{ "episodeId": "SLP406", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "stephan_livera": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "guest", "tag": "STEPHAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.45, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Now, online social media discussion of Bitcoin can paint it like it's this inevitable thing that's gonna change the world. Now, I do believe it's gonna change the world, but the literal fact of the matter is Bitcoin needs technologists. So joining me today is Ardi Shankara. He's the founder of Summer of Bitcoin, and we talk a little bit- About how he got into Bitcoin and what he's aiming to do with Summer of Bitcoin, which is a internship and education project that's there to help guide new students in and learn how to work and develop and contribute to Bitcoin code as well as Bitcoin design projects. Now, this show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the easy way to learn about Bitcoin and also buy Bitcoin. So over at swan dot com, you can sign up with an ongoing dollar cost averaging or Bitcoin savings plan. Automated, and so this is a really easy way to get started, perhaps for you or for your friends, or if you're looking to buy a larger amount of Bitcoin, there's Swan Private, so you can find that over at swanprivate dot com, where you will have a Swan Private concierge to help guide you through this process. And finally, Swan is organizing a conference, it's called Pacific Bitcoin, it's coming up in November, I will be one of the hosts. There'll be a range of awesome Bitcoiners there, there'll be so many fun events, and this is another opportunity" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:30", "start": 90.42, "text": "new to Bitcoin, this is a chance to learn about it. So that website is specificbitcoin dot com and use the code Livera to get a discount on your tickets. Mempool dot space is the Bitcoin explorer built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. It features real-time transaction tracking and mempool visualization so you can quickly get the information you need about your Bitcoin transactions. Mempool dot space is available over Tor and it's also completely open source so you can even run your own mempool explorer at home on a Raspberry Pi with just one click. Over one million people use mempool dot space every month, and the project is operated freely for the benefit of the Bitcoin community without ads or third-party trackers of any kind. Go try it out today, the website is mempool dot space. Now, when it comes to Bitcoin hardware, you know my favorite is the Coldcard. You can get this over at coinkite dot com. The Coldcard is an extremely versatile device. It has gone through many iterations, now the latest version is the Coldcard Mark IV, which has NFC support, it has two secure elements, it has a range of features that are quite popular in the Bitcoin world. So for example, you can use the mic-- micro SD card to move information back and forth between your cold card and the computer. You can use it in single signature or as part of a multi-signature setup, and the cold card just has all kinds of features that will actually end up teaching you more about Bitcoin as part of the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use the code livera to get a discount on your cold cards. On to the show with Ardi. Ardi, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "03:00", "start": 180.02, "text": "I'm listener and a big fan of your show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:04", "start": 183.88, "text": "Yeah, of course. And I know you're doing some really interesting stuff with Summer of Bitcoin, and obviously, I'm sure you'll have some interesting insights to share as well in terms of Bitcoin in India as well. And would love to start by hearing a little bit of your background and how you got into Bitcoin, because I know your story is perhaps coming from like a tech background as well. So I'd love to hear a bit about that." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "03:27", "start": 207.0, "text": "Sure. So I'm the founder and it's a global summer internship program where university students learn about Bitcoin and contribute to open source Bitcoin projects under the mentorship of an incredible group of Bitcoin developers and designers. You know, your question about how I got into Bitcoin, it's always hard to answer why and how someone gets into Bitcoin. You know, one of my friends likes to say the Bitcoin rabbit hole extends both ways, even before you've heard of Bitcoin. Or have come across it in any setting whatsoever, you're always, you're, you're sowing seeds of your initiation likely since your childhood, and, you know, there are numerous little circumstances that enter your life and mold you in a certain way that you fall upon just the right set of framework that is needed to truly understand Bitcoin and understand the promise that it represents. And that's also some, something which is strikingly unique for each of us. So for me, you know, I grew up in a fairly- Humble middle class family of generational farmers who originally came from the foothills of Himalayas in northern India. And my parents, they migrated to Mumbai in search of better opportunities, and I vividly recall that for us living in a city like Mumbai, growing up in a working class low income neighborhood, money was always, almost always never enough. my, my father was working two, three jobs at a time, and, you know, don't get me wrong, we had good food on our table, and they sent us to good schools Schools, but even then, it almost always, felt like we were racing against the tide. You know, money was this all elusive thing that surely would solve all our problems, and you can imagine as a child, it became a fascinating object for me. Interestingly, I never gave much thought to how I could accumulate more of it, instead I started thinking about where it actually comes from, and I was eleven years old at the time, and I remember one day I asked my father, \"How did my- Money come into being. At the time, my, father told me he like, you know, like many others around the world thought was true that the governments print as much money as, the amount of gold that they have. And, you know, thinking about gold, it seemed like a rare thing in the world, so I distinctly remember feeling skeptical if that was true, somewhat disappointed that we couldn't just make more of it, and yet somewhat satisfied knowing that it wasn't coming from thin air after all. That the rules of the game were reasonably fair for all of us. And so, you know, fast forward to when I was an undergraduate studying computer science in India, I got an opportunity to pursue a research internship in Singapore. This was in twenty thirteen. I was assisting a professor who was working on system security and distributed computing, and it was there when I was first introduced to Bitcoin. I remember trying to mine Bitcoin In our lab servers, and of course, not being able to, for some reason run the damn software, probably ran into some errors, got frustrated and got back to work, sadly. But that was my first introduction to Bitcoin, and it was in an academic setting. I was a computer science student, and I was able to grasp that it was a fine piece of technology, but I hadn't quite given any thought on its potential for humanity. And two years later, I'm back in India, still in uni- University, I read about how Bitcoin is really catching up as money on the dark web, and I remember thinking to myself like, surely this isn't how money works, right? Bitcoin was an interesting technology, but can it really become money? Like, what would happen to gold and the paper that was printed out of it? You know, except that I realized like that wasn't the case anymore, that, you know, all of my childhood, all that I thought about money, all of what my father and countless others like him had been told, was not the truth, that there was no gold, that the Where at least, not for a majority of us. And so that left a big hole for me, you know, a big question, what was money? Eventually, I graduated, I joined a big tech company as a software engineer, and now with all of the quote-unquote money I was making, I had to do something about it. And so I started looking at all the investment options, you know, real estate, mutual funds, good old fixed deposits, and this was also late 2017 when Bitcoin started to make its run all the way up to twenty- thousand and above, or rather, up to twenty thousand. So, you know, then it wasn't just money alone, it was also a speculative store of value, and, and then there were like so many of these hundreds of other tokens that were promising a lot more. And so, like everybody else who- It was a space I started sort of printing all the white papers in my printer, analyzing their valuation, and I got extremely lucky very early on to, to have come across John Pfeiffer's seminal paper, The Institutional Investor's Take on Crypto Assets, which I recommend to everyone even today. I followed that up With Bitcoin Standard, and I finally had found the answer to the question I had since I was eleven. So that was how I got into Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:41", "start": 521.33, "text": "Yeah, sure. And so John's paper was a definitely an interesting one, because part of what I recall from that is he was talking, in some sense, a critique of utility tokens. And so this is something in the Bitcoin space that's been around for a while, if I, I recall, even the problem of altcoins. I believe that came out in like twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen from the Nakamoto Institute guys. And so, it's interesting that we see people coming from different angles, but with a similar critique in certain ways, in, in certain aspects, where, you know, part of the critique is that, oh, well, if you just have this utility coin, someone can just create that new system, fork, fork out the code, and just create a new system without that utility token. And so I think that, that was one of the critiques, and that's where potentially in some of the altcoin world there was discussion about, oh, how do you keep demand for these coins? And so that's where If you hold our, you know, our shitcoin, we'll give you a better interest rate or things like this. And so they try to invent ways to sort of slow down the velocity, if you will, to try to create a bit of a pumping dynamic, and that's where we see this in, in various altcoins. But of course, enough about altcoins, the economic and sociological ramifications of Bitcoin, I think, are very important, and that's potentially where, when people come in from a technology perspective, that they have to oftentimes go and read and learn about these economic And sociological consequences of Bitcoin and the problems of fiat currency. So I'm curious, did you, you later went down that pathway as well?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "10:10", "start": 610.41, "text": "Oh, yes, absolutely, that's right. You know, there was, at the time, I think Justin Moon had just started a Bitcoin reading club, and, you know, after having read the Bitcoin Standard, I joined the club, and I remember we were reading, Murray Rothbard's works, and it was enlightening in the way that it analyzed money and all that it ought to be, from a very very pragmatic perspective, whereas we had been sort of thought about, you know, money is just a blind spot, right? We use it every day, we know it's a make-believe paper, and yet we go back to it. And so this question of what is money ha-- hasn't been asked enough. And in some ways, you know, the Shitcoin phenomenon, it's, it's also worth reflecting on, like, why has this happened? This whole unquote, this, this whole, you know, quote-unquote crypto industry, a lot Necessity has been destroyed. There's certainly hard questions that needed to be asked. You know, there are, in technology, there are like two kinds of ways things can go wrong for ideas. You know, one is for ideas to never be questioned, and one where questions are shot down too quickly. In crypto or Web3 or, you know, whatever they're calling it these days, we've had both, where, you know, a lot of questions weren't asked A lot of ideas were never questioned. In Bitcoin, on the other hand, ideas are always questioned, and no question is shot down too quickly. That's why we Bitcoin, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:36", "start": 695.89, "text": "Absolutely. It's seen like a adversarial environment in the way that people should be presenting arguments based on facts, logic, data, trying to present some kind of argument as to why this is-- why this is a certain way or it should be a certain way, or the development pathway should go this way. And, we've seen that in the- The years with Bitcoin over the time. Also, I'm just curious, obviously as you're, you're growing up in India, do you have any reflections on the Bitcoin scene in India as compared to the quote unquote crypto scene? Could you share some insight there for listeners who are in other parts of the world?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "12:11", "start": 730.97, "text": "Absolutely. Well, you know, India has had a very chaotic affair with Bitcoin. What you hear from the mainstream media and the government's spokespersons is that they want to regulate it. The bureaucrats or the babus, as we call them On whom, the ultimatum, on whom the, the regulation ultimately depends on, don't quite have the capacity, time, or even the ability to understand Bitcoin and therefore do anything with it. And it seems to me, and, and this is my personal opinion, is that the RBI, which is the Reserve Bank of India, the Federal Reserve equivalent, has, or may have quite nailed what Bitcoin truly represents in terms of, in terms of its endgame, and therefore wants not Nothing, like absolutely nothing, to do with it. And so they've been calling it out since like forever. The government and the bureaucrats on the other hand have been like busy, they have a ton of things on their plate already. And so Bitcoin has been just in a state of like eternal suspension in the air as far as the current, regulatory environment goes. That said, keeping the regulations and the governments aside, India is a lot more than what appears on the surface. it's one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Its culture itself has simply been just an open source project since time immemorial. You know, Hinduism, which is the predominant faith here, has literally no leader or authority. It has had endless forks itself. It's spread throughout the South Asian continent, and even in India, every- Every few hundred kilometers, you find that it's a different country, it's a different society, and so the mainstream narrative or what the world thinks of India is sort of less than thirty percent of what the country is. Mahatma Gandhi, you know, once famously said that India doesn't live in its towns, but in its villages, and, and that village, you know, comprising about seventy percent of India, is actually a little republic, self-sufficient in its wants, governed by autonomous- Self-reliant local communities called panchayats, where the local individual is at the center of local administration, and people are expected to take personal interest and turn up in large numbers at community meetings to deliberate problems of common interest. And this system was envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi. He called it swaraj, which loosely translates to self-rule or self-governance. And by the way, like Mahatma Gandhi would have been a Bitcoiner, true and true. He rooted for a stateless society. His definition of democracy was something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong. For him, the village was, the self-sovereign republic, and he was against any centralization because he knew that centralization of any sort could only be sustained with force, which, as you know, was against the core tenet of his nonviolent philosophy. Unfortunately, even though the village or the panchayat system is the foundation of India's political system, it has, you know, slowly and gradually been abused by the centralizing forces, since India's independence from the British. And, well, one of the largest centralizing forces, of course, fiat money, the Indian rupee, because otherwise there's really nothing in common between the hundreds and thousands of uniquely distant, distinct villages that make up India except, the Indian rupee. In that light, I think that in the coming decades, you know, Bitcoin can have an increasingly important role to play in returning power back to India's villages and local communities. it remains to be seen how everything plays out. As far as the regulation is concerned, you know, as I said, the RBI understands very well the borderless, permissionless nature of Bitcoin transactions. I think they're advising the government to cooperate with other nation states for Reining in on the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's obviously a difficult approach to take from a game theoretic point of view, and I think they're very well aware of that. And, well, for those of us on the other side of the fence, we're obviously interested in lighter regulation. The question is, how much can you really convince them? It's, it's a long, arduous journey. I think the greatest challenge is that all the benefits of adopting Bitcoin are counterfactual and far into the future. It's like, you know, imagine how much of innovation And how much progress art and culture we've lost because everyone's been on high time preference, and that's sort of a hard argument to make. I think the more important thing perhaps, and, and, you know, the most important thing is technological progress as far as the Bitcoin protocol goes, in that, you know, there's always an aspect of technology that, that's been the case where you don't seek permissions or regulations, but ask for forgiveness. The, the real big breakthrough for Bitcoin, the end state, if you will, or the T minus zero movement for hyperbitcoinization Would be where, the privacy technology is so strong that no one in the world can break it, no government, corporation or individual can know how much Bitcoin you have and how it's moving. Twenty-one million is a necessary condition, but it's not sufficient for safe of my money, and I think we should get there in due time, you know, with enough developers and enough of their ingenuity, which is where Summer of Bitcoin and a lot of other developer education efforts have an important role to play. Sure." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:44", "start": 1063.87, "text": "Yeah. also just curious Just before we get into summer of Bitcoin, one other question, just about, in terms of the Bitcoin scene in India, do you see very vast or liquid peer-to-peer markets and trading in, in terms of Bitcoin or not really?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "18:00", "start": 1079.56, "text": "That is true. I would argue that the volume today, on centralized exchanges is a lot less than what we have in local peer-to-peer circles, and that's been true, I think, for the last few years." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:13", "start": 1093.25, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Are you interested in Bitcoin? Mining, brains dot com is the website for you. They have a blog with all kinds of educational content, as well as an analytical dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on the Bitcoin mining space. You can even run Bitcoin mining profitability calculations there, and I've spoken about this calculator in recent episodes with Daniel Fromkin. So that website is b r a i i n s dot com, and you can use their product, BrainsOS Plus. This is firmware that you can install on your Bitcoin mining ASIC machine, and it can help you tune Your hash rate and give you additional efficiency by up to twenty or twenty five percent, depending on what model you are running. You can mine on any pool, and you can of course point your hash rate towards BrainzPool and get zero percent pool fees. So that website is brains dot com. For many Bitcoiners, security is paramount, and with Unchained Capital, they are helping you by taking security into your own hands and using multi-signature. Now, Unchained are running a drained the exchanges promotion, so this is running until the eighth of September. But the price of the concierge onboarding service is dropping dramatically. So the simple price is two hundred and fifty dollars. It, it's extra if you need hardware wallets, but two hundred and fifty dollars to have a team member guide you through the process of setting up a secure multi-signature vault. So if you've been putting it off, well, this is now the time. Up until the eighth of September, you can go to the website, go to unchain dot com slash concierge, use the code livera, and you'll get a discount, an extra fifty dollars off, and you will" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:45", "start": 1185.43, "text": "And withdrawing from the exchange. So this is a great time to give yourself that peace of mind. It's Unchained dot com slash Concierge. Do you need to run Bitcoin or Lightning nodes? Voltage dot cloud can help you with this. Now, this could be handy for you whether you are a Bitcoin builder building some kind of Bitcoin business in the space, or if you are a merchant who wants to take payment online, or maybe you're a nomad who's traveling and you need an easy way to run your Bitcoin node. Well, this can help you. So Voltage makes it really hassle-free because they Just made it really slick and smooth to spin up a Bitcoin node, a Lightning node, or a BTC Pay server node, so you can use that to do merchant payment processing and simplify that process dramatically. You can scale nodes instantly by the thousands, and Voltage even have features that allow you to get inbound quality liquidity easily and much more. Get a node up and running in two minutes by visiting voltage dot cloud. And now back to the show. Yeah, and that's interesting because that also does lend some credence to that idea that even if governments do try to really shut it down, they realistically wouldn't be able to, just because there's so many people trading it peer-to-peer, and that arguably is what we've seen in other countries as well, such as Nigeria and Pakistan, where, let's say, a regulator or a central bank tried to make moves against Bitcoin, but it ended up driving more peer-to-peer volume. So, I was just curious to see if that was a similar thing you were seeing in India." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "21:11", "start": 1270.57, "text": "Oh We have a lot more local groups that are trading with each other or buying Bitcoin or selling, than what may appear on the centralized exchanges." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:21", "start": 1280.91, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into Summer of Bitcoin. So could you just give us a bit of an overview, like, first of all, what is it and how did, how did this get started? Actually, you know what? It might be interesting as well to talk about the why as well. I think, let's start with the why. Why, why Summer of Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "21:37", "start": 1296.72, "text": "Yeah, I think it's worth spending time" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "21:43", "start": 1302.83, "text": "is the most important thing to think about and work towards at this point. You know, two of the primary narratives with regards to the Bitcoin experiment have been, or, or let me put it this way, when you look at the stories people say about Bitcoin and have said over the last decade, there have been primarily two stories that stand out. One is the story around its rapid price appreciation, both in the past and potentially a lot more in the future against fiat currencies. There's something About the price, you know, the, the BTC-USD ticker that is strikingly charismatic, that captivates people and makes them either love Bitcoin or hate it, depending on which side of the bet you're on. The other story is of its role as a breakthrough technology that solved the double spending problem for a first of its kind and the only digital money to actually work as it does. And the question of, you know, what doors does this seemingly genius technological solution open? Open for the societies of the future. The thing that is striking is the contrast between these two stories, right? The first story that is, if, if, if you're long BTC/USD price, then in some weird way, you're predicting that the USD is still going to be around. And so if you're long BTC/USD, that's how I put it, like if you're long BTC/USD, then you're short the Bitcoin standard. In contrast, the second story of its technology, right? Like how it works, how proof of work, the peer-to-peer protocol. The difficulty adjustment and cryptography come together, how they solve the double spend problem, how the twenty-one million is enforced, and how such a technology for money can catapult mankind further on the path of progress thanks to the low time preference it brings about. That's not often discussed. The fact that this technology is a category creator, just like technologies that came before, whether it was, fire, the printing press, electricity, microprocessor, internet, and now Bitcoin. Right? It's extremely hard to find people who are obsessed about this story over the first one. There's not enough people talking about the technology and too many people talking about the price, which is another way of saying that there's not enough technologists or developers working on Bitcoin and there's too many traders trading it. If you look at all of the great technologies of the past, they all had these great technologists that had a very definite, determined vision for the future they were building. They didn't just- Describe it in some abstract, conditional sort of way. Take the scientists at Xerox PARC in the seventies, they built these seminal computing tools and interfaces over a span of literally just a decade that continue to be used till today and probably forever. Take the mission to the moon in the sixties, take the Manhattan Project in the forties, take the Wright brothers, all of these different technologists actually believed in what they were working on and had very powerful, animated, indefinite visions for the future. When you have more traders than technologists, you end up in a mimetic behavior where the masses discuss predictions on price, but there's very little discourse on the state of Bitcoin technology and how it should go forward from here. It's as if, you know, we're all involved in some lottery ticket type dynamic, and this dynamic has very strong negative network effects in that it not only attracts scammers and parasitic leeches, it actually repels the other technologists who have expertise in Related or peripheral domains and who may have found Bitcoin fascinating and with their ingenuity could have and co- and can contribute to making Bitcoin a lot more resilient, a lot more useful, a lot more prevalent, than it is today. Now, we touched on the Shitcoin phenomenon, and I believe that the Shitcoin phenomenon is, is directly the result of the long price and short technology culture. All of the shitcoins should have been killed and would have been killed on paper if there were enough technologists and less vices, enough developers and less traders thinking clearly about their architecture, their econ-economics, and their use cases. The shitcoin peddlers define decentralization to be so many different things at once. And ambiguous in every possible way, and, and then they sell this indeterminism for profit, you know, they leech on unsuspecting masses under the garb of price appreciation. And so no one talks about technology anymore, and there aren't no technologists left. A few months ago, I think, there was this, person, I think his name is Moxy, the founder of Signal. He wrote an article reconstructing Yeah. and if you recall, he wrote an article deconstructing NFTs, how Web3 works underneath at an architectural level. And he absolutely crushed them, like seeing how broken, fragile, and useless Web3 is. It sent waves across the Twitterverse. It frightened the guts. Out of every Web3 enthusiast. Now, Moxie is a well-known computer scientist and cryptographer. We needed a lot more Moxies all these years. Like, where were they? Right? Where are they even today? And I think all of this is worth reflecting a little bit. Bitcoin has unfortunately remained an illegitimate technologist, especially among the tech-- an illegitimate technology, sorry, among the technologists. We need a lot more of them, not only to bring back focus on Bitcoin as a technology, but also to shoot down all the bad ideas before they start to infest the masses. And we need to do that while the window is open. We have this window open for a very short while. If you look at some of the other disciplines of technology today, especially nuclear technology, no one in college thinks of becoming a nuclear engineer anymore. It's perhaps one of the most unpopular careers of all time. What happened to nuclear technology is that the technologists let the politicians take over the narrative, and at some point, there were no more technologists, no more nuclear engineers. And so there's a negative network effect to these things where an unpopular thing becomes a lot more unpopular to the point where it becomes cursed. So, we need a lot more Bitcoin engineers, developers, and technologists before Everybody else rears in and takes over the narrative, and also to weed out the crypto, Web3, shitcoin phenomenon, because that isn't helping either. And so that's why Summer of Bitcoin was born. We are focused on universities we want to foster and nurture future Bitcoin technologists. One of the challenges today is of course, like, even if, even though Bitcoin is one of the most important innovations in computer science, it has remained illegitimate in all the computer science universities around the world. In fact, I-- In, in fact, some time ago, I met a prominent Bitcoin researcher at MIT who told me that even the MIT Bitcoin Club is considered as a fringe technology group on campus. And the- That both students and funding are hard to come by relative to other groups. And, you know, MIT Bitcoin Club is of course an exception. The norm is that there is a swarm of computer science students in every university today who swear that their life's passion is in AI or ML or big data. And on the other hand, when it comes to Bitcoin, it's possible that there are just one or two, quote unquote, weirdos on campus who trade crypto and mostly for quick money and Sometimes because Elon Musk says so, right? So, so, so there's nothing, well, there's nothing wrong with working on AI or big data, except of course, like, there's, there's only so much data you have on your local computer that you can run your models on, and so joining the big tech is your only option, and therefore we have a situation today in universities where you're beholden to the big tech industrial complex for your career. And over the last year, you know, of course, we've had, we just, we've just had a new scheme, a new If you will, and they're calling it Web 3, and of course, it's a, it's just a rehashed version of the 2017 ICO mania. And if Bitcoin was previously illegitimate, then this new narrative of Web 3 may have just legitimized it, but as this old, boring, slow, and obsolete technology that is soon going to be overthrown by this shiny new token that, look, has so many people in Discord, it has to work. so Summer of Bitcoin is trying to fix that situation. We are a group of open- Open-source Bitcoin developers and designers that are helping university students learn about Bitcoin, contribute to Bitcoin, and be inspired for a career in the Bitcoin industry." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:39", "start": 1839.26, "text": "And I think one thing that's really crucial about this program is that there's actually a, a pathway for a career, right? So it's one thing for a person to be studying Bitcoin at, and let's say they are a university level computer science or design student, they need to see a credible pathway in terms of a job that they could get. And so as you rightly said, and part of this does come down to issues with the money, right? There are some economic and sociological problems that drive the shitcoins and the big tech and of the- Of the world today, but obviously Bitcoin is, you know, we view Bitcoin as part of the answer, but in order to help fix that, there needs to be a credible pathway for these students who are learning about Bitcoin to then have a pathway of, \"Oh, okay, I could go and intern for this Bitcoin company, and if I'm good, there's a chance that they hire me on afterwards, right?\" And so I, I presume, and I understand that's what you've have been helping facilitate, and that's what you have seen with Summer of Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "31:37", "start": 1896.7, "text": "Yes, absolutely." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:38", "start": 1897.9, "text": "So could you just spell out for people who aren't familiar with the program, what does it look like for students who want to, apply and, go through the program?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "31:49", "start": 1909.47, "text": "So sometime in January every year, we invite university students to apply to our summer internship program that takes place over twelve weeks in the summer. They go through a rigorous application process where we assess them primarily on their programming ability and open source experience, and then we provide resources courses and seminars to help them grok Bitcoin at a technical level, at an economic level, at a philosophical level. We work with several open source developers and designers in the Bitcoin space to generate project ideas. Students then apply to project ideas of their choice based on their interest and skill set, and the best applications then are selected to work on those project ideas over the summer under the mentorship of our open source developers and designers. Students receive Stipend for their work, and those who demonstrate exceptional performance are referred for internships or jobs or grants in the industry." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:49", "start": 1968.51, "text": "Fantastic. And so could you just give some examples then of perhaps some of the students and some of the companies that they've been working with?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "32:57", "start": 1976.6, "text": "So graduates from our program have gone on to continue working on their open source projects even after the summer. Quite a few joined Chaincode Labs as interns to continue working on Bitcoin Core. Or a few others joined Geloï, Blockstream as interns. In fact, just last month, two of the alumni from last year's program, who graduated from university this year, received a full-time annual grant. To work on Bitcoin Core. One of them, Shashwat, is contributing to a new sleek GUI for the Bitcoin Core app. It'll improve its usability and therefore user adoption. The other one, Stratosphere, is helping Drew with testing and reviewing Bib324. as you know, Bib324 is one of the most important developments to happen to Bitcoin. It encrypts all of the peer-to-peer communication between nodes, which today being Completely in plain text, is susceptible to tampering or censorship from ISPs or governments. And with Bib324, it'll all be indistinguishable from any random text. I think that's a big deal. A lot of many students from this year's cohort have been doing phenomenal work, and we can't wait to see how their Bitcoin development journey unfolds." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:19", "start": 2058.57, "text": "Yeah. And so just people wondering, when did Summer of Bitcoin first start, and when was the first cohort, and where? Where are we today?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "34:25", "start": 2065.15, "text": "Yeah, well, so, this was last year, when we started the program. you know, I had been looking for ways to contribute to Bitcoin open source, with my background. I had some open source experience in the past, and in my last job, I was building products for developers and had had a lot of interaction with student developers around the world. And because of the rationale and, you know, discussion we had around why it was important to have more and more developers and technology Just I wanted to help student developers around the world grow Bitcoin and consider Bitcoin as not just a legitimate technology, but also a breakthrough technology that they can be a part of. So last year, sometime in summer, we sent out an email to five university mailing lists in India soliciting interest in, Bitcoin and open source development. In just over a few days, we received close to five thousand responses, with, you know, with enormous support from Chaincode Labs, Spiral, and the incredible group of open-source developers, we were able to quickly develop a curriculum and fund an internship program for a selected set of students, I think it was around fifty last year, to contribute to Bitcoin. This year, of course, we expanded the program globally. We received about twenty thousand applicants. We ended up selecting eighty students from fifteen countries who are now contributing to about thirty open-source projects in Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:53", "start": 2152.73, "text": "Yeah, that's fantastic to see. And hopefully then over year over year, you'll see more and more growth as more and more people hear about the program and then get excited to either contribute in some way, whether that's donating Sats or whether that is being a mentor, to volunteer or even just listeners, if you have either children in, at that age or you even, you have a nephew or whoever who is interested, you know, you could sort of refer them to this. So what are some of the things that you would like to, I guess, ask for from the audience so that they know if they wanna support Otherwise, they can do that." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "36:25", "start": 2185.17, "text": "Well, you know, we are at summerofbitcoin dot org. Everything's open source and public for you to learn about. All of the projects that our students are working on are listed on our website. We organize talks and seminars in universities, apart from the internship program. And so if you would like us to connect with students in your university or alma mater, you know, hit me up. Or if you'd just like to support our work and mission, you can do so at summerofbitcoin dot org slash support." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:53", "start": 2212.63, "text": "Excellent. So Let's talk a little bit about, I guess, kind of in the broader space around development priorities and things like this. These things that you would basically ask students what they wanna work on, or are there ideas that you might go and say, \"Oh, hey, this might be good for non-custodial adoption,\" like, what, how does that aspect of it work?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "37:10", "start": 2230.44, "text": "You mean in terms of, figuring out the projects for the students? Like what projects? Yes. Well, it's usually the open source developers and designers we work with who propose project ideas. you know, they're the ones who are leading their respective projects, and they help us generate project ideas that they think could be well scoped and well suitable for a student, you know, studying computer science in a university and maybe a good starting point to, maybe learn about the project and become a full-time contributor." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:42", "start": 2262.43, "text": "Excellent. So then, as I understand it, these could be engineers is working at some of the Bitcoin companies, or there could be somebody who's working on a Bitcoin open source project, and then they could say, \"Oh, okay, based on what I'm seeing, there, there might be an opportunity for a student to take on this project, and I can mentor them.\" And that's, that's when they would come and, I guess, they could come and pitch you and say, \"Hey, Ardi and Summer of Bitcoin team, here's an idea that maybe if you have a student, they could come and work on this project" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "38:11", "start": 2290.64, "text": "idea.\" That's And so we expect the students who we are working with, who've made through the, screening process, to go and figure out what their skill set is, skill set is, sorry, what their interests are, and which of these ideas they would like to write a proposal for. And so, you know, they write a proposal, they get their hands wet with the open source project, and then, you know, we've, we've got these open source, developers and designers who act as mentors, who then- And select, these proposals and, and get started over the summer." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:50", "start": 2330.29, "text": "Yeah, so all of this helps to grow the ecosystem of Bitcoin developers, and I think to the point we were discussing earlier that a technology, it can be hindered by, let's say, bad regulations or bad attitudes and bad cultural attitudes towards it. And so people, you know, people could even, I, I believe you were saying this as well, is that if, if nuclear energy is this amazing technology But if society hates nuclear energy, then it's very difficult to actually take the benefit and gain from the benefit of using nu-nuclear energy. And so I wonder, are there parallels then with Bitcoin and, trying to enable society to get the best benefit out of Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "39:33", "start": 2372.72, "text": "That's exactly right. You know, we, we let the politicians take over the nuclear narrative. We can't let that happen to Bitcoin. You know, we need to make sure that those in universities today are on the right side of the future. Because they are the future, the youth ultimately will be an important constituency, and when enough of them understand Bitcoin, I don't think-- I mean, I mean, no politician worth his salt can ignore them, and perhaps when enough of them are working on Bitcoin, Bitcoin wouldn't need politicians. It's like the printing press has been invented, do you learn how to make it or use it, or do you want to wait for politicians to regulate it? The technology and technologists can and will be able to take care of themselves. There's also, there's also the question of equity in Bitcoin development, right? If you look at the world's population today, we've, we have about sixty percent in Asia, Africa is another fifteen percent, South America is at five percent, North America and Europe combined to make another fifteen percent. Now, contrast that with developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem, we have over ninety percent of developers from regions that represent ten percent of the world's pop- Evolution. Bitcoin's promise is of course to be the world's reserve currency, and there is a necessary path dependence to that outcome, which is to say that in the coming decade, I believe we're about to witness geopolitical equity in Bitcoin development. It's almost, it's almost a sine qua non on Bitcoin's path to world domination, and there are parallels to the other aspects of Bitcoin. For example, if you look at the last thirteen years of Bitcoin's existence The first few years were marked with decentralizing consensus by way of full nodes. The last few years have been distinctly marked with decentralizing mining, most recently with the Chinese mining exodus and the emergence of home mining enthusiasts and protocols for decentralized mining like Stratum v2. The coming decade should be about decentralizing the pool of developers contributing to Bitcoin for their local communities And also building on layers above it, and this is sort of the phenomenon which, which is what I'm most excited about, and it's where I think the bulk of opportunity is for all of us in the Bitcoin education space. You know, hat tip to Spiral, who really pioneered open source funding. We've, we have Chaincode Labs and Drink, who are really pioneering Bitcoin developer education, and just recently, so many of the Bitcoin companies and organizations Who are being great stewards of Bitcoin. So I'm bullish on tech." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:21", "start": 2540.51, "text": "Yeah, of course. And I think it's really an interesting perspective you have there that really when we zoom out, we're seeing the ecosystem goes out there and tackles various challenges, whether that's making it easy to run a Bitcoin node, whether that is, you know, mining, trying to e-enhance and propagate that around the world so that it, you know, because historically that was the line, it was, \"Oh, look, all the Bitcoin mining is in China, therefore you guys can't really claim to We really are seeing a lot of other countries take on Bitcoin mining, and as you said, this idea of developing, building out the developer ecosystem around the world will be very handy in a way, because if there are billions of people in Asia and not a lot of the developers are focused there, then they won't understand the problems as much, you know, if, if, if it's like all American developers or if it's all European developers trying to make a product for Asian Bitcoin users, well, then maybe, It won't be as, targeted for the, to understand the needs of the, the local people. So I think that's an interesting point. I'm curious if you see any other priorities in the space, like what, what, what sort of things would you like to see a focus on?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "43:33", "start": 2613.0, "text": "Well, I, I think the recurring theme in our conversation today has been to, you know, bring back focus on technology, to be long the Bitcoin standard and short Bitcoin price. Of course, I mean, Austrians would say that the price is the ultimate truth, and with that, I hundred percent agree. But price is a lagging indicator, right? One could argue that the present price hasn't quite lived up to what people expected. And so, you know, my message isn't of an, of a, of a, of a pessimist, on the other hand. And I'm, I'm an optimist. I'm arguing that things can be a lot better. If you are a technologist, learn Bitcoin. If you are a Bitcoin shit poster, learn to code. And code is ultimately free speech. Vote with semicolons, not emojis and or memes. You know, build. What you post on Twitter will get lost, worst, you'll get banned. What you build into Bitcoin though, will stay forever. I am also excited about innovation in industries and frontiers that are adjunct to Bitcoin. You know, it goes back to the theme of technological innovation and optimism. Like, how do we use Bitcoin to harness more energy, cheaper energy? How do we create Create marketplaces and economies on a Bitcoin standard. It's extremely bullish on Lightning. How do we think about new forms of governments and law? How do we discover and build new territories of freedom, aka Bitcoin citadels? You know, it may be on international waters, it may be habitats in space, or it may all just be virtual. Like, I don't want to ask who knows, right? I want to know who is working on it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:09", "start": 2708.67, "text": "Fantastic. Well, I think that's probably a good spot to finish up there, Ardi. So, listeners- Make sure you, go and check out the project. It's summerofbitcoin dot org, and you can follow Ardi on Twitter. His handle is ardi bitcoin. Ardi, thank you so much for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "45:24", "start": 2724.31, "text": "Thank you, Stephen. This was fun." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:26", "start": 2726.47, "text": "Get the show notes at stephanlivera.com/406. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }