What Bitcoin Did - The Tyranny of Permissionlessness in Bitcoin | Amiti Uttarwar

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Amiti Uttarwar is a Bitcoin protocol developer and founder of Waye. In this episode we discuss her path from Bitcoin Core to building support structures for long term open source contributors, the limits of permissionless work, funding and sustainability tradeoffs in Bitcoin development, and why social and human layers now matter as much as technical ones. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Amiti Uttarwar: https://x.com/amizi Waye: https://www.waye.dev/

What does it mean to switch into a 10x mindset? What does it mean to achieve things at a completely different rate, different level of impact? It's a moment of identity shift, right? And any direction that's taken some subsection of what Bitcoin is to people has to be compromised. And so how do we navigate that as a community? and it's not just one homogenous community, right? It's layers and bubbles and, you know, interactions and all these superset of communities because we're trying to build technologies that last lifetimes.

We got coffee. I don't eat it. I don't even know if I can drink it. I've already had a surf. Nice. How was it? It was beautiful. Oh, good.

The sunrise here is insane. And there was like 20 bitcoins out there. Wow. It was beautiful. Oh, that's so fun. Have you been down? to the beach this morning? No, not yet this morning. Had a nice sunrise meditation. Oh, nice. Very Costa Rica. Love that. Well, I'm Miti. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. The first time you

were on the show, you were an intern at Chain Code working on Bitcoin Core. You were the first female contributors to Bitcoin Core. Is that correct? First identified. Yeah. Yeah. And then since then, you went into sort of coaching. So do you want to start off by just telling everyone what you did, how you got to where you are today before Way, and then we're going to get into Way? Yeah. I guess my journey into Bitcoin Core was a series of passionate curiosities and good fortunes.

I, my previous job prior to Bitcoin life, prior to learning about it, was working at this service, services marketplace called Simby. And there, it was all about trading and bartering goods and services. And there, one of the users of the platform was like, hey, you guys have this virtual currency and the vibe that you have is so right, you need to learn about Bitcoin. So he came into our office and just straight up orange pill dust. Like, flash forward.

I'm doing a scuba dive weekend and sitting on the sofa of a hostel, like reading the Bitcoin white paper. And my takeaway from that was not to understand what this thing is at all. It was that the internet is really fast. You can get a message out to all computers on the whole network in the entire world within 10 seconds. I mean, that does sound insane. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. We live in a very advanced.

world. But it compelled my curiosity. And so for years after, I just kept being like, what is this thing? How does it work? Does it work? How do I learn more? How do I get closer? And through that years of, you know, fading in and out, leveling up, getting closer. I eventually became a Bitcoin core protocol developer. And what really compelled me was the peer-to-peer layer. The kinds of questions of you are a node in an unknown network that's adversarial, but you need to collaborate with people in order to know what's the best chain, tell them what your transaction is, things like that. So how do you, how do you find peers to connect to? How do you decide who to stay connected to? How do you send out your transactions,

but maintain some idea of privacy? Those kinds of questions are what really compelled me. and led to a series of protocol contributions that I've made. I'm proud of a lot of my contributions. I've changed how we broadcast transactions to make them more private. The address manager is what Bitcoin Core uses to manage who other peers are. And with collaboration with Martin,

we rewrote the whole thing, changed the address protocol for the network at large. Lots of improvements to long-term thinking for security, privacy. It was a ton of fun. I love the intellectual challenge. It's kind of, it's a bit of an impossible challenge. You're trying to make changes in a network

where the question, how many nodes are on this network, could be probably a series of academic research papers. Because one, what's a node? Two, what's the network? Three, if anybody could be a network. If anybody could know, that's a bad thing for the entire network. So anyways, I had many years of having an amazing time working in the peer-to-peer layer of Bitcoin Core and the Bitcoin Protocol. And then somehow kind of organically, over time, I got pulled into this other thing that now has a name called Way.

And, yeah, we can dive into that. When you first discovered Bitcoin, I was like a software engineer. Is your first instinct to be like, I'm going to see if I can break it? Oh, yeah. I think that was my first and my second and my third and my fourth. And I think till this day, I still hold the question of, does this thing actually work or what will break it? What do you mean does it work?

Because it does work. So what are you sort of questioning? Yeah, yeah, great question. It clearly works for certain, utilities at certain points in time, right? Like there are many, many different ways in which Bitcoin works. Whether or not it will continue to work into the future of unknown size, big question mark. Whether or not it works for everyone in the way it needs to work, big question mark.

So to me, the thing that makes Bitcoin, the thing that makes it compelling and interesting is, you know, we say censorship resistant, but it's really that no one can prevent anyone else from participating in the network. Yeah. And sounds fancy, but this is actually very primitive. Like, if I want your shirt and I say, here, take my bag, no one can stop that unless they're physically here and they violently stop it. But in our digital age, and this transformed into any, you know,

tangible currency, if it was gold or if it was cigarettes in a refugee camp or whatever, right? But in our digital age, people can just totally arbitrarily stop it. Even in America, one of the countries where money works best in all of the countries in the world, people's bank accounts get shut down on a daily basis, and the bank is not allowed to tell them why. I've heard stories of people just like, their bank account gets shut down, and then randomly six months later, there's a checkmail to like their parents' house in a different country for the entire content of their bank account. account. Totally insane. And like, and the scary thing is, and I think we'll probably start to see

this happen, like, especially in the UK with their sort of crackdown on hate speech, however you define that online, is like, that's going to be another reason people are going to get their bank account shut down. Like, we saw it happen to Nigel Farage, who's a totally like polarizing figure. Don't get me wrong. But he's still, like, he's leading the party that is most likely to be elected next election. And he had his bank account closed down because of his opinions and his views. Like, that's really scary. But when you say Bitcoin has to work for everyone, are you really saying it has to be freedom tech for everyone? That's the Bitcoin I'm interested in.

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and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to Anchorage for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today. That is anchorwatch.com. I totally agree with that. When you say the sort of future threats to Bitcoin, will it continue to succeed? What do you see as the biggest future threat? Oh my gosh.

So many. I think the conversation of the threat of quantum is really interesting. And I'm not at all the most informed, but several people who I consider very, very smart, who have been engaged in this, think that quantum is a very existential threat to Bitcoin. I don't think that's the only one. Personally, I look a lot at the social layer. And I think that in order for Bitcoin to be globally accessible money that anyone can use, we still have big changes that need to be made. We have, there's privacy, there's security, there's scalability, there's access, you know, there's education, all these things. And so,

So conversation that talks about, for example, ossification or that social layer that prevents progress from being made in the name of preserving security, privacy, something like that, I think those are really, really big threats to ensuring that this technology can actually be something meaningful that lasts for lifetimes. Yeah, the quantum one, I think is really interesting because I'm in no way quantum expert, but I just, I'm not going to bet against human ingenuity here. There's also billions and billions of dollars going into this. I think at some point they'll get a quantum computer that's probably good enough to crack elliptic curve cryptography. That's the one that's going to crack, isn't it? Yes. I mean, just checking.

Amongst other things, but. But if that does happen, I also believe that like there's going to be Bitcoin developers. There's already BIP 360 where they're working on things that will be quantum resistant addresses. The problem I have, though, is, again, on the social layer, what do we do with, like, old coins and that whole debate? Because, like, the idea that we go out and confiscate old coins because they could potentially be stolen by an attacker is just, like, a non-starter for me. Like, as soon as you break Bitcoin's property rights,

this is, to me, that's Bitcoin failing anyway, regardless of any quantum attack. I think it's going to get pretty spicy over the next few years. Totally. Yeah. It's a moment of identity shift, right? And any direction that's taken, some subsection of what Bitcoin is to people has to be compromised. And so how do we navigate that as a community? And it's not just one homogenous community, right? It's layers and bubbles and, you know, interactions and all these superset of communities. And I think quantum is one example.

But my stance is kind of, I've taken a step back from being like, what do I think is the single most threatening thing? As a dev, I was looking at that. Like, what's something really important, really threatening? And I looked a lot at like long-term security and approached that through protocol development. But now I'm kind of like, how do I support a wide array of intelligent thinkers who are engaged to move forth

with their own personal, you know, hypotheses, theories of what is the biggest threat and help them be clear enough, solid enough, effective enough to put that into the shared space. I do have a very kind of decentralized ideology, fairly internalized from working on the technical P2P layer, but now looking at it in the social lens. I think that what we need as an ecosystem is competing ideas of what the biggest existential threat is.

and different visionaries and leaders who can share to others why this needs to be worked on, you know, people to work on it, implement robust solutions, people to challenge those robust solutions in thoughtful discourse and, you know, eventually unity as a community to adopt whatever over here, over there, over there. Like, I think if we all focused on the same thing, that we wouldn't be building the future that we need. For sure. Does that make sense? It makes total sense.

So when, I do want to get into what you're doing now, but when did you decide to leave Corr and why, or stop contributions to Corp, why did you decide that? Yeah, totally. So I do have a moment in time, which is convenient for being on a podcast. But basically, 24, I went to my first Oslo Freedom Forum. And I walked out of that week in just this very energized confusion going, I guess I'm starting a nonprofit.

And that was when I decided to temporarily pause coding and see what this nebulous thing was. So the journey has been a lot longer. Before that, I had organically started coaching people and doing that in addition to doing my full-time coding job. And that's kind of what led to when I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum, I, people in the wonderful HRF community, were like, hey, I'midi, everyone is talking about these problems,

these problems being things like the psychological toil, the challenges focusing on long-term solutions, burnout, these human aspects of working in open source, working on permissionless technology. And the theme, the problems were everywhere. Everyone's talking about it. But they convinced me by saying that I was the only one who was talking about the solutions.

And at the time, my form of solutions was fairly organic and individual. And it was in the form of coaching other people, other devs in the ecosystem. And the shift for me was, okay, what would it look like for me to put my attention onto designing scalable solutions, design. a social layer that helps us have more resilience, support each other to pursue long-term meaningful changes. And that's what's led to where way is at. And it's been a series of learning.

And this past year, I guess 2025, has been an incredible journey of a lot of experimentation and a lot of traction. And so that's just information that, you know, is informing what 2026 is going to look like, where we're going to go. So maybe it's worth starting with the problems because open source development, I've obviously never done it. But like I imagine it's tricky because there's not necessarily one direction that everyone's taking.

I'm sure there's sort of structures in there where people are project managing and telling people like what they should be working on. Is there not? Is it just literally choose your own adventure, go and write some code? I wouldn't say there's none, but that is definitely not the norm. that's not even close to majority. It's mostly choose your own adventure. And yeah, it's kind of wild.

There's a burden of this solopreneur journey. And it goes beyond devs. I think it really applies to people who are independently working. In general, but specifically in this ecosystem, there's trends, you know. But let's use the example of me as a dev and the grant ecosystem. And this is the case for many, many other people.

But you have to figure out what you're working on. You have to figure out how to work on it. You have to find people to collaborate with. You have to build your own team. You have to advocate for yourself in terms of fundraising. So you have to market yourself to a certain degree. You have to advocate for your work. So you have to socialize it and market your work as well.

In addition to the day-to-day challenges of you don't have a boss, when do you take time off? Is going to a conference taking time off or is it not taking time off? How many hours a day is a normal amount of hours to work? Like all of these different things. So you really actually have to essentially run an entire organization as an individual. But you don't think about it that way. You're not a creator.

You're not somebody who's like, okay, let me spend 20% of my time doing business development. What are those words? You're like, I'm a dev. I write code. And you're working on some of the most complex systems. Like, as a software engineer, I've seen a lot of different projects in the world. And the Bitcoin protocols, the complexity of them are, I don't know, top 5% of complex technical projects easy.

You know, it's no joke. And so in addition to all of that as requirements, also like you, either if nobody mentored anybody, the ecosystem wouldn't grow. So hopefully people are mentoring people. And you obviously want to grow because life's no fun if you're not learning. So then you have to do your personal development. And this is just off the top of my head. You know? Like not to be, I don't want to be mean here to developers, but you don't necessarily think of developers as being excellent marketers. They're incredibly different skills. I'm sure some of them are great at it. But they're very different skills. So like, yeah, totally. How do you

address all those problems then? Are you going in and like teaching people about business development and marketing and how they can sort of sell their ideas? Okay, great question. How do we adjust the problems? And, you know, I wish it was a silver bullet, but really the answer is in a layered way. And before we get right there, I want to talk about one more thing that I find interesting on the problem front, which is our research report has claimed this term, the tyranny of permission. And I think that's really interesting to focus on because the idea is that the same values, you know, the freedom to work on whatever you want, the, you know, nobody can stop you. Just do things, right?

These values that lead to these technologies that we're passionate about can be kind of oppressive when applied without intention to human systems. And so this double-edged sword, this tyranny of permissionlessness, I think is a very interesting way to put a label on something that we face as an ecosystem challenge. And I think it's important to recognize it as an ecosystem challenge because if we only treat it as an individual challenge, it's not that we can't address it at individual layers and that there's value. And we do, you know, ways doing that. I've contributed to working on that. But I think what's really important is that we realize that this is a shared challenge. And if we treat it as such, there's so much that we can do to work on it.

And so what I'm doing and what way is doing is hopefully part of the solution. But the world I want to live in is a more robust, decentralized, permissionless ecosystem. And it's this opportunity to radically rethink how work works. We know that there's tons of companies that are business bureaucracy that exist in the world and people who show up to their job but don't actually do anything. And there's a lot of ways that conventional structures don't work, whether it's for certain people or for certain businesses, for example. And we have this opportunity to build an entire new way of working.

And we're seeing so much traction in that. The grant ecosystem right now versus when I started contributing. like early 2019 is a completely different space. In addition to the grant ecosystem, there's so many different, you know, like shops, like engineering shops, right? Chain code, Brink, local host, 2140. So we're in a different and also onboarding programs.

There's programs, BitChalla, Bitcoin for open source, VinCimp, blah, blah, blah. It's really cool. There's so much going on. So anyways, I just kind of want to mention that looking at it, at that ecosystem lens, I think is the most powerful thing. And now I'm happy to drill into what Way does and how we address that at different layers. But I want to pause there. Is this making sense?

It makes total sense. So what's your overall take on the grant ecosystem? Because there's obviously a few companies doing, I'm sure there's more than I can name, doing really good work. There's OpenSats, there's Brink, there's HRF, chain code. Like, have we got enough people funding this development? Oh, if you want an answer to that question, Have you seen that report that, is it 1A, 1Z?

Yeah, that great. That they've put out. I've not seen the report, but they are doing. Well, they have a report, and they look at the funding ecosystem, and I think that puts forward the information of, is there enough? And if you ballpark it compared to any numbers of, like, looking at Bitcoin and it's, whether it's market cap or the amount of development fund compared to if it was a company or anything like that, it's a tiny fraction.

Does that report say how many million go to developers every year? I think so. It's too small a number, though. I mean, it's a $2 trillion project that these people are working on. Right. That should be. And so if that was a company, how much would be spent on first off engineers, which is easier to quantify, but also for Bitcoin to succeed,

we need a lot more than engineers. We need educators and builders and project managers. and like all sorts of recruitment. Like all these dimensions we have are real. So it's hard to make a claim that there's sufficient funding. But I also think that funding is not the only issue. And do you think, so from my understanding, the way these grants often work is sometimes there'll be sort of monthly payments

to work on a project. Sometimes they'll do long-term grants. Like, is the structure of the grants sufficient? Yeah, okay. So there's a couple things you mentioned. So bring chain code, local host 2140, these kind of block stream. They have more of primarily employment models. And a lot of them have in-person like offices and additional elements that go to that.

Then there's the series of organizations that are primarily grant oriented. So H-RF, Spiral. I mean, Spiral also has a in-person. aspect, but Spiral does a lot of grants too. So HRF, open sets, obviously huge. You know, so Be Trust is coming onto the scene. So the grants are more like we give you X amount of money for Y amount of time. You know, one year is fairly standard, but some are less, some are longer.

But one year, even one year, which is great, it doesn't give you that much security on what you're doing. 100%. I think that our research report gets into this, but I also personally strongly believe that there's a bit of a disincentive. And I'm seeing it play out a lot because we're trying to build technologies that last lifetimes, right? In order for Bitcoin to succeed, it better be going when I'm no longer on this planet. That's the Bitcoin I want. And not just Bitcoin, all these things, like whether it's Noster, whether it's other layers of Bitcoin, etc. So in that context, when you look at, hey, we're going to sponsor one year of work, it's a very narrow amount of time. And the people who have done the most meaningful changes, the biggest changes. So someone who I respect immensely, who is, you know, just my favorite is AJ Towns.

And he has been contributing in this ecosystem for, I don't know, higher than I can count. But he, I've gotten the privilege to, you know, witness his expertise, his contributions up close. And he will incubate research ideas for years. I kid you not, three, four years before they actually see potentially. You know, there will be three, four years he's been working on something that doesn't actually make it to the GitHub repo. And I think that, I mean, I understand that the position of like giving out grants, there has to be like some evaluation of is this working. But I think that giving year-long grants, especially to people who are later in their journeys,

is a bit of a disincentive. And I see, for example, research being deprioritized over things that are more tangibly observable, such as PRs and reviews. Yeah, that's really hard, though. I understand from the people who are giving the grants out, like why that's tricky, because you need to see progress, but thinking is progress. And how do you kind of benchmark that and say, yeah, you're still hitting your goals or like,

it's a very tricky thing to try and manage. Totally, totally. And yeah, it's definitely not an easy challenge. Our researcher in the report made the recommendation of basically doubling the amount of time. So if you demonstrate that you did good with a year, then next time too, then if you demonstrate that you did good with two next time for, like, et cetera.

That was the recommendation there. I also think there's a difference between, like deliverables versus code. Just because you're doing research doesn't mean that that should not have a deliverable, whether it's thoughtful posts on delving or maybe it could be in a GitHub issue or it could be working groups. There are ways to involve the community. And if you're working on a long-term research project, It is very important that you involve people because if you're like, hey, I went in a hole and contributed, I thought about it for five years and I came out and I have this really cool thing.

That might work if your name or your pseudonym is Satoshi. But for 98% of the people, it's like, do you want to be like, just wake up one day and be like, okay, I need to spend the next six months reviewing something that someone worked on for five years? Like, that's very overwhelming and not very enticing, you know? So collaborating with thoughtful contributors who have domain expertise is a very important part of project success. And so there's a difference between isolation versus long term, you know? Yeah, that makes sense. So what kind of projects are you working with? Because this isn't all just core developers, is it?

No, definitely not. I think this past year, Way has supported over 35 open source projects, which are all in the Bitcoin and friends like Bitcoin and Noster. ecosystem, which is kind of wild. I definitely can't name them off the top of my head. But it is shocking. And I think it's really important for people to realize how many different projects are in this open source permissionless thing.

Like even in Bitcoin itself, there's Bitcoin core, but even other Bitcoin like implementations, whether it's BDK or Russ Bitcoin. And then you have the whole school of Lightning. And then you have additional projects that might be a bit more, you know, researchy, but also relevant. their findings. And then there's Noster and a whole slew of projects over there.

So there is a lot. And I think that's something that I very much want people to hear because I have the good fortune of getting exposure to these things. But it's funny. I feel like in a way, it's kind of like five-year-olds playing soccer or football for the international audience. And everybody's just kind of like running to the ball, the ball being Bitcoin core.

but in order for Bitcoin or even Bitcoin Core to succeed, for example, like research layers as well, right? There's people who have made such meaningful contributions to the Bitcoin Protocol who have never touched Bitcoin Core code. And yeah, there's mailing list or delving is really, I think, a much more thoughtful discussion place these days. And yeah, there are so many different ways to contribute. And so you have to, you have to, if you're in,

interested in understanding the space, you have to make sure to put some energy into mapping the field, not just staring at the soccer ball. If you're interested in doing that, I think a good place to look is, for example, if you go to SOTBIROLs page, HRF's page, OpenSats page, and you see the projects they support, they have these huge lists of projects that they're supporting and I think that's high signal. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time? Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware, you can. New tax guidelines from the Big Beautiful Bill allow American miners to write off 100% of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year.

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Okay, yeah. All right. What is Way? Great question. So Way is it's executive coaching for freedom tech builders. What does that mean? Executive coaching is a little bit of an umbrella term. What we're focused on is helping people build things.

that matter and do it for the long term. That's the goal. And this past year, we've run a lot of different experiments and programs and projects, etc. And what's really gained the most traction is this coaching thing. And so what we're focusing on is doing it two ways. One is individual coaching and the other is group. So what is coaching? What does that mean? mean, you know? We look at the models of the world around. If you look at anyone who's excellent

at what they do, whether it's an athlete or a musician or, you know, a startup like entrepreneur executive or Oprah, like anybody, they all have a coach. Because when you reach a certain point of excellence, having somebody else focus on, okay, what can get you that last mile. so that you can focus on actually doing it is well known. Like, what athlete that is a superstar doesn't have a coach? That's silly, right? And so that's the aspect. It's getting systemic support, having coaches focus on like,

here are shared problems and here are shared solutions so that the individuals can focus on building the thing that matters. And it all starts with, you know, whether you're doing it in an individual format, whether you're doing it in a group format, it all starts with identifying what is the single most thing, single most important thing

that matters to you right now. And having support shifting into that long-term mindset is extremely meaningful. When we live in a world, I mean, everyone in open source, there's 100 million directions pulling you. And everybody in the modern day has 100 million directions pulling you.

We come out of hustle culture. And so really spending time to create intentionality of like, hey, this month, this year, what is the dent I want to make that is going to make, whether it's Bitcoin Core, whether it's my Noster project, whether it's a research project, what's the dent that is really going to improve our collective knowledge or our collective tooling? what's the one I want to focus on? And having that clarity already is such a big deal. And then the next step is how do I focus on it?

And if there's someone who's working on like open source software right now who wants to use way, how do they actually do it? Do they pay for the services? How does it work? Yeah, totally. So we've run, we've gotten some grants, the kind support, of HRF and OpenSATs. And we have run programs that are open to Freedom Tech Builders.

We have a proof of work model, strongly believe that, like, I personally, the reason I care a lot about this is kind of what we were talking about, that individual ingenuity and having people put forth their own ideas. Like, I think that what we need to succeed as a space is a diversity of thought. You know, I come.

from being the first female and the gender diversity thing has always been very in my face, and I'm passionate about that. Also, very passionate about geographic diversity. When I started in Bitcoin Core, there were zero contributors from Asia, Africa, and South America. And so I'm very glad that that's not the case anymore, but if we're working on a global project, it should be global. But really, really what we need is a diversity of perspectives and a diversity of thought. And that's the hardest thing.

That's much harder to measure than what we look like. But that's the critical thing that I believe leads to the security resilient success of these projects. And so because of that, we've gone with this proof of work model of if you're making contributions that matter, we want to help you do it well and do it for the long term. So our funding source is we're trying to get it more independently. And if any donors out there want to contribute. to supporting the good people working on open source infrastructure. Hit us up.

But that's why I strongly believe that I don't want to reinforce systemic biases. I want to challenge them. Yeah. Can we talk about diversity? Because for some reason, that's become almost like a dirty word, especially when to Bitcoin is. Dangerous to use on a pod. But like everything you say makes sense.

It's a global project that should absolutely be contributors from Asia, from South America, from Africa, from all over the world. Like that's just obvious to me. But why do you think it's become such a sort of hot button topic? Especially, I don't want to get into the whole Knot's core stuff. But like the not side of that, I've been really pushing the problem with diversity in core and things like this. You know, I can't really comment on speaking to that perspective. I'm not very familiar with it.

I'm hardly on Twitter, things like that. But I can't talk to you about my work in at the protocol level. level in Bitcoin Core. And I think that contextualizes the way I approach it. So I worked a lot on security, right? And one of those aspects is in adversarial environment, you can only connect to a certain amount of peers. Because if I connected to everyone that would require so much resource

that you no longer could run Bitcoin on a Raspberry Pi or you'd have to have a supercomputer, maybe that cost is prohibitive. Right. So limited an amount of slots, adversarial environment. You need to choose. We make eight full relay outbound connections by default, 10, two additional block relay only so 10. You have 10 slots from this entire world of Bitcoin nodes.

And how you choose is very important. If you choose wrong, you could actually not be connected to the main network. You could actually be eclipsed and connected to one entity that you perceive as 10 different entities. So very big risk, right? Or a very big consequence. I should say. And you want to mitigate the risk because the consequence is so high.

How do you mitigate the risk? You know very little about your peers. What we do from a purely technical point of view is we try to get as much diversity as possible along as many different indices as possible. So we take every piece of information we can get. We look at, you know, IP address range. We look at what network are you on? When was the last ping time, response time? What kinds of information are you advertising or not? We get our hands on any piece of information possible

and then try to maximize diversity or variability, whatever you want to call it, along each one of these. And this is the strategy for security. This is the strategy for privacy. Because you don't want to be connected to 10 nodes in one server room. If you are, that is an eclipse. You know, that is a risk of, and it could be an eclipse attack if it's more intentional and targeted. If we do that at the network level, you could have a partition risk, which would be game over.

If we had two separate Bitcoin networks, I mean, I really think that would be game over. So that's what we look at is we try to maximize variability. And so, yeah, okay, this word diversity comes. very loaded, but I come from the background of having a very technical view on it. And genuinely, if you go to the GitHub repo of Bitcoin Core right now and you type in diversity, you'll see a bunch of PRs that are probably mostly in the P2P layer that have diversity and security, like probably in the title, a couple of which are mine, but like others too, I'm pretty sure. I mean, I haven't checked this.

I'm just kind of guessing, but I feel fairly confident claiming something like this. So I think that it's, I mean, and, you know, any good thing can be hijacked. Any well-intentioned thing can be transformed into something else. And so I think if you're like, we must have diversity. And what that means is quota is like that can lead to undesirable consequences. So how I look at it, I mean, you know, going back to like what way it does and looking at the individual, layer. And this relates to my own journey. What I saw is that a lot of times we see these experiences where, okay, let me talk about an individual. Someone I respect very much. Her name is Stratosphere.

She's a Bitcoin core contributor in South Asia. And she came onto the project through Summer of Bitcoin and contributed straight out the gate to Bit 324. Super cool project, right? What was 324? End-to-end encryption. Okay. So awesome for security, privacy, something that really moved the needle in the Bitcoin Protocol. And so she demonstrated incredible, like just talent, passion, you know, ability to execute.

But after that project, she was sponsored to work on Bitcoin full-time. And after there was really a lull in productivity. If you looked at it externally, you could wonder, what is she doing? She's not doing anything. You don't see any work products. But if you zoomed in and looked closely, she was showing up every day.

She was engaging very deeply and technically, working really hard. But the problem was that she would review a PR and she would have these amazing notes in a different place. Those notes weren't translating, into leaving the review comment. So why was she doing it that way? Right.

So first was she didn't realize she was doing that. You know, it was just kind of the, oh, I'll review the PR. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'll get to that. But then the next PR caught her attention. And she was doing the deep work. And so she was one of my first coachies that I think it was before I used the word coaching.

You know, and I saw it wasn't technical mentorship that she needed. she was already incredibly badass problem solver. It wasn't some technical tool. What she needed was a mirror held up to help her realize that she wasn't hitting the green button and leaving the review comment. And when it was, you know, there was a very specific period of time that we were working together. And in this role of what I now call coach,

I held up that mirror. It showed her like, hey dude, you're not actually doing that last, step, which you know is less work. Yeah. She was just like, oh my goodness. And once she saw that, she couldn't unsee it and broke that pattern. And so why is she doing that? I mean, I can comment at a higher level of, I've seen that not just with her, but with myself. And I've seen that with many other women. And for some reason, women have this tendency to, to overthink. before, like, it's not, oh, my God, you're not doing the hard work. It's not, oh, my God, you don't have the technical engagement.

It's this level of hindrance before you post the review comment. And that is a critical difference, you know, and I've seen other trends too. Working, I've seen this huge trend with Africans where they will not submit the funding application. Like, and you go, why? And I think that the person or the lens that could best answer why would be someone, like historian or something like that who could talk about colonialism and the entrenched systems that still run the world and how that shows up in individuals and how that translates into individual Africans feeling intimidated to ask for funding. And it's not like they're sitting

there like, no, I'm not going to ask. They're like, oh, I'm just going to do a little bit more proof of work. Oh, once I have a bit more in my repertoire, then I'll be in a good position to ask. Like, they don't realize that, hey, it's been six months and no one's paying you and you've done amazing work until someone helps them realize. I saw you do your talk at the Africa Bitcoin conference and you asked the question who here is nervous about like asking for money and every single hand went up. So like clearly that's a real problem. Yeah. And I wonder if that's just down to like valuing their own work. Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to comment on.

Those aren't my areas of expertise of like really why. it happens, but I see that there are these trends. And there are certain patterns that hit certain groups of people harder. And I can comment a bit easier just anecdotally on what I've seen with women and what I've seen with Africans. But this is true for everybody. We all have the things we're good at and the things that are harder for us. And that's why that coach can really help you see the thing that is actually a small amount of effort, but a huge amount of gains. I need a coach.

We all do. One sec, sorry. I've just seen how we're getting on for time because I know Alex wants us to start at 9.30, but we're doing good. No, start at 10. Oh, okay, cool. We're great. Okay. So, yeah, I think we all need a coach.

And yeah, I mean, so do you want to get into some of the mental models that have been really cool and the takeaways? Can we go on a different tangent first? Sure, sure. Because when we've been speaking over the last couple of months, you were telling me that you've gone down a kind of neuroscience rabbit hole. Oh, great. That's the same thing. Okay, perfect. So what's the rabbit hole? What have you gone down? Oh, my God. So many. All right.

And why did it start? What made you sort of start looking into this? Oh, personally, neuroscience is just very fascinating to me. I have this naive, optimistic lens that it's the source code of like how we work, of what is a good life, you know? And I have a very technical, nerdy brain. And so neuroscience, I'm like, does it hold all the answers? Does it? I mean, I'm hoping. That's, um, but yeah.

So, so I've learned a lot about neuroscience. And obviously I'm not a neuroscientist. So anything I share comes with that strong disclaimer. But with Way, we do have a neuroscientist that we work with. And so my claims have been reviewed by someone who does, you know, has had real world experience. Um, and, and I think, I think how I'd like to approach this is, is talking through, one example of applying to ourselves, like how to work on something that matters.

So I want to share something that came up from a OS reboot, which is our group coaching protocol that happened this year, and then work through, I mean, you got a little glimpse of the 10X framework and then talk about the neuroscience of that as well. So kind of like do the full stack. It has that sound. Okay, cool. So earlier this year,

Wei ran a OS reboot, as I mentioned, group coaching protocol for a group of Noster devs. The lead facilitator of that was Noemi Boyer, who is the CEO of Democracy Labs here in Costa Rica. Extraordinary human being. We are so lucky that she has shared her knowledge, her passion, her expertise with us. And what she came in with was very out the gate,

very strong was this idea that 10x is easier than 2x. This is based on a book by someone whose name I don't remember, but the mental model is really interesting. So our natural mode, passionate people trying to help the world do something better, is to find those 2x improvements. How can I be more effective? How can I achieve these goals quicker or better, whatever? right? 2x linear thinking. That's very natural to us. And the metaphor for that is building a faster airplane. We already have an airplane. It's taking people where they've got to go. We want to make it faster.

How do we do that? Let's innovate. Let's experiment. Let's build. Make a faster airplane. The idea of switching into a 10x mindset requires stepping back, which is a very uncomfortable process. And one of the key reasons having external support is valuable, stepping back and going, what does it mean to switch into a 10-X mindset? What does it mean to achieve things at a completely different rate, different level of impact? And the metaphor here is stepping back and saying, I don't need a faster airplane. I need a rocket ship. And the concept is that having a 10x mindset is actually easier than having a 2x mindset because good luck making a plane go as fast as a rocket. This isn't like iterating.

It's completely rebuilding. Yes. It's exponential rather than linear thinking. So I'm going to give the example of Pablo F7Z. I think he goes by on the internet. Do you know him? He's like the Nostodev. Noster Dev.

Another extraordinary human. It builds like one project and Noster every week or something. Right, exactly. Yes, that's great. Also is on ways board, but also participated as a dev in this reboot that Noemi was the lead facilitator in and got exposed to this 10X mindset, you know, this concept. And he set a 10x goal to, you know, he was, his context was that he was at the computer screen all of the time, you know. He was saying that sometimes he would tell his family he's asleep, but then actually be working because there's too much to do. You know, like, are you kidding me?

Have you seen the world war? And there's way too much to do. How can you turn off the computer, let alone your brain, which is something that I think many of us share this experience of, you know? And so he was probably sleeping four hours a night just like, oh my God, got to go. And which quick tidbit, our research finding had a kind of disturbing finding that as seniority increased of contributors in the ecosystem, the sustainability decreased.

Because they're not sleeping. They're not paying any attention to their own health. Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. Which like, oh boy, that came out of like an academic research, you know, interview. That's a really weird thing, though, because it's so obvious that you need sleep to be productive,

but it's so easy to fall into the trap of being like, I've got too much to do. I'm going to sacrifice sleep. 100%. 100%. So Pablo, one of the many who's found himself in this situation, making amazing things that people are using, right? Leading a lot of expanding our communal minds as to what is possible. But his 10x goal was to spend four hours a day in front of a computer while having stronger day-over-day productivity, stronger day-over-day impact than before.

That was his 10x school. And he is well on his way to achieving it. So how he has done this is he's built this incredible AI tooling, which is a series of autonomous agents that are essentially working as a team. You hire somebody who's the project manager. You hire somebody who's the designer. You hire different devs who have different approaches. And this one's going to focus on fuzz test.

and that one, you know, whatever. And so they are all interacting with each other to challenge each other to iterate. And there's touch points of human interaction. I think he also has trained different AIs to model his own mind. And he actually called this project 10X after this mental framing, which is mind-blowing. And yeah, he's, I love this story because he's,

Living a richer life while achieving more. And I really believe that when you're aligned, when you're internally aligned and you bring that into the external world, that's where real impact occurs. So the idea of spending four hours at your computer instead of 10 or whatever he was doing is that you spend... 10. I think that's an underestimation, but we don't know. But is that you're spending the hours when you're in the right state of mind to actually do work rather than just sitting there because you feel like you need to be sitting there.

Yeah, I mean, you know, in order to really dive into his experience, we would need to summon him. But I think there's one element of we all find ourselves. Okay, so flow state, the research shows high achievers across all fields of study, whether it's physical domains or more intellectuals, whether it's, you know, musicians or mathematicians or athlete, etc. Like, but flow state, high performers top less than 1% of their fields, do not achieve more than three to four hours of flow state per day, which contextualize that to what we as knowledge workers think we're supposed to be spending in front of a computer. And I know that when I started measuring my focus time, I was so embarrassed. I didn't know this fact about three to four hours.

And I was so embarrassed that I was like. like working between two to four hours a day. And I, at the time, I was like, I am never going to tell anybody about this. Like, oh my God, they're going to think that my imposter syndrome isn't a syndrome. It's real. I am an imposter. Like, that was what was going through my mind, you know? But I feel like so, like, I'm the exact same. Like, there's no way that I can be productive for eight hours a day. Like, my, I think I've got a bit of ADHD as well, which doesn't help. But like, there's times where I'll sit down in my front of my computers to do work. and I'll start doing something.

I'm just like, I can't do it now. Like, I'm just not in the right state of mind. I'll have to go and like sit and read and have a coffee or whatever, come back. And then sometimes you'll sit down and it's just like, you're on. Totally. And I don't know, the thing that I don't know is how you know you're in the right state of mind when you're going to do some work.

Totally. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that the research around flow state is very relevant here. And there's a couple of different attributes of like, how do you know if you're in flow? And there's also how do you set yourself up for it? And so things of like, how do you know you're in flow are things that are probably relatable, like everybody's experienced it somewhere, which is like total absorption in the activity at hand. It's intrinsically rewarding. You're kind of having a good time, but you're also convinced that there is these feedback loops of like,

I'm getting somewhere. There's a dilation of time. Like you have a loss of sense of how does time work right now. So those are indicators that you're in flow. And I know them when it's happening, but it's when I'm like, if I'm not, my computer. It's like, I don't know whether to be like, right, now's the time. You're in a really good state of mind, go and do some work. Totally. So how do you set yourself up for success, right? And this, like, based on my understanding of the research, you know, there's a couple

different things. Like, one is strong intent. Before you enter the block of time, you should know exactly what you're working on. And what you're working on is also like feeds into, how do you know if you're making progress on it? So that should be identified before you end. enter the work block. That's one. Another one is removing distractions. Flow state is really interesting. It's actually in the research. It's called exploitation mode. I think that's the neuroscience lens of the way it interacts with like your hormones and chemicals and neurotransmitters and things like that. It's called exploitation mode. It is not meant to be sustained for extended periods of time. So this is the critical piece that I think we're all missing.

Those other ones like, know what you're doing, remove your distractions. Like, okay, like we kind of know whether or not we're doing it, we know. The one that I find most interesting and most difficult is to recover effectively. And what does that mean? It means some tangible things like to re-up your glucose stores, you need to eat food. Hydration is really relevant, like those kinds of things. But the critical piece. that is central to motivation is dopamine.

And for those of us who have ADHD, which I strongly believe is overrepresented in our space, but dopamine is relevant to everybody. And in order to replenish your dopamine stores, you need to let up on yourself. The metaphor I like is like, you can't refill gas while your car is still going. And this is an oversimplification, but the best, but it's relevant as a mental model to think of dopamine as a limited supply because it's kind of like rate limited.

And if that, if you have too much or too little, it's actually like psychosis or schizophrenia or, you know, it's good that it's rate limit. So thinking of it as a fixed supply. And so flow state feels good, right? I'm productive. I'm having a good time. I'm focused, right? And so it's very natural to have that addictive quality of it. I'm in it.

Let me just keep going. I don't know when it'll come back. Like, let me get every drop of it that I can get. This is really natural. Do you relate to that experience? Oh, 100%, yeah. I mean, yeah, me too, right? So truly, though, if you want to encourage more flow state in your life,

ending it well, saying, I'm done now. And not, I have nothing left in me. But like, I've done a good amount. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to feel good. And for some people, there's so much guilt-driven development in this space, not just with developers, but like with everybody in this ecosystem. That I've gotten the feedback that like feeling good about yourself, like that's impossible.

So I was like, okay, what if we just acknowledge that progress was made? They're like, okay, maybe I could do that. But like closing it, saying, I've made progress. saying, wow, I'm happy with that progress, if that's possible, and stopping and saying, I'm not going to continue right now, I'm going to come back later. That's really the way that you can let up on trying to squeeze every drop of dopamine out. And giving yourself that mental rest is going to help you regenerate,

not just dopamine, but also neuroephenephrine and other neurotransmitters that are necessary to that process to help bring more flow state into your future life. I also think we need... Also exercise and hang out with people. Well, so I'm pretty good exercising. And the thing that I think we need to normalize is having a nap. Like, a 20-minute nap in the afternoon honestly makes me so much more productive.

There must be a reason Google put like sleep pods in their offices. There must be some science behind that. But you can, I cannot do 20-minute naps. I'm just out for like two hours and I'm like, oh. Oh, see, if I sleep for two hours, I'm dead. No, that's what happens to me if I try. You could have sat down a lot. Oh, I'm amiti. Come on.

You don't think I try that. But the thing that I found, again, I think this is because I've got ADHD, is I have like an office at home where I do all the podcast from. Works great for the podcast. I cannot work in there. And I think it's because there's like multiple screens. I need to be like on just a single laptop so I can't get distracted. And I like to go out and like work at a coffee shop or something where there's other people around.

Even if I'm not talking to them, I just don't like being completely isolated on my own. Totally. Totally. I mean, I love it. I think you know what works for you, and that's what's really important. And each of us finding, like, what our own cadences and then also the fun thing is,

what works for us changes over time. Which goes back into why it's so helpful to have some additional support for, like, coaches and people who are learning the research so you don't have to. I mean, that's part of it. My journey, it's like the way I have fallen into nerding out about all of this,

was as an independent worker working in my room alone, caring deeply about these projects, wanting to be more effective. I was like, oh, how do I be effective? And then I took on an entire other job of like researching, learning, thinking, project managing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And part of building ways, like, if you just want to do your job really well and your job is building these freedom technologies, working in a permissionless ecosystem and stewarding our decentralized future,

I want you to have the support to do that. So going back to kind of ecosystem vision and grant, like the role of granters and grants in it. So we have some shops that are like, like, you know, more like full-time employment. But I also see this decentralized vision of the future. And if you look at funders like HRF, OpenSats, etc., as verticals in that space, you have as an individual, this amazing opportunity where the work you're doing is unentangled from the people who are offering financial sustainability. At a normal job, if the people don't want to pay you to do it, you can't continue doing the work. You know, your access is removed.

But in open source, it's different. And in decentralized development, it's very different. And so you might, you know, maybe one of those orgs is not aligned with the way you're approaching things. You have other options. And that's really cool. You can mix and match according to what suits you and what aligns with, your point of view. And so if we look at those as verticals, the world I want to see, my vision of our decentralized supported future is that we have a lot more horizontals. And these

horizontals are things that would be comparable to stuff you find at a company, especially if done well. You know, like having an engineering manager that's a good manager is amazing for helping you grow the size of project you're able to take on. Or having, you know, off-sights are wonderful, wonderful for reminding yourself that you're human, you know. And so having more horizontals. And an example of this horizontal that has existed is the legal defense fund, you know, and they had a proof of work model. If you've done meaningful contributions and you're under threat because of this legal concern, then we're here to support you. And Way is another horizontal. It's executive coaching of if you've done things that matter, we believe,

in you and want to help you do do it for the long term effectively. And so based on this proof of work that you have, you get access to executive coaching. And that's another horizontal. And I want to see many, many more. I think there's additional legal support that people in our ecosystem could really use. There's additional mental health. Like, I mean, so many people really want actual proper mental health support and way is not that. But I would love to see people do it. I would love to see people do something that directly competes with Way. I think that's a sign of success because we're in a decentralized ecosystem, not in a, you know, I want to run a company and have the market share. Like, no, we should have alternatives. If somebody doesn't align with Way's approach,

they should have alternatives. And this is really critical because as individual contributors who are working in unaffiliated ways, like that individual human ingenuity is what I see for a robust, resilient long-term ecosystem. And financial sustainability is a very critical aspect. But there's so much more to sustainability than just financial. And so having that kind of multidimensional support. And that's the world I want to live in. And that's the world where I think it loops back to what you're saying,

because you've figured out things about the way you work. Like me, at this point in time, it's hard to imagine me going back to an office because I work terribly in coffee shops. I listen to everything everywhere. I'm like a little puppy, you know. See, I work terribly in silence. Exactly. A bit of background noise helps me zone out.

That's just like my white noise to work in. And I can't have headphones in listening to something. That distracts me. But if there's just white noise, I'm good. That's awesome. I love that you know what works for you. And so iterating on that, you know. And I think we can all, that's why it's, there is no one-size-fits-all.

I mean, that would be so cool. But also, it would probably make a less interesting life. That's true. I do have an eight-hour. whale song playlist that I have on YouTube that I listen to. I work sometimes as well. Are you serious? Because I just need something in my head. Whale songs? Well, it's just like a drone. It sounds so bad. Yeah, I know. It sounds terrible, but it's just like it will help me just zone out and actually do my work. Oh my god, that's hilarious. There you go. Um, amiti, this has been amazing.

Wait, before we go, can I, um, can I share some like a bit more about what way has been up to and what ways about to be up to? Absolutely. Okay. And tell everyone how to find it as well. Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, so this past year has blown me away in terms of traction. We've had, Way has supported over 150 Freedom Tech builders coming from over 35 different countries, which I'm just completely astounded by. The stories of impact, you've heard, I guess, just two, but oh my God, I could talk your ear off about, we need to do a better job of sharing them because it's really blown me away. People who are either, oh my God, I'm on the brink of burnout, or things are blowing up,

and this has really helped me focus on what's important to be more efficient, you know, to level up the whole spectrum of things. We have, yeah, I think I mentioned we've supported so many different open-source projects. And, yeah, we're doubling down. This upcoming year, Way is partnering with HRF. We're going to be supporting 50 HRF grantees. We're in talks with other organizations and looking. Right now, we have really big wait lists for these programs.

So I highly recommend if you're interested in staying up to date with what Way is doing, you can find us at www.w.way.dev, w-A-Y-E.d-V, please include it in the show notes. I would recommend signing up for our newsletter. We have yet to send a mail, but we're working on it. And the next time we launch a program, which, yeah, donors, you're very invited to help us reduce the size of these wait lists. But the next time we launch a program that's open source that is available, just we're going to definitely message out the mailing list.

So any questions you can email us, hello at way.dev. And to be clear, it's not only for developers, it's for freedom tech builders. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you for this, Amiti. Thank you so much. I think it's an amazing project. I'm so glad. And I've had fun.

I've had a great time. Thank you. Thank you.