{ "episodeId": "SLP620", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "matthew_zipkin": { "name": "Matthew Zipkin", "role": "guest", "tag": "MATTHEW" }, "stacie_waleyko": { "name": "Stacie Waleyko", "role": "guest", "tag": "STACIE" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.12, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by BOSS. You can buy Bitcoin over at getboss.io, that's for the American listeners. Now joining me today are Matthew Zipkin and Stacie Waleyko from Chaincode Labs. So, first of all, welcome to the show, guys. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "00:27", "start": 27.05, "text": "Hi, thanks for having me. just a minor correction, I'm with the Bitcoin development project, which we will talk about more." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:33", "start": 32.84, "text": "Okay, sorry, I, I was under the impression you were both at Chaincode. Sorry about that. Okay, so, yeah, we're gonna be talking a bit about Bitcoin and open source today, so, yeah, I mean, maybe just take a minute each and give us a bit of a background for listeners who don't know you" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "00:52", "start": 52.37, "text": "In Bitcoin open source. Before that, I was a hobbyist and, and a node runner, and, Bitcoin is the thing that got me into everything from Linux to cryptography to software development, open source, all that stuff. I joined Purse in twenty eighteen, worked at BitGo for a stint, and I joined Chaincode Labs in twenty twenty-three where I contribute to open source software, research, development, and education of Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "01:17", "start": 76.89, "text": "I am Stacie. I have been working in open source Bitcoin and development for the last few years, but prior to that, I started my professional Bitcoin journey in twenty nineteen when I joined Casa. I worked on a lot of the backend systems for their multisig offering before jumping into to the world of open source just a couple years ago, so I'm excited to chat more about that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:39", "start": 98.78, "text": "Great. Okay, so yeah, let's talk a little bit about Bitcoin open source. there's d-different, things going on at all times in the space, but, where, where would you say Bitcoin open source development is at these days?" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "01:52", "start": 112.05, "text": "Well, it's good, but it could always be better, and, and that's, you know, the focus of the project that the projects that, Stacie and I are contributing to. I think It's not guaranteed. It, needs constant maintenance and attention. One of the things that's been interesting about this year is that, the Bitcoin Core project has been responsibly disclosing, some of the vulnerabilities that old versions of Bitcoin Core have been exposed to over the years, and I, I think that's a really interesting- reveal to, to show the public that Bitcoin's core software wasn't done on day one, it, it needs constant attention, as technology improves and attackers get smarter and, you know, we'll say state-level actors have more power, and users need more features and more privacy, and the blockchain's getting bigger every day, and, we need to keep up with the technology, and that takes constant attention and, and maintenance from contributors." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "02:50", "start": 170.42, "text": "Yeah, I definitely agree with that, and something that we don't like to- To think about is Bitcoin isn't as inevitable as we think it is, and we have a lot of people talking about these big futures with Bitcoin, and that it's not propor-proportional to the amount of people that are actually building. The infrastructure within, and then like just even on a like day-to-day level, though, we just have so many people that still don't understand Bitcoin, whether that's because it's just they honestly don't get it or because there are people working to spread like misinformation intentionally about it, or, you know, people pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto or, I think it was mentioned earlier, nation states trying to ban it, we got politicians trying to choke out Bitcoin business and innovation. So while the state Of Bitcoin open source, or as we like to call it, BOSS development, is good. It's-- there's definitely room for improvement, and the more smart, interesting, creative people we get involved, the richer array of solutions we have to choose from, especially if we can get more people involved from places that we think Bitcoin could serve its highest good and its greatest impact." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:04", "start": 244.43, "text": "I see. And so just to explain a bit for maybe listeners- Listeners who are new, do you guys mind just explaining kind of what are the different types of Bitcoin developers, right? Because you have like protocol developers, there's application developers, there's, you know, the, the, if you just explain a little bit about the, the world of Bitcoin development. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "04:23", "start": 263.06, "text": "great question. So, I guess you can think about it in terms of layers. There's definitely like the layer one Bitcoin protocol layer, which is mounted mostly in Bitcoin Core or Bitcoin full node software. This is the computer program that Satoshi Nakamoto Kakimoto developed, however, twelve, twelve years ago, and, and that actual computer program has been handed down through generations of open source developers to the people who maintain it today. It's still basically the same computer program, and there are alternative implementations written in other languages besides C++, which is what Satoshi chose. that's definitely the layer one, that is the software that does Bitcoin. It, it, connects to other full nodes, it transmits blocks, it, validates transactions. It also has its own wallet, but I would say that, that wallet software is more of an application. you don't need Bitcoin Core to run a wallet, you do need some kind of full node to run a wallet, though. That's why I'd say it's upper level. And wallets, probably everybody's familiar with, you've got them on your phone, you run different ones" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "05:27", "start": 326.53, "text": "Different feature sets, security trade-offs, privacy trade-offs, they all need to connect somehow to layer one so that we are all in consensus that you know that the money you just received is actual Bitcoin and that, that, you know, you can send that Bitcoin to somebody else in the future. Let's say those are the two main layers. You know, there's also Layer Two, which is, which is Lightning, which is off-chain transactions, so your audience is very familiar with that. it's an, another sort of, I guess it goes in-between kind of wallets, the application layer and the protocol layer. It's a separate protocol that relies on the security, robustness, and liveliness of the Layer One Bitcoin protocol. but allows all this fancy off-chain stuff. So, yeah, I, you know, there's, there's protocol, there's layer two protocol, and there's application layer. It's there, the, the main places for open source development, and there's also lots of closed source development. There's plenty of applications, you know, Coinbase needs Bitcoin engineers, that kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:20", "start": 380.4, "text": "And so I think let's try to touch back on something, Stacie, that you were mentioning as well, that the, the relative size of Bitcoin and the relative size of companies" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:33", "start": 393.09, "text": "developers that we have, right? As an example, you know, we've got, you know, Bitcoin overall, the market is, as I look at it now, it's one point eight four trillion dollars as an overall market. You know, we have large, you know, there are publicly listed companies, like you said, like Coinbase, and others, and just other large companies Can you give us just a rough idea, like what is the, you know, how many developers should we have? Like, I guess I'm, I'm trying to get an idea from you guys, 'cause obviously it's more your world than mine." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "07:04", "start": 423.66, "text": "Yeah, I, I think, yeah, well, first of all, let's just talk about how you mentioned Bitcoin is the code that underlines now close to a two million dollar, two, sorry, two trillion dollar asset. That's wild, and when we think about it, there's no centralized source of funding, there's no barrier to entry, there's no benevolent dictator, and when the, the truth is that anyone can contribute to Bitcoin, and that's, that's really cool. That's really unique. And, one of the things that we're trying to share is that it's not as scary or intimidating or complicated as it may seem. And there are some companies, or definitely companies that employ open source developers, which I think is incredible 'cause we need that in the ecosystem. But as Matthew mentioned earlier, there's a lot of companies, I don't know how many, but I personally know that there are companies that use open source Bitcoin Software in their products, but don't contribute back to it, whether that's because they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the funding, or it's just not a priority. But In order for us to build this future on Bitcoin that we all dream of, we need to really up that. And so I, I wish I had actual numbers for you, for like a percentage, but I can only think of a handful that I personally know that are employing open source Bitcoin developers. But at the same time, too, something that's really promising is there are tons, not tons, but there is a growing number of nonprofits and groups that are supporting open source Bitcoin developers as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:42", "start": 521.78, "text": "I see. And from my understanding, it's common that maybe some of these large exchanges, while they may not directly have Bitcoin protocol developers, they may fund some of those, organizations. they may contribute to, you know, a BRINK or an HRF or, you know, these different, kinds of organizations that are, that are in turn employing developers or OpenSats, and I'm sure there's many I'm, I'm, I'm missing out here. so Do you wanna, I think one other thing that was touched on, I think we should explain this again as well. I, I, you know, I've touched on it, on the show earlier before, but sometimes it's good for a reminder. And this is actually an observation I see, right? Like when you look on social media, you sort of get this sense of, \"Oh, Bitcoin has already won and it's, it's, it's pristine, it's perfect.\" And, or the, oh, here's the other one you hear people say, \"Oh, Bitcoin has Being a stickler, but you could say, \"Look, in 2010, there was this value overflow bug. 184 billion bitcoins were created out of thin air, and yes, that, that had to be wound back. Yes, that was before Bitcoin had a price. But yeah, I mean, there have been bugs before. 2013, there was a chain split. 2018, there was an inflation bug, not exploited, but there was one.\" So You know, this kind of-- so it's sort of, I think there's kind of this public social perception of kind of pristine, and then there's sort of the reality sort of on the, on the ground." }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "10:12", "start": 611.77, "text": "Yeah, and there's clearly a huge gap between protocol and users too. Individual users get hacked all the time, exchanges, Malicious wallets, poorer random number generators, users could accidentally use funds by using basically weak, weak cryptography without even realizing it. so a lot of stuff takes review. W- one thing I'd like to add about the, the scale of the GitHub, I mean, the, open source community that we're talking about here. it's probably between a hundred to two hundred, I'd say full time or close to full time open source contributors that run this, like you said, two trillion dollar ecosystem. So just compare those two numbers. Two trillion dollars versus one hundred and fifty people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:55", "start": 654.72, "text": "Yeah. And so, I mean, to be clear, that, that hundred and fifty people are you talking there about Bitcoin protocol development, and then maybe there's applications that might, you know, once you, once you cl-include them, that might be another, you" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "11:06", "start": 666.03, "text": "know, I, I'd say if you're looking at Bitcoin core specifically, you might find there's really only fifty, fifty full time to maybe a hundred part time, you know, up to maybe five hundred total contribute over a year, it might be two hundred to five hundred People who get a pull request merged, that kind of thing. But the core is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:23", "start": 683.46, "text": "really like fifty people. Fascinating. And even there, there are different types of developers, right? So you have like, sort of people who might make a contribution every now and again, maybe regular contributors, like people who are doing review work, and then a small, maybe five or six maintainers, right? That's kind of, that's like lo-roughly the split. Sure." }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "11:41", "start": 701.25, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:42", "start": 701.69, "text": "yeah. I" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "11:42", "start": 701.91, "text": "mean, there's only five maintainers, I think, at this time, and everybody does review. we always need more code review, for like the exploits that you've already mentioned, like, you know, that's, that's where review comes in." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "11:56", "start": 715.52, "text": "Yeah, yeah. And, and Stephan, you mentioned earlier about the stuff that we see on Twitter and how it can sometimes kind of feel like an echo chamber, and something that we believe in as- As representatives of the Bitcoin Dev project and Chaincode's BOSS program, is that an understanding of the technical side of Bitcoin, even if you have no intention of ever becoming a developer or cutting a line of code, is really what seals the deal for you in terms of Bitcoin. It's, it's, it's what makes you like truly believe in it. And so what we're trying to do is kind of like spread more of that information, especially to people who may not be interested in I, I love Bitcoin Twitter, but I know not everybody does. and then, as well as like people who may not be currently served by some of the more traditional learning styles out there, I know like the Bitcoin white paper is pretty easy to read, but white papers in general can be kind of difficult. some people do better with more visual styles of learning or more interactivity, so we're trying to kind of level everyone up so that we can all participate in these technical discussions that are so important to Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:07", "start": 787.24, "text": "Gotcha. Okay, so look, let's talk about that idea then of creating, so if the idea and the goal of the projects that you guys are working on is to create more, Bitcoin open source contributors, how do we, how do we do that? What's, what's the way to achieve that?" }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "13:22", "start": 802.07, "text": "So I, I think the, the approach that we've taken with the Bitcoin Dev project is kind of to try and lower the barriers and make things more accessible and also cater to a wide array of different learning styles. we-- one of our offerings is actually a game. It's called Saving Satoshi. that's something that Matthew and I have been spending a lot of time on, as well as a bunch of other people. There's also interactive courses. One of them is Decoding Bitcoin, where we pair some really nice visuals and animations by a contributor named Jamal, who's also done BTC Illustrated, with interactive coding exercises within the lessons. there's also a tool called ChatBTC, which is like- Chat GPT, but all of the sources come from vetted places like, Delving Bitcoin, the mailing list, the Bitcoin Talk forums, blogs, Op Tech, all that good stuff, so that, you know, when you go to search for the word Lightning on your favorite search engine, you're probably not gonna get the Lightning Network, but if you ask Chat BTC or Bitcoin Search, which is another one of our tools, you're gonna find that kinda stuff. So we're, we're trying to be creative and one of the goals is really to create something That is as captivating and unique as the technology itself. So it's, it's a challenge, but it's a fun one." }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "14:45", "start": 884.81, "text": "I think probably the most important thing we could say to your audience is that Bitcoin Twitter isn't Bitcoin development. The, the community is, I'd say much warmer and more welcoming, and friendlier, and we care less about, who or what you are and, and very much more about what you do and, and what you know, and that's emphasized by the number of anonymous open source Contributors and, I've met open source contributors to, to Bitcoin core, protocol layer that are still in high school, doesn't matter your age or gender or where you live, Our, the Boss program that Stacie mentioned, we ran last year and we're about to, to run again. It's a little bit more advanced than Saving Satoshi, which, which we, we wanted SavingSatoshi dot com to be Very entry level, you need a little bit of technical knowledge, JavaScript or Python helps, but it's like the perfect sort of thing that, say, a high school computer programming class could get into, i-it's, very accessible for beginners in the protocol. the BOSS program is definitely more advanced. at, at the end of the BOSS program, what we did last year was we had, a three-month program. The first month involves, weekly coding challenges which are run through, GitHub Classroom. They're very challenging. stuff like, writing a, Bitcoin transaction by hand, verifying transactions on Cygnet, working with the Bitcoin core codebase directly. they're very difficult challenges. but at the- At the end of that, at the end of that first month of challenges, we start pairing successful students up with, actual open source project groups like LDK, Bitcoin Core, Rust Bitcoin, Payjoin, Silent Payments, LND, Wannet, all kinds of stuff like that, and we, help those students get involved directly. So the idea behind the BOSS program is, is that, that zero to one, the really like, I've never contributed to Bitcoin before, but I think I can, and after three months, you are, not just you can, but" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:44", "start": 1003.62, "text": "Just to be clear, is this an in-person or on-- online, course?" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "16:48", "start": 1007.51, "text": "Good question. This is, is program-- It's async and it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's online. So this isn't like the Chaincode Residency, which we've held in the past, where people actually are flown to New York to all hang out, which is an amazing program. but we were also able to, to cast a much, much wider net with this. So, before I forget, I wanna mention that, that applications for to get signed up. yeah, and so it's, it's async, it's, it's offline, I mean, it's online. we had a Discord server last year with just hundreds of channels and everybody in there. people from twenty different countries were, were involved. I think we had something like fifteen time zones, which make any kind of synchronous stuff just like really, really hard to do. We would have, Kind of, office hours we called it, where, it wasn't just everybody has to come in and watch somebody talk on a Google Meet, you actually had to have a question to enter, the office hours. You had to have a question ready, so that we know people are, are really engaged and working. When we first, announced the program, towards the end of, you know, by this time last year, there was something like six hundred people that actually, signed up about three hundred of those people actually made it to the first step, which was, you know, registering and passing the, the first coding challenge. And then we kind of saw as the weeks went by, the size of the group of participants narrowing down, two hundred, one hundred, seventy down to, I think about forty-five students made it through every week of coding challenges, and there's a lot of success stories that came out of that group, a lot of full-time open source contributors that are being supported by programs like Opensats, Brink Spiral today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:36", "start": 1116.03, "text": "Fantastic. And you mentioned in terms of, success stories, I'm, I'm curious, are these generally young people and it's their kind of first job, or is it actually, are they, you know, older people and maybe they're retraining or they're a developer in some other field and they're coming into Bitcoin? Sure, good question. So a couple of them," }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "18:52", "start": 1132.32, "text": "I don't know, like Space Bear is, is one participant who did great in the program. I have no idea who this person is or how old they are or what their experience" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "19:03", "start": 1143.16, "text": "is, Spiral BTC grant now contributing, to Bitcoin. There's also, a few other folks like, David Gumberg is, is one of our like success stories. He was a high school algebra teacher, interested in Bitcoin and went through our program, and he is now on an OpenSATS grant, and working on Bitcoin full-time. And there's other success stories like that. So, you know, the, the, the demographic of the people that I know about, I would say are in-- they're already, well, I guess, I mean, Dave is a great example of somebody who's not already a professional software developer. there certainly were professional software developers in the success stories in that, in that class. But yeah, it could be anybody." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "19:44", "start": 1184.41, "text": "I think that attitude is also really helpful in this, these kinds of situations because we have the resources for you, but you have to put in the work. But if you put in the work, you can definitely make it all the way to the end." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:56", "start": 1195.62, "text": "Yeah. And so I guess the, for some of these people, maybe the goal is to get either a grant or maybe a paid role, working at a Bitcoin company somewhere. I guess that would be-- would that be the goal for most of them, or are, are the, are others just kind of going through" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "20:13", "start": 1212.85, "text": "Well, for the, the boss program, definitely like getting that number from 150 up to 151, 152, that's our goal as hosting the program. There's a ton of information and education out there, and I think there's, like I said, 600 people signed up originally. I'm sure everybody had different motivations. many people want to be a full-time Bitcoin developer, a lot of people simply can't, they just wanna learn the protocol, either those, type of person is accepted. Certainly for programs like Saving Satoshi So she, it's more about, education and just understanding what this is. I mean, I remember my light bulb moment when I realized that Bitcoin was a thing that's out there on the internet. It isn't just like Xbox points or like Amazon credits or something, which was my initial impression of it in twenty thirteen. and that's what we want. We want people to have that moment where they're like, \"Oh, wait a minute, this is like really real. This is a thing.\"" }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "21:06", "start": 1266.38, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that, the, the phrasing of like that, that moment where it clicks. But I, I will also point out that having a career in BOSS and Bitcoin open source has a lot of benefits, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people do enter these programs with the end goal of trying to find funding, especially as we're seeing more funders come online. one of my favorite things about it is you just get this professional freedom to work on anything that you see meaningful for Bitcoin, and for a lot of us, we have certain Parts of Bitcoin that really resonate with us, and so this is an opportunity for you to contribute to Bitcoin in ways that are very meaningful to you. Like, l- some people are really passionate about privacy or self custody, and you get to choose those paths yourself. And then there's also just this-- there's a lot of, a, a, a-- this actually speaks to this, the intellectual curiosity of kind of looking into the stuff, but Bitcoin is full of really, really hard but really interesting problems, and you get to solve those problems. Some of the best developers that I've personally ever worked with, I've, my degree is in computer science, I've been working in software engineering before Bitcoin, and never did I encounter the types of people like the caliber that I have since working in Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:20", "start": 1340.03, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKite dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices, such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private- Private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on those, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Befiktion Desktop or Nunchuk, as a few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrase, you can use SeedX or, my favorite is multi- Signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code Livera to get a Discount on your cold card. The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, Bold lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin only brokerage with next gen multisig vaults. 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Right, and you've, you've kind of also worked in You know, Bitcoin, companies before, you know, focusing more on the educational aspect of it now. yeah, and do you want to just kind of outline a little bit about BDP? What are some of the projects inside BDP?" }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "24:49", "start": 1488.76, "text": "Yeah, I would love to. So BDP stands for Bitcoin Developer Project. I get confused 'cause it's Bitcoin devs dot x y z, and that, that's where you can find most of our stuff is just Bitcoin underscore devs on, on Twitter, and Noster. And it's a collection of tools and resources and open source educational material. It's all free, op-- all open source, that's kind of designed to be like the welcome wagon for Bitcoin tech. We're trying to create something that's very Like gentle and welcoming because we acknowledge that everyone's kind of at a different place in their journey. And, and we also kind of wanna have fun with it, like Bitcoin is serious. Bitcoin's very serious, especially protocol development. But when you're learning about it, you don't have to take yourself so seriously. And I think by adding like a little bit of a playful spin, we can overcome some of the more emotional barriers to learning about Bitcoin, like some of the stuff is really overwhelming, it's really intimidating. Intimidating, but by creating programs that kind of just help you ease into it, especially something like the Boss program, which gives you structure to work off of, it makes it a little bit easier. So that's kind of what it is, and it's a whole family of offerings. I've mentioned some already, I can talk about a couple more. One of them is BTC Demi, which is- For, it's like, it's an intro to Rust, but through the lens of Bitcoin. So I think that's really great for developers who wanna level up and don't know Rust and, and wanna also learn more about Bitcoin. Another, project is the Bitcoin Dev Philosophy book. So that one's less technical. It's a book you can sit down and read it, but it also gives you a really good insight into some of the stuff that's going on, especially in Bitcoin Core, which brings me to the Bitcoin Core on Onboarding guide, which is probably something that if you've gone through the BOSS program, you would be looking at especially towards the end or maybe in the middle of it, which just helps bootstrap people into the Bitcoin core ecosystem. And then, I guess, oh, another one is Bitcoin Transcripts, which is really cool. It's, it's, it's exactly what it sounds like, it's just transcripts for, for Bitcoin and other audio recordings. But here's the cool stuff. first- It is, we, we do them, they're all AI generated now, but we use real people to perfect them and make sure that all of the, like, like do the review, and you can earn sats for doing that. So it's actually learning without realizing you are. And we have a story from one of our participants, Matthew from the Laurier Bitcoin Club, and he reviewed a transcript on time warp attacks, and he did it, and he earned his sats. And the- And then shortly afterwards, he went to a conference and one of the panelists was talking about time warp attacks, and they didn't really elaborate on it at all. But to his surprise, he knew exactly what they were talking about, he knew the details, he had all the context to understand this. And so, I, I think that's one example of just like, it's, it's good for you, it's, it's if you wanna progress, if you wanna like level yourself up, this is, this is a great way to do it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:11", "start": 1690.91, "text": "Fantastic. And so, as you were saying, this is kind of, I guess in your mind, you're seeing this as a way for maybe people who are online trying to learn more just on their own. And this could also be, you know, it's a common thing, and I'm sure many of us have gone through this, when you first learn about Bitcoin and you first kind of, let's say, bitten by the Bitcoin bug, let's say, you're kind of trying to read and research everything you possibly can about it. and so I guess the hope is that, I see here as an example, you know, on level one, okay, Read Mastering Bitcoin, okay, it's like a canonical, you know, kind of introduction to some of the technical concepts, and then later, okay, you've got some of these different exercises and these different things that sort of walk the Reader or the listener through on, actually how do these things work?" }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "28:59", "start": 1739.02, "text": "Yes, yeah, and actually you, you reminded me one, I, I actually lost my train of thought and it is back now. but two, we, we really, we do wanna encourage p-- the people, for the people who want to drink from the fire hose, oh boy, we have something for you. It's called TLDR, and it is a series, it's a website that summarizes the mailing list. And what it does is it summarizes every post on the mailing list, but also every thread. Every time a new post comes in, the summary for the thread also updates. So for people who just wanna look at everything, I, I would recommend that one. And then, sorry, going back to Bitcoin transcripts though, earlier, as part of the Bitcoin dev project, we realized, actually, I would say the first problem that the Bitcoin dev project was trying to solve was building tools for existing Bitcoin developers. And one of the problems was you couldn't search through transcripts. So the team built a way to index these transcripts and now we have a way to search them, which is great. But then they added a way to filter by author, and then they started adding in more sources, like some of the ones I mentioned earlier, like Optech, Delving Bitcoin, blogs, the Stack Exchange, and that became Bitcoin Search. So that's a search engine that only pulls sources from vetted places that we know to be reputable. And then on top of that, if you wanna filter by author, then the team decided, \"Hey, wait, what if we turn this into a little AI chatbot? So now you can chat with some of your favorite Bitcoin contributors, and their answers, have been generated based on things that they've written about in the past.\" So I guess going to your point earlier about the traditional, I, I love that you mentioned Mastering Bitcoin as the traditional way that you start your, your Bitcoin path, 'cause that's how I started mine, and when I was starting, it was the only book out there. But, but yeah, you're like, where do I go from here? A-and we have those resources for anyone that, that is looking." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:04", "start": 1864.26, "text": "This show brought to you by Mempool dot space, the world's leading Bitcoin visualizer, and now they've got an accelerator program. So if you have a transaction that you sent at a fee that was too low to get confirmed, now you can fix this at-with the Mempool accelerator. The way it works, you can go and search your transaction, scroll down, click accelerator, and you don't need an account, you can pay with Lightning, and Of being accelerated, and then after a few minutes, it's confirmed. And so this is a great way to help you out if you are stuck, and this can happen where maybe your wallet doesn't have RBF or CPFP, or it might help you in situations where it's impractical to go and re-sign. So for example, multi-sig with keys in different locations. And thirdly, even in some Lightning scenarios, perhaps a forced close, you might not be able to use RBF. And so in this case, the mempool accelerator can help you out. So keep it in mind, Slash Accelerator. This show also brought to you by Nomad Capitalist. Nomad Capitalist is a leading provider in terms of offshore tax and lifestyle strategy planning and implementation. They can help you go overseas and legally lower your taxes. As many of you know, I grew up in Australia, but I left. I was sick of it in terms of the taxes and the COVID tyranny and all these other things. And so that's why I left, and now I live in Dubai. But that's not necessarily the place for you. You have to think exactly what works for you. For your family, for your business, and Nomad Capitalists have worked across dozens of different countries. They've helped people get passports, residences, bank accounts, and all kinds of other things. And importantly, it's not just about choosing one place, it may be multiple places, and it may be also about making the pieces fit together in terms of how your business fits with your family and you as an individual. Nomad Capitalists have helped many, many people in terms of going overseas, and if you're interested, go to nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. This is applicable For people with a net worth above one million US dollars. That's nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. And now back to the show. Great. So, when it comes to career pathways, I guess we mentioned before, but maybe if you guys could spell a little bit out there, what does it look like? I guess for people who wanna professionally get into this, I guess it's either try to apply for a grant, try to work at a Bitcoin company or a Lightning or some related company, or maybe- Start your own thing or start your own project. Maybe that's another thing people do. So maybe you guys could explain a little bit more, what does that process look like? Let's say the person is, you know, the listener now is sort of thinking, okay, I wanna go through some of these, I wanna learn a bit, and then I wanna actually go and- You know, take one of those pathways. What does it look like?" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "33:45", "start": 2024.86, "text": "I would say, and this is something that I, try to enforce with the, with the BOSS program too, is that the best way to get open source contributors is to start as users." }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "33:57", "start": 2036.7, "text": "Because good contributors will start by using a program, find something they really hate about it, and then dig under the hood and open a pull request, and bam, now you got a contributor. So that's why, like, when the BOSS program starts, the, the first thing we do is inter- is interact with the RPC interface. and I'm hoping that somebody will be like, \"Oh, this RPC interface is lousy, like it doesn't do the thing that I want.\" And it's like, get in there, make it do the thing you want, open a pull request, now you're on the board, now everybody knows who you are, and you've proven that you can scratch an itch, you know? So I would say that is the first step, the most important thing is like, use Bitcoin, yes, yeah, especially, you know, open source versions of it, like it's great to use, to be a Coinbase Bitcoin user or something, but really like, you know, try to look at the transaction and, and, and see, you know, if, if there's something that you can't figure out, like, why not? Is there something that the program isn't doing? and then like, as you said, like the sources of, like the, at the other end of the road is like these sources of funding where it's, it's Chaincode and Brink and Blockstream and, OpenSats and, and Spiral and like that, and, and those areas are limited, it's true, and we need more people who, believe in Bitcoin to contribute funds to expand that, to connect the people in the beginning of the story who wanna change something about Bitcoin to the people at the end who are, have the time Support to, to do so." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "35:23", "start": 2123.27, "text": "And I like what you mentioned about scratching your own itch and being a user of these pieces of software, because it, it really highlights that we all have different perspectives and something valuable to add to the conversation, and what better way to do that than actually implementing it yourself? And I know from my experience and from watching other people, one of the best ways to find yourself in open source full time is to just start and start making those contributions because Bitcoin is like the open source of open source projects, and it's, it's as close to a meritocracy as you're probably gonna be able to find. There's no barrier to entry, NIMs are encouraged, good work is acknowledged, and because of that, you're able to kind of like build a reputation for yourself based on your contributions that you can later take when you decide to go and make those applications for full-time funding. Now I come like, I thrive in structured environments. So for someone like me, I would start-- well, I did, I read Mastering Bitcoin, and then I w- I would go find, find a course, find a program, and I've already mentioned a couple like, that we have, Decoding Bitcoin and BTC to Me, that you can start with, and then From there, I think you have like, you have a couple different paths you can take. I think that the education side of Bitcoin is really having like a, a mini renaissance right now, like there's so many things coming online, and so we may be having this discussion a year from now, and there could be a lot more funding sources for people who just wanna do education and something that I thought was interesting is I spoke with Jamal, who is the author of BTC Illustrated and Decoding Bitcoin, and he said he got started with this because-- Well, let me backtrack. So he started with a pro-project called BTC Illustrated, which he creates little comics and visuals of some really heavy technical topics, like the math that makes discrete log contracts work. And so this is like, this is no joke. And he said he was making this stuff while he was learning about Bitcoin Because one, he had the enthusiasm, but two, he was learning just as much as his audience. And I think that, that, that's definitely like one path you can take and, Sorry, got where I got this totally. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:50", "start": 2269.57, "text": "Okay, well, one other thing, yeah, I, I think one other area that might be interesting for you guys to spell out for listeners, let's say the listener is thinking about going further down this pathway, can you spell out some of the different areas that they could get involved in, right? Like you mentioned earlier, okay, whether they have some issue with the RPC or whatever, if you could ex-ex-explain what are some of the different aspects of Bitcoin and the, the ecosystem around it that, you know, people go and develop on?" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "38:19", "start": 2298.59, "text": "Sure. I, and this, this is a great question because Bitcoin software is so, all-encompassing. So, you know, let's just throw some subjects out there. There's like the cryptography, there's, peer-to-peer networking, there's Internet protocol, there's Internet privacy protocols like Tor and I2P, there's data management. I mean, I had to upgrade from a five hundred gigabyte drive to a one terabyte drive, last year for, for the blockchain index, it's huge amount of data and storing it efficiently. Optimizing all that kind of stuff, if, if you've ever synced a full-- Have you ever synced a full node, Stefan? Have you ever started from scratch? Yeah, yeah. So it's, yeah, how long did it take you? Like two days or something? Like wouldn't it be nice if it only took one day? There's definitely room for improvement there. The graphical user interface in Bitcoin Core and plenty of other wallets, can use work even if you're just a designer, or not sorry, I didn't mean to say just a designer, even if you're a designer, like we need you, please, please, we need you, you're like super important or, or user experience expert or something like that. So all these fields of computer science and programming and technology are, are involved, and really if any of those pick your interest, like for me, I love the, the networking complications, it's crucial that a Because, you can't be, lied to 'cause we verify everything, but you-- but some truth can be withheld from you, and that's a constant, battle against what's called eclipse attack. So just like that kind of adversarial thinking, you, you don't need to know anything about UTXOs, To work on that area of the code, just, you know, the, the internet networking of it all. Fantastic. Stacie, anything to add" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:54", "start": 2394.06, "text": "there?" }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "39:56", "start": 2395.92, "text": "couple things. Mempool is also a really popular one, which, it's funny, like when Gloria started working on that stuff, it, I don't think it was very popular, and, and I, I feel like just her interest and her ability to like drum up excitement about it and made a lot more other people interested, so we could see that happen with some other areas, and then I'm really passionate about the type of developer that doesn't come from the Bitcoin world, that just is like, \"I know how to code a little, at least a little bit, where can I help?\" And something that I saw when I was first coming into this, which I don't quite think is, might still be a need, but in my previous life, I was doing a lot of like Docker and Kubernetes, and I wasn't a DevOps engineer, but I worked with the DevOps team a lot, and now that I've been More involved in the Bitcoin dev project, I, we are seeing like a need for those kinds of skills, so I would say that even if you don't-- even if the stuff that you're interested wasn't just listed right now, I wouldn't- I wouldn't use that as an excuse to, to not jump right in, because Bitcoin is for everyone, and we do need all kinds of different people bringing their perspectives and their skills. And then going to the, the Docker, Kubernetes, DevOps kind of stuff, Matthew, you've been working a lot on a project called Wornet, which leverages some of that. Can you tell us a little bit more about it, because I love this project, but I don't feel like I have a good way of describing it, and it go-- it speaks to your interest in the P2 behaviors that you see there." }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "41:30", "start": 2490.43, "text": "Yeah, so WarNet is a P2P network simulator for Bitcoin and also Lightning. And, how it works is we use Kubernetes, which is a system that puts hundreds of CPUs together, hundreds of servers, and we can simulate a P2P network in there by actually running an actual P2P network in there with hundreds of Bitcoin Core nodes. we can define the topology of the graph, we can define the connections between them, we can run it in Regtest or, or Signet, We can add Lightning nodes and open channels and send payment transactions, with both LND and with core Lightning nodes in there, and we can run experiments. So, for example, there were two pull requests last year that affect the, peer-to-peer stuff, like increasing the transaction throughput. Like right now, I think it's seven transactions per second just at the relay level, and the question is like, can we increase that to fifteen or eighteen? And, you know, from the software perspective, it's easy enough to change a seven to a ten And then validate that with a functional test. But what's really gonna happen on the network? What's gonna happen to the Raspberry Pis that are out there that we still wanna support? and that's what Warden is for, is to simulate those type of network effects and see what the emergent properties are. they also allowed us, this Warden also allowed us to do a really cool war game, which we've run a, a few times most re-recently, at Tapcon in Atlanta, where we launch a network of a hundred nodes with the known vulnerabilities that I mentioned" }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "42:57", "start": 2577.28, "text": "or that have known vulnerabilities and users are, tasked with, it's kind of the capture the flag game, you need to take those nodes down. and we had some high school students in there, they were like, new developers that just know a little bit about Python, we had the tools set up to make it very easy to access, Wernet and run actual attacks that actually crash actual Bitcoin core nodes. So it's a fantastic, educational tool, and it's also being used for, research on the Lightning Network. my colleague here, Carla, is doing research on Lightning channel jamming, and she uses WarNet to simulate payments across the network and how they can be plugged up and, yeah, and it's all using container stuff. So this is an open source project, actually one of our contributors, Grant, who's been super helpful with the WarNet project this year, came out of the program, in, in twenty twenty-three, January through March, and chose WarNet as his open-source project to get involved in and contribute to because he was interested in these war games, these types where you can like simulate attacks and work on mitigations that way" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:04", "start": 2643.63, "text": "Yeah, interesting. I, I think I heard a little bit about a little bit of the chatter from, that, that I think the recent Tapconf, and, people were sort of talking about who knew the vulnerabilities or who knew how to exploit them and things like this. so yeah, certainly, a, a, an interesting way to get people to think about, how to make Bitcoin more robust and, more, you know, resilient and these things. So, yeah, interesting. okay, so any other- The topics that we haven't hit on, I know, Stacie, you were keen to make sure, p- people got a shout out for the people who are involved with BDP as well, people who are helping on BDP." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "44:42", "start": 2682.03, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did wanna throw out a few shout outs, because these people have been working so hard, on the projects for the last few years. So the first one, I mentioned Jamal earlier from BTC Illustrated and Decoding Bitcoin, and kind of already mostly talked about the stuff that he's been Helping others walk the same path that he has. So he actually did go through the BOSS program that we've been talking about, and he's contributed to core, he's contributed to a bunch of other projects, but he decided that he really wanted to double down on the education, and I, I think it's like, it's really nice, like, when you see other people having done the thing that you wanna do, and then having them turn around and kind of lend a hand. So, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, check out Decoding Bitcoin, and then we We also have a contributor, Andreas, who is from, a place that we kind of think, when we think about Bitcoin, we think like, \"Oh, wow, it's gonna be so great in countries with hyperinflation or in places where they don't have the same kinds of financial privileges that we have in the West.\" And so he's from Cyprus, that is an island in the Mediterranean, and during the twenty twelve, twenty thirteen banking crisis, it was the only country to get a hair- Cut, which means that depositors of the country's largest banks lost, I think they lost about sixty percent of their savings over a hundred k euros. And then when you combine that with the capital controls that happened nearby in Greece in twenty fifteen, that kind of stuff resonates with you, to be able to like witness, like, \"Oh, that actually did happen here.\" so he, his, his motivations, I think are really strong, but he's just also such a Great contributor, if you've been around the Bitcoin core space for the last few years, you probably know him for his work in terms of helping onboard people to Bitcoin core, but also do it in a way that is sustainable. I know when I was onboarding to Bitcoin core, I used a lot of his, His release, his test guides that he would write for the different releases so that I would, I would go in, make sure that, like, I would like QA the releases. but what's interesting about his story is it's come full circle because today he's the lead on the Bitcoin transcripts project that I mentioned where we use AI to generate transcripts and then real people go in and they actually earn SATs for reviewing them. But he-- that was actually one of his first contributions years ago, was this-- what he described as like a little random project, and like who knew that it would blossom into something like this? So, those are my two shoutouts, and I know Matthew has one as well." }, { "speaker": "stacie_waleyko", "time": "47:26", "start": 2846.46, "text": "Yeah, I wanted to give a shout out to, Theo, Theophilus Isa, who's, xtheo on Twitter, I think, and, he's been the lead dev on many of the Bitcoin development project projects, stuff like TLDR and the search. He worked with me on Wannet back in the, back when it was just a little baby, back in the hackathon stage. and he's actually working on his own educational program now. I'm, I'm not sure how to pronounce it. It's, it's, it's h x c k r dash orgs. It looks like hacker org. And he'd be an interesting person to, to maybe interview in the future as that, as that takes off. He's been a great contributor, and he's from, Lagos, Nigeria." }, { "speaker": "matthew_zipkin", "time": "48:07", "start": 2886.81, "text": "Oh yeah, and I will mention, a lot of these contributors that we have today that we work with, they, they, they've been coming up from a lot of programs we've been talking about, specifically in our case, VTrust or formerly known as Kala. So I think that's great that you can kind of-- Sometimes like you just have to start. You don't, you don't know what's ten steps ahead, but you just gotta start. And so this is an example of like somebody who maybe just signed up. For Bittrust and, and now look where they are, I think it's great." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:37", "start": 2917.05, "text": "Fantastic. Well, yeah, listeners check it out. links, I've got them here, bitcoin devs dot x y z. And, reminder the BOSS program is coming up, you can apply, make sure you apply before the end of the year. We're recording this November 26th, but apply before the end of the year. Learning dot chaincode dot com. Links will be in the show notes and, yeah, Matthew and Stacie, thank" } ] }