The Breakdown - Here’s How to Expand Who Contributes to Bitcoin Core

Episode Date: July 4, 2020

OKCoin and BitMEX recently came together to provide a $150,000 grant to Bitcoin Core developer Amiti Uttarwar.  In this conversation, Amiti and OKCoin CEO Hong Fang discuss: Why OKCoin believes it is essential for companies in the space to support Bitcoin Core development How OKCoin and BitMEX came together around this grant Why Amiti is focused on the P2P layer Why Amiti believes Bitcoin should be private by default  Why Bitcoin Core will better serve more populations if more populations are represented in who is building it    Find our guests online: Hong Fang Website: https://www.okcoin.com/Twitter: @hfangca Amiti Uttarwar Twitter: @amizi   

I think the reason that privacy is so important is because when you look at monetary vehicles in the world, if all of the activity is able to be linked to a person, then a lot of times people with power, governments particularly, are able to penalize particular kinds of transactions. And sometimes that power is used for good, but sometimes that power is just used to gain more power. And as we move towards a more global society, a more digital society, I think it's important that users have a way that if they need to,

they can use a monetary system without a different entity saying they're not allowed. Welcome back to the Breakdown's Free Ideas Festival, a Fourth of July exploration of ideas with the potential to shape the future of the economy. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Friday, July 3rd, and this is the Free Ideas Festival.

Earlier this week, I was joined by Dan Held for a discussion of how Bitcoin's decentralized marketing department is an essential force for its success. Today, we're looking at another aspect of the decentralized Bitcoin ecosystem, developers. Hong Fang is the CEO of OKCoin. Recently, OKCoin teamed up with Bitmecs to provide a $150,000 grant to Bitcoin Core developer Amiti Utawar. In this conversation, I'm joined by Amiti and Hong to discuss, one, what Amiti is working on and what she believes are the most important projects for Bitcoin Core devs.

Two, why companies in the crypto space like exchanges have both an obligation and an interest in direct support for core devs. And three, what we can do to incentivize more developer contributions to Bitcoin. Given how much we are all relying on this particular group of builders, this is an incredibly important conversation. And three, what we can do to incentivize more developer contributions to Bitcoin? Given how much we are all relying on this group of builders, this is an incredibly important conversation.

All right, welcome back to the breakdown. I'm so excited today for this conversation about how to bring more developers and developer energy into Bitcoin and how companies can best support the Bitcoin ecosystem. I have two great guests. And maybe, guys, before we dive in, could I have each of you just introduce yourself briefly? Yeah, hi. My name is Amiti, and I work on Bitcoin Core full time. I started contributing to Bitcoin in January of 2019.

and that was nights and weekends until I got accepted into the chain code residency program where I got the privilege of spending all summer focused on Bitcoin and interacting, exposed to a lot of different experts and other people who are really interested in Bitcoin. So after that, I was working at Zappo, where I got to continue my work. And recently I've been transitioning to a co-sponsorship with OKCoin and Bikoy and Bipo. bit mix. So basically, I really like Bitcoin. Awesome. I love it. Hi, this is Hong. I'm very excited to be here as well. I'm currently CEO of OKCoin, which is a global crypto exchange with being around for seven years. We have a very global experience working with our team to provide a crypto

on-ramp and off-ramp on the Fiat side to people in different countries. Before that, I've spent a decade on Wall Street with Goldman and other organizations mostly focused on investment, later spending a couple of years in growth investment, looking at tech companies who are working for the future. And as part of that experience, I invested in OKCoin, back in end of 16, early 17. I really like the idea of Bitcoin because I feel like that's the future of our society, you know, starting from a trustless monetary policy to a trustless financial system,

ultimately to a trustless society. I think that's a very exciting promise of future. And that's ultimately, you know, what pushed me to investing in OK coin and ultimately joining it on the operational side. Awesome. Yeah, no there's no better affirmation of an investment that you make than being actually so interested in it that you have to dive in full time, right? I think that's a credit to both your interest in the space and to OKCoin for being a platform

for you to build on. Thank you. So I want to start maybe with Amiti. Maybe you can share a little bit about what you've been working on within the context of Bitcoin Core. And I guess maybe actually for people who don't know what it means to be a Bitcoin core developer, can you explain what that actually looks like? How do you work? How do you decide what to work on? How do you communicate with other developers? I think, you know, I don't want to take it for granted that this is a very new way of working in some ways for people who are used to a traditional kind of company model. Yeah, definitely. And happy to dive in. There's so much that I've learned and so much kind of nuanced.

to how the system comes together to work, that I don't think I can tease apart all of it, but maybe I can give some highlights. Sure, yeah. So Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation of the Bitcoin Protocol. What that means is the protocol specifies how the software, these nodes, interact with each other and identify what valid transactions and blocks are. but there are other parts that are the choice of the implementation.

So Bitcoin Core is the predominant implementation that we see on the network, but there are some alternatives or you can run something that's compatible. Bitcoin Core is a project just up on GitHub. If you go to GitHub.com slash Bitcoin slash Bitcoin, you can just see it. and it's an open source implementation that has many different contributors, I think approximately 700 people who have ever contributed a change. And there's a process that we go through for offering and accepting changes and incorporating them into the main client that's released approximately every six months. And that process involves making pull requests,

which is offering a code set that changes the code, reviewing pull requests, which is reviewing other people's proposed changes in depth to make sure that they're robust, they move the code forward, et cetera. And we have maintainers who look at the community consensus and make the decision of if that change is ready to be accepted. So fundamentally, that's the core of the process.

there's a lot of other components like how are issues handled or how do you find work? And the answer there is some combination of there's logging and tagging and inputting it into what we call issues on GitHub and some component of looking around in the code, getting familiar, talking to people who are familiar with the code base and identifying a direction that makes sense. That's, yeah, so those are some highlights to start. Do you have any further questions I can dive into? No, I think that's a great kind of TLDR on how changes get made. So now I guess I would love to hear more about what is kind of what's your scope of interest? You know, I'm sure that you're obviously thinking about a huge number of different issues,

but what are the specific issues that you're most passionate about or really hoping to work on over the next year? Yeah, the layer that has really kind of totally drawn me in and compels me, and I love thinking about, is the peer-to-peer layer. So this has everything to do with how nodes send each other messages. How do you make sure that you're connected to enough peers, but not so many that your bandwidth or other limited resources are being constrained? How do you process the messages that are sent from peers that might be malicious or just make mistakes and come to understand those messages and draw a picture of what is going on? What is the latest block at the tip of the chain?

What are valid transactions, et cetera. So the peer-to-peer layer is really a very exciting, fun area, and it's super nuanced. and very complex. And that's what I've been focused on trying to wrap my head around, fully understand, improve along the way. And I've been working on a project around rebroadcast, which is a project to improve privacy around when you're creating a transaction. And recently I'm working on a project of improving,

the ability to have automatic tests for different kinds of connections. So different components in the peer-to-peer realm. Amazing. I'm going to come back to the question of privacy and maybe use that as a jumping off point for asking you what you think are some of the important issues to tackle for Bitcoin from a development perspective. But Hong, maybe let's shift over to you for just a minute. I'd love to hear how you at you guys at OKCoin decided that it was important to support a Bitcoin CoreDev and perhaps also how you came to work with Bitmex on this grant specifically. Sure. Happy to talk more about that.

When we think about our business and our mission, we always believe that it's important to contribute to the ecosystem. it's for us supporting Bitcoin developers in the way that we are is not really altruism, right? Because we are a major player in the crypto ecosystem and Bitcoin is the majority of the market cap for crypto. And as a exchange who is trying to really build a platform to give people free access to that Bitcoin, we philosophically believe that Bitcoin is value. It's very much aligned with our mission. It's actually North Star of our mission. And in order to make sure that Bitcoin ultimately will grow into that vision that we believe in, we think that it's really important to invest in the fundamentals. With my investment background, I really believe in investing in fundamentals. If we only look at what's going on in the trading market, there are a lot of noises going on. But ultimately, what really matters is what, you know, whatever the project is working,

people are working on can really bring what kind of value they can bring to the society. So that's really kind of the fundamental reason why we decided to support Bitcoin Core developer in the shape of independent developer grant because we think it's important to help our ecosystem continue to grow in that technology layer, although it's probably not as visible as the price fluctuation of various coins are to the mass population, it's super critical to both our own business as well as the overall ecosystem. And when it comes to how we ended up working with Bitmax on this particular grant, it's actually interesting because we didn't design it that way. We were just in the course of going

through our pipeline and talking to various developers and figuring out who we want to support next. We've been supporting Fabian, who is a German Bitcoin developer. We've been supporting BTC Pay, which is an independent project focused on lightning and promoting utility of Bitcoin payment. And we were kind of looking through other potential grand recipients. And we decided internally that Amiti is the right next step for us because of her passion for what she's working on. And her vision in Bitcoin versus what we believe in. And then Amiti is actually the person who brought us together. She told us that Bitmex is also looking at sponsoring her.

And we really like the idea of partnering with BitMex because we believe that, you know, the Bitcoin development itself is very decentralized. We like the future crypto because we feel ultimately it is a, you know, a P2P kind of network where people work together without no, with no single point of failure. And we believe that from a funding perspective, There are different ways of funding developers in Bitcoin and in other areas. But a major advantage of supporting the developers in a decentralized way is we want to emphasize the collaboration point instead of the competition point, right? We want to make sure that when we kind of participate in this efforts, either standalone or with BitMax or any other organization, it sends out a

signal that, hey, this is an important initiative. It's an effort that all the developers are using their own time, either full time or part time, working on it with their passion. And it's important for different organizations to participate in whatever they want, they deem appropriate and partner and support it in whatever way they see appropriate. I think only with that type of collaboration and decentralized fashion and also providing different optionalities to developers in the world in this space, can we get a more sustainable path forward for both the developer community as well as for our ecosystem going forward. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred

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What's going on, guys? I'm excited to share that one of this month's breakdown sponsors, is Crypto.com. Crypto.com offers one of the most cost-efficient ways to purchase crypto out there, as they've just waived the 3.5% credit card fee for all crypto purchases. What's more? With crypto.com's MCO Visa card, you can get up to 10% back on things like food and grocery shopping.

When you buy gift cards with the crypto.com app, you can get up to 20% back. Download the crypto.com app today and enjoy these offers until the end of September. I really like this, the notion, a couple things. First, the idea that this isn't altruism. It's something that makes sense and is kind of values aligned and also business aligned in the context of the particular shape of this ecosystem and industry. And I also do, I think that the choice to collaborate is valuable because it does reinforce this idea of kind of independence, right? It's hard to, it's hard as any individual who's receiving a grant, even if it comes with no strings attached, to really feel like it has no strings attached and distributing or kind of decentralizing where the sources of that capital comes from. I mean, and this is not just the case in this specific instance. Anytime you have someone who has a wider variety of kind of revenue sources or income

sources or whatever you want to call it, right, whether it's a publisher or a developer or a company, there's a more ability to actually do what they see fit without kind of pressure. So I think that that's really cool the way that you guys have designed this. Amiti, I want to maybe talk about sort of the specifics of what you're hoping to work on. I mean, you've mentioned it before, but maybe let's talk a little bit more about this sort of privacy project specifically. I'd love to get your sense of what the state of privacy or the privacy discussion around Bitcoin is and what you think the opportunity in the context of that.

the specific project you're working on might be. Okay. Yeah, sounds good. So I think privacy really needs to be broken down at the different layers. Because if you're trying to use Bitcoin today to make a private transaction, it's totally possible, but it's not going to be by default. It's not going to be the easiest way that you use Bitcoin. You can have a lot of obfuscation techniques by, you know, creating your transaction offline and then, like, somehow manually or off-chain kind of sending it to a different node in order for that node to be the one broadcasting it and using coin joins and being very careful about coin selection when you're trying to.

to create a transaction and just kind of going through a lot of hoops. It's possible today. The future that I would like to work towards and that I think would be important for the values of Bitcoin that I see are really important involves privacy being more of a default because privacy loves company. And so if it's on by default, people shouldn't have to have that mental overhead of always trying to opt in or seeking it out for specific transactions. And I think that there's a lot of improvement to do on many layers. So on the protocol, mainly what privacy comes down to is matching up ephemeral Bitcoin transactions with the source wallet that's broadcasting the transaction. So basically, if I can, as a spy,

identify, hey, that note over there was the first one to broadcast this transaction, then it's a heuristic that indicates to me that is a high likelihood that it was the one managing the wallet. And then I can link its IP address with those Bitcoin addresses and create a long-lasting sense of identity with transactions that are supposed to be ephemeral. But that is insufficient, even if we solve that, and there are improvements, which is one of which is what I'm working on. Even if we solve that, though, that's not enough because if people are, you know, going through KYC and purchasing Bitcoin and that's their entire flow, I think that's totally

reasonable and acceptable. But I think that in the world, hopefully we start seeing more transactions happening in Bitcoin where I could pay rent or buy food in Bitcoin. And then that wouldn't just be like, I K-YC to enter an exchange. I got my Bitcoin at an address associated. And then anything my next hop is very apparent. But that's in user behavior. And those are kind of different ways that we adopt how we use Bitcoin. So I think that I, I think that I, I think the reason that privacy is so important is because when you look at monetary vehicles in the world, if all of the activity is able to be linked to a person, then a lot of times

people with power, governments particularly, are able to penalize particular kinds of transactions. And sometimes that power is used for good, but sometimes that power is just used to gain more power. And as we move towards a more global society, a more digital society, I think it's important that users have a way that if they need to, they can use a monetary system without a different entity saying they're not allowed. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with some of these concerns. And I think that they get even more acute in a world where so much of the conversation right now is shifting to central bank digital currencies and whether you're going to see a digital, you want or a digital dollar. And there's a huge sort of privacy and surveillance implications

around that. So, you know, I think that this set of work and this set of questions are really, really important to be working on. I want to maybe follow up, though, with a slightly different question. It's something that I know you've thought a little bit about, METI, is what do you think are different ways to incentivize more developers and just more talent in general to enter this Bitcoin space? Sure. I don't have any. great answers, but it is something that I think about and, you know, I feel so grateful that I get to spend every day in and out working on Bitcoin and have to be sponsored, be supported. This is such a privilege. And I hope that over time we see more people, both developers as well as people who

have other skills to offer, finding a way to have a sustainable. focused source of income and project that they're working on. So, I mean, it's very exciting. I feel so thankful for Bitmex and OKCoin co-sponsoring me. And I think that it's exciting to see the momentum that seems to be picking up with funding Bitcoin Core devs. So areas that I think we can. could improve is partially happening. Partially, I think there's a big psychological pull when

you see examples of other people who are able to make it happen. And that was demonstrated for me of other people working on Bitcoin full time that made it conceivable that I also could. And then I want to see that grow. So something I find very interesting is square crypto and what they're doing with designers because I've gotten a lot of questions about how can designers contribute. And so creating more of a roadmap for usable software seems promising because I think having effective UI is so crucial to having software that people actually use. So I'm excited over time because we need software engineers, we need investors. Those are mostly who are able to actively participate right now. And I think we need a lot more. We need designers.

We need marketers. We need social media managers and everything in between because Bitcoin is a huge project. It's a new monetary system. It's a social movement. It's kind of like a religion right now. It's so many different things to so many different people. And the version of Bitcoin that I want is prioritizes all the places in the world. And I think it's really important that we start seeing more involvement from different population groups because everyone's going to have a unique perspective of how it works in the society they live in. I couldn't agree more. And I actually really think that that notion that was sort of implicit in a lot of what you're just saying, that it's important to have people who see Bitcoin through the lens that they experience.

And that's both the, there's a couple different contexts for that. One, it's from a professional standpoint, right? Designers who are identifying UI and U.S. problems and thinking about that specifically. But it's also a use case issue. And I think that this is particularly relevant in a world where a lot of the places that Bitcoin could be the most impactful, right, places where you are seeing already currency devaluation and debasement and issues like that, having people who are involved intimately, not just sort of from a, you know, I bought some of this and I can use it as a store of value

perspective, but who actually have a stake in and who are trying to work to create and make sure it works for them, I think is really, really important. Yeah, I very much agree. And this is all at different levels. Like, I don't think the protocol is done. And I do think we need to continue to work on But I think country by country or like different options for applications will become much more important for these different places in the world where we see different currencies have policies that make us wonder if Bitcoin would be a lot better. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Hong, maybe by way of wrapping up, do you have any last thoughts on

either the responsibility or the opportunity of companies in this crypto ecosystem to support or to better support Bitcoin, to better support the development of Bitcoin? Yeah. I think there are actually a couple of different layers. One way is to provide funding, as we have discussed in different fashion, to support the developers who feel passionate about what they're doing. doing either in terms of independent grant to individual developers or in terms of supporting projects not on the protocol level, but on probably the application level to promote adoption.

I think the second layer is that the educational pieces, right? When it comes to, you know, promoting Bitcoin and pushing for mass adoption, one side of it is really to kind of obviously there need to be a use case for that. And obviously in a lot of countries, there are use cases for that. But on the other hand, it's really the awareness, the literacy, how people understand their own situation and how people see Bitcoin, you know, as something that is good, that is giving them choice, giving them independence versus something that is just used for Silk Road.

So I think that piece is also important. And as a Mity said, I think that's also a very social aspect of the Bitcoin. And it's not something that any individual group, individual developer, or individual organization can do. It's really industry-wide efforts that has to be pursued. And then the third piece is obviously laying on top of it is what we really feel passionate about as well is to provide that access to people. if they want to buy Bitcoin, if they want to sell Bitcoin, if they want to trade, and they can do that freely, I think that's also what we feel passionate about. In our society, I think the fundamental layer is obviously the monetary policy,

and on the top of it is that the optionality to freely trade in and out of something, be it Bitcoin or any other assets people have. And I think one of our mission is really to build that platform for people so that more and more people can have access to it. And when you have more people kind of believing it and coming in and out of it, there is also a very natural price discovery process for it. So I think that's another way to support the Bitcoin developer. There are also other ways that we are seeing, you know, people like crypto, a square crypto, encouraging. designers to coming in help, I think that's also a very creative and much-needed way for us to continue to promote the development Bitcoin. So we're in very early stage, as the Mideastard, I think

it's a very fundamentally different thing from what we have seen before, but it's also an experiment. A lot of efforts have to go into it. We have to, you know, try an earth. to some extent. But I think as long as we hold true to what we really believe in and try to kind of come up with a new way to push for its adoption and its growth, I think ultimately we should be able to get there. Well, Amiti, I'm so glad that you have this opportunity to spend all of your energy and passion on Bitcoin. And Hong, I'm so glad that you're thinking in this way about how to better support that. So thank you guys so much for hanging out today. And I'll leave you here to get back to the important work of making this ecosystem great for everyone.

Thank you. I was so glad for a chance to have both Hong and Amiti on this show because I think that this type of voluntary collaboration between the companies who are building on top of the Bitcoin protocol and the people who are underneath maintaining that protocol are so important. This is a voluntary network, a voluntary association that makes this total experiment in, non-state, non-sovereign, non-debasable money work. And unless we have companies that have resources that have built successful businesses on top of Bitcoin actually financially support the maintenance of Bitcoin and more importantly, do so in a way that is about what is best for the protocol, not what is best for their bottom line, we aren't going to have the sort of robustness we need. So it's really great to see when companies are stepping up to do exactly that and to really make a

difference in how this thing evolves. So kudos to these guys for collaborating. Kudos to Bitmex for being a part of it. And I hope to see more of this type of action going forward. That's it for me today, guys. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace. I'm Galen Moore, senior research analyst at CoinDesk. On July 7, I'll be with Lucas Nutsi from Coin Metrics hosting a live webinar on everything you need to know about a fundamental that's critical for understanding digital assets. Bitcoin Days Destroyed. Join us. Join us. by signing up at coin desk.com slash sign up.