hard to have sufficient to marshal enough resources to have many competing implementations because they're just so challenging and they need to be in perfect concert with each other.

So I guess the prospects for having competing implementations maybe look a little dim by that rubric. I mean, I certainly acknowledge the distinction between Bitcoin the protocol and then Bitcoin Core because those are different concepts. But does this trouble you at all? The fact that there's just structural forces which kind of result in Bitcoin Core being hegemonic within Bitcoin? I think in the long run, we will see a better modularization of Bitcoin Core and a more formal interface between what really is the core of Bitcoin Core.

the validation and consensus engine, and then the components around that, the peer-to-peer implementation, indexes, the wallet, the RPC, all of those things. And if we can make that separation clear, then potentially people could use the validation consensus part of Bitcoin Core and re-implement their own peer-to-peer stack using the same validation core.

And I think that would be a much better situation to be in, this kind of monoculture of one project and everything being totally dependent on that one project is not ideal. And in the long run, I'd like to see alternative peer-to-peer implementations, alternative wallets that use Bitcoin core's back end. And that, I think, can only be good for the health of the system. Yeah, I was going to say we haven't even succeeded in disentangling the wallet from the node. Well, it mostly is we have a formal interface, a clear interface between the two, which we didn't use to have.

And you're even able to run it in a separate process, that that isn't merged into a release yet. But Ruskinowski has been working on that project for a few years, and you can theoretically run the wallet in a different process. So that's mostly done. I think the thing that will be more difficult. And people have tried and not trying is to separate just the consensus code from, say, the peer-to-peer stack. It's kind of funny that the original Bitcoin was vertically integrated in that it was a wallet. It was a node.

It was a miner. It did everything related to Bitcoin. Yeah. And there's even coding there for running a merchant and running an online. shop and things like that. But I think that I'm not going to say Satoshi did a bad job there. Satoshi was presumably working alone, we think, we don't know. And they were writing all this code.

And so it doesn't really make sense that they would think about the long-term architecture. The priority is writing something that works. And you can, you know, you can tidy that later, whatever. That's different from the protocol. You know, Satoshi said once the protocol is in place, it's kind of set in stone in some ways. But the implementation, I don't blame Satoshi for taking shortcuts and even messy code. That's our job to clean that up after. In a sense, the last decade of Bitcoin development seems to me, at least, that a lot of it is just reckoning with the initial conditions and trying to, as you say, modularize it and make Bitcoin,

and easier to work on and tease these different components apart. Yeah, I think that's important work. I think that's good work. And it is for me personally a high priority. I think the way you formulated that might suggest we haven't shipped any features in the last 10 years, which certainly isn't the case. I was fine. And I think as the project scales, these kind of architectural

considerations become more important if you want, if one person is working on a project, architecture doesn't matter because they hold it all in their head. If 10 people work on a project, you need slightly better boundaries. And if 100 or 1,000 people are working on a project, you need very strict boundaries because you need separation of concerns and specialization. And some people work on some components. So I think it's a natural maturation, in the project that these things are getting more formal. So again, returning to critiques and these are now we're at the part of the discussion where we have to tackle the really tough questions.

But I think the first time I met you was maybe in, it might have been in Curacao, actually, at FC, I think I asked you the same thing back then. So I'm going to ask you again for the benefit of our listeners. So, you know, the critique of Bitcoin core dev is that it's sort of a technocracy. And, you know, while it ostensibly might be meritocratic, you know, in practice, there is, you know, a handful of individuals whose views are very influential and maybe, you know, they have an effective veto over, you know, decisions that are made. maybe that's going a little bit too far with that characterization. But certainly Bitcoin CoreDive is often alleged to be a technocracy.

So, you know, first of all, how true would you say this is? And second of all, if it is true, how do we deal with it? It's a very deep question and one that we could talk about for a while, I think. there's very little formal hierarchy or structure within Bitcoin core. There are a number of maintainers, and those maintainers have the privilege or the, I don't know, maybe privilege is their wrong word, duty. They have the merge button.

They can merge code into the mainline master branch, which eventually gets released. But they don't have much in the way of, power to influence what gets merged. They are seeking what is consensus amongst the developers and acting more like functionaries. And as soon as they see that a change has enough consensus and enough people have said, yeah, this change is good.

Then they hit that merge button. So they don't have any more sway or power over the direction of the project than any other contributor. So there's not much in the way of a formal hierarchy. but I think it would be naive to say there is none. Obviously, people who have been around for a long time have more influence, simply because if you have a history of making wise decisions, then people are probably going to listen to you when you say something.

So even though the power is not explicitly and overtly formalized into a structure, there is some kind of hierarchy there. I don't think that is necessarily bad. I think it's probably unavoidable. We want people who are experienced and good to have more influence because they have a history of making good decisions and we want to continue making good decisions. So we aim for a meritocracy.

We aim to judge every change on its own merits, but we're humans. And obviously if someone who you would, respect, suggest the change, you will probably consider it more deeply than if someone you've never heard of suggestive change. And that's a useful heuristic. The thing that's very rare, the rare resource here is your attention and time. And so if I see a change as being proposed by, say, Sipper, Peter Willa, it's probably worth my time looking at that change because it's probably a good change. But that doesn't mean I would just rather stamp it and say, yeah,

I put it in. I think all changes we aim to scrutinize equally heavily. John, is your personal journey salient to this question as well? Because, you know, not to butter you up or anything, but I would say you're a pretty respected voice in Bitcoin development. And equally, you haven't been at it, you know, as long as some people like Blue Matt or Greg Maxwell, for instance. So, you know, is the fact that you, quote, unquote, broke in to Bitcoin core dev and establish yourself as an important voice, is that evidence, you know, pointing to the openness and the actual meritocratic nature of the system? I think so. Yeah. I mean, I've always found in my personal development learning about Bitcoin people have been very open and generous with

their time and I think it's a more open system than other systems I've worked on and there aren't there aren't walls that you can't get past or break down but it's like I said It's a very difficult system to work on. And if you want people to listen to you, you have to establish credibility. Yeah, I think one other place where people get tripped up is that actually following the discourse, as it pertains to CoreDev, requires a reasonable level of expertise and kind of meta-knowledge. I mean, you need to know where to look, who to follow, what forums to follow. and the dialogue can be pretty scattered, you know, there's occasionally in-person meetups,

but IRC, mailing list, other forums, presumably as well. So I think it can also be intimidating in terms of, you know, Socratic seminars, all those other forms of dialogue. It can be intimidating in terms of just knowing where to start in the first place. Yeah, yeah, there's, I said earlier that everything's out in the year, open but it's certainly not cataloged and indexed and codified in a way where it's you can show up on day one and know exactly what's what it takes a long time to establish a context and that there's you know for every piece of excellent information on the

internet there's probably another one which is telling you completely wrong thing so it's there's great information out there it's mostly out in the open as far as I can tell the decisions and process are all pretty auditable, but like you say, it just takes a long time. And you need that context, and you just need to spend a lot of time. So there's one other thing I wanted to touch on, which is, you know, Bitcoin is a public good or the Bitcoin Protocol is a public good, because I would say Bitcoin's themselves are not a public good because they are excludable. you know, my possession of a Bitcoin deprives you of a Bitcoin, in theory, I guess.

But the Bitcoin Protocol, you could say, is sort of an architecture and a system of moving money around kind of resembles a public good. At the very least, it's shared in public infrastructure. And, you know, the thing about public goods, and, you know, we certainly hear Vitalik talking about this a lot is that, you know, we need to coordinate a way to fund them. So as we've discussed, there's actually a very robust set of entities that are interested in funding Bitcoin. Would you say that it is kind of sufficient? And even if it is sufficient, is there enough sort of coordination in terms of identifying important long-term objectives?

What are the shortfalls of the kind of funding environment for Bitcoin right now? I think it's, well, there's so many different ways to answer that question. If the question is, is there enough funding for protocol developers or protocol development right now, I could say yes, probably, because I think most protocol developers who I want to see funded are funded. but I could also say no because I want there to be more and I want to grow the project and scale it. And if Bitcoin does what we hope it will do and becomes like a major asset class that thousands, millions of people depend on, then I think we want more people working on the project and scrutinizing the code. But there's two-size-setcoin.

There's the supply of talent, I guess, and the demand. which would be the people who are prepared to donate or pay for that talent. And we need to grow them both equally. One can't find ahead of the other. If there's too much funding and not enough skilled people to accept that funding, adding another dollar isn't going to help. And on the other side, if there's not enough funding and too many skilled people, training someone up who can't get funding is not going to help.

So we need to grow, we need to grow both sides. We need to grow the pipeline of people coming into Bitcoin development. And for that to be sustainable, we need to grow the amount of money that's available to pay those people and put food on their table. When you think about the Bitcoin model, which I think we're quite lucky that Bitcoin has some pretty four-sided organizations, which certainly benefit from the existence of Bitcoin, but they also give back in terms of funding developers. When you compare it to alternatives, I think a lot of them don't have the benefit of Bitcoin's dispersion, which makes sense because Bitcoin is the most well-known and the best, most dispersed, you know, cryptocurrency out there. But you look at alternatives and they often have, you know, protocol-derived rewards. In fact, we talked about it with Josh Cincinnati on the show recently. I mean, have you contemplated this model?

obviously it wouldn't be appropriate for Bitcoin. We couldn't change the supply schedule. As a developer and someone who's active in sort of protocol governance, so to speak, I know we're not meant to say the G word. Do you have any opinions on this protocol drive funding model? I think my only opinion is it's not Bitcoin. I would not begrudge Zcash or anyone else. establishing that model, which they have done. But it's not Bitcoin and it's not suitable for Bitcoin. I, yeah, like I said, I don't want to bash other projects that do that. They are trying to fund what they think is a useful project and something they want to work on.

But for Bitcoin, making that reward intrinsic to Bitcoin would no longer be Bitcoin. And so we have to, we have to look at it. elsewhere for funding. Yeah. And, you know, what's interesting is I think sometimes it can be a poison chalice a little bit in that it gives you discretion, it gives you lots of funds to play with, but, you know, I think in practice what we've seen is it becomes something that people squabble over and causes lots of tensions and debates and causes sort of administrative bodies to spring up, which, you know, fritter away the funds in some of these. I've got a case studies. So, you know, arguably Bitcoin's inflexibility would be is a strength here because

it's meant that, you know, these organizations are stepping up with their own capital to support Bitcoin as opposed to relying on the protocol itself and performing a kind of taxation or anything. Yeah, I think it skews the incentives of that, that protocol that it gets tilted towards potentially could get tilted towards the interests of the people who are receiving that reward, and it tilts their incentives to lobby for their own interests, potentially. But luckily, that's a question that I don't really need to think about because I work on Bitcoin. That's right. So I think we've covered a lot of ground here in terms of what you envision.

with Brink, I mean, you know, if everything goes smoothly, what does it look like, you know, in five years time? It is the best Bitcoin development center in the world. It's the place that people want to go to to work on Bitcoin. And it's one of many different Bitcoin development centers and polls around the world. And there would be a diverse and dispersed source of funding for protocol developers. And Brink would be one of many, but, you know, I hope it will be the best. Yeah, on that same token, actually, I forgot to ask you. So we talked about the absolute level of funding being maybe it's the best it's ever been. But then in terms of the relative distribution of funding, in terms of if you consider funding a proxy for power, which it's not, but if you do, what do you, I know, you could maybe do the math on this, but, you know, if you were to run a jinny coefficient of, you know, the different organizations and the capital they're putting forward to fund bitcoin dev um are are we at a are we also at a level of strong dispersion or there's still organizations

that are pretty dominant in terms of uh representing a larger pool of uh capital to support bitcoin Dove? The question about how those dollars equate to power or influence within Bitcoin is something that's very difficult to measure, I don't think. I think you can't say this organization funds $500,000 worth of Bitcoin development or this organization funds three Bitcoin developers. And those three Bitcoin developers or that $500,000 is in any way fungible to what other organizations are doing or individuals, it just, to my mind, does not work that way at all.

Right. But to answer your question in a different way, I think currently Bitcoin development is more dispersed and decentralized than it has been certainly in the time I've been working on Bitcoin for the last four years. And I would say ever, I think we are moving to a more decentralized model, which can only be a good thing. Yeah, so I guess the other way to evaluate it would be to look at commits and maybe you could say X percentage of commits are coming from Y organization. So is that metric kind of trending in a favorable direction? I think that's an even worse metric, to be honest.

It's looking at a measure that you can measure, but it's not measuring. what's important. The number of commits, commits are not fungible. I could create a PR that has 100 commits. It's just moving code around and adding comments and doing not very much that's useful. You know, or I create a PR, a branch that has a commit that has a bug and it's actually destructive to the project. And someone else could create a branch that has just one commit, but it fixes a critical bug. And so it's extremely important. And you wouldn't know that from looking at the tally and you wouldn't know that from looking at the code and letting you exactly what you're looking for and even then you might miss it because it's very

difficult to judge the contribution. I can do it subjectively because I have experience and I know these people and I know what they've done over the last few years and so I have my opinions about who is contributing value to the project but that's from my own standpoint that is definitely subjective and we we can't see everything. Well, I hereby jettison those measures. Yeah, so to answer your question, it's difficult to measure. But from what I see, subjectively, I think we are in a better place than we have been

and heading in a good direction. And I hope that by adding another model and diversifying further resources of development for Bitcoin, Brink will push us. even further in the right direction. Well, I'm thrilled that you have thrown your hat into the ring and are further diversifying the set of entities supporting Bitcoin developers. Couldn't be more excited about Brink. And I will, assuming there's one ready at the time of publication, I will put a link

to donate and support Brink in the show notes as well. Amazing. Thanks, Nick. It's brink. It's brink. Bring. Dev. There you go. John, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming on with us today. Life by his neck.

Speak to you again soon.