{ "episodeId": "SLP734", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "pavlenex": { "name": "Pavlenex", "role": "guest", "tag": "PAVLENEX" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.14, "text": "The best way to kill an open source project is to undermine the meritocracy that powers it. In Bitcoin, we are already seeing this happening on, on, on certain projects, right? You found one person, you found one project that is closely related to this, and then all of this like pyramid of meritocracy starts crashing. So what I personally am advocating there is that all of these things can be solved if more entities acted in their own self-interest, selfish interest basically. Hi," }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "00:30", "start": 29.74, "text": "everyone. And welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today I have my friend at Pavlenex rejoining me on the show. Many of you will know him for his work on BTC Pay, of course he is working on SV2, Stratum V2 a lot nowadays also, and, yeah, welcome back to the show, Pavlenex." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:46", "start": 45.76, "text": "Hey Stephan, it's a pleasure to be here. I believe this is my fourth time on the show, so breaking my own personal records." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "00:55", "start": 55.31, "text": "That's right, yeah. Well, I, I saw you wrote an article recently, so I thought it'd be good to chat about it. Obviously, it's related to open source and Bitcoin and building in this, in this industry, let's say. And I guess the, there is this, maybe- There's this mindset that, open source is philanthropy. So, i-i-as I understand, your article is challenging that idea. So, give us, give us the pitch. Why, why is it not philanthropy?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:22", "start": 82.14, "text": "right. So my article isn't really challenging it. I, I do believe there is a little bit philanthropy involved in open source. Maybe when we speak about open source, all of us Bitcoiners immediately think how funding works in Bitcoin, and then we try to project that to broader open source and, how funding works there. but yeah, my main problem with that article, that I wrote, it was inspired by, we can talk about it in a moment, what inspired me, but I-- what I'm arguing there is Is that, companies actually can benefit from supporting open source, on a strategic level, so, they can even gain profitability out of it pro-- in the long term, and there is like multiple benefits that a lot of companies don't really think of when they think about supporting open source. so my main goal there was to try to explain, to corporations, or even to people in general who think, that open source is just, or rather, supporting open source is This marketing stunt or, you know, goodwill or just like, you know, let's just do it because it's, good for community, so philanthropy, so yeah, I, I, I outlined, some of the talking points that I personally use when I speak about open source funding and try to pitch it to, to corporations, So yeah, hopefully it, motivates, people and corporations to-- It motivates maybe, contributors to better pitch their own work when they speak about their work publicly or try to get funding, or it helps, corporations, understand it. Because you're saying it's also" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "02:58", "start": 177.62, "text": "like, put it this way, on the funding recipient side, maybe there's an angle of how they pitch it also, that maybe they're not pitching it in the right way so that the funder side of it doesn't understand the value because they're not pitching it in the right way. The right way. So I, I guess in a sense, you're not only pitching, you're not only speaking to companies or wealthy individuals who might be engaging in, you know, false funding, you're also- Kind of helping people understand where is the value here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:25", "start": 205.11, "text": "Yes, and I also wanna give context on like, why am I the person that can speak about this? So I worked in, free and open source software for nine years now, seven of those years I would, I, I'm, I was funded through grants, but like I worked two, two and a half years without any support, early on in my career. so I've been on the receiving side of, free and open source funding, but also I try to help others build career in Bitcoin, Funding, get jobs in the companies, and I try to pitch, free and open source funding to various, companies. so, I've been involved in, in this ecosystem for, quite a while, and I think, I've seen ins and outs on both sides. Like I see arguments that corporations have against, I see, how individual contributors may be undermined their own contributions and work because, I often hear like, \"Oh, maybe why would somebody, pay me to play?\" Around and just do what I like, so they don't really see that their work actually benefits, wider ecosystem. so yeah, just to be also transparent, I'm currently funded by Spiral, so just to give clarity, like when I speak about things, I'm also personally funded, via grants, so just wanna be transparent there. so I have a pretty practical perspective of, of how things work, and I've seen maybe some in-incentives being broken as well on, on how things shouldn't work, so we can also But, but maybe the best way we can start discussing this a little bit more concretely is like why I was triggered to even write this article, yeah. Because you saw some" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "05:01", "start": 301.23, "text": "inter- you saw some reactions, I believe it was to Mara's, announcement, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:07", "start": 307.41, "text": "Correct. So, Mara announced, Mara Foundation, I think, a few days ago, they described this as an incen- initiative to support Bitcoin security, open source development, education, and, while it was greeted- With a lot of, you know, optimism and, open source community was cheering for it, great, another, you know, way for people to get funding. I, I, I started reading comments and I saw a bunch of Mara shareholders there, saying, \"Oh, wow, they are diluting us again. how does this bring value? Like, why is this philanthropy now needed?\" So, I then remembered, wait, I have a bunch of talking points that I wrote for, for quite a few years, maybe I can put Maybe it helps people understand that, supporting open source, if done properly, can be very, strategic, and it can be an investment, in my opinion, for the entity supporting open source. And there are various reasons, why that can happen, right? So just to be clear, when we speak now about open source funding, we won't be speaking specifically about Mara, or this specific situation. We will be speaking, about open source funding a bit broader and just using Mara as an example of why I was triggered basically to write all of this." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "06:25", "start": 385.24, "text": "Yeah, gotcha. So let's start with the start. So at the-- in your article, the first one you mention is this idea of upstream decisions, downstream impact." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:33", "start": 392.93, "text": "Yeah. just before we jump a little bit, into like those specific talking points, I think I think we just need to cover a little bit more of, the stages in which open source project is, because my talking points aren't really for all of the stages, or like, yeah, like it's not the same for every stage in which open project, open source project is. so, my colleague Connor Oakes from Spiral wrote a great article a couple of years ago, about, o- I don't know how exactly he, he called it, but it was a framework for open- Open source funding, and he outlined a couple of stages there on how Spiral sees these stages. I personally see them a little bit different because I approach them from maybe project perspective, not like a, entity who is funding a project perspective. So, There are, I think, a couple of phases. First one is maybe we can call it baby or early stage, where actually philanthropy and grant funding and community funding is extremely important. this is early stage where projects may not even have users, they have some technical idea of how they wanna solve a problem, maintainer maybe has a vision, but, for outsiders it's not really obvious like what they're doing, why they should support it, you know, they don't really understand it yet, so that's- This is where I think organizations like Spiral, OpenSats, HRF, Tether, a bunch of other entities that currently support, for example, Bitcoin ecosystem specifically bring a tremendous amount of value because they have experts who understand in and out of, the ecosystem and they can recognize, if something, if idea is basically valuable or, or not, so this early stage is somewhere where, potentially corporate funding may not make fully sense for, you know, Just from the broader perspective, but I think it does make a, a ton of sense, for like, s- donation-wise and just like companies supporting, sorry, not companies, these organizations giving early support to the project. then there is like a stage where community-- this is second stage, maybe we can call it community formation, where community gathers, starts to form. Somebody's using a project, maybe they're getting some community donations already, but what they lack Tap is often, and this is what I personally see, is that, a lot of projects in this stage, they lack, strategic support. So they are doing something, they are getting some donations, making users happy, but maybe they're having troubles holistically thinking how, their project, can grow. so at this stage, they're not really missing money, there is some money, but, what would be also ideal besides money is, strategic support or, you know, somebody just to listen to maintainer and try to help them out, whether that's, drafting a roadmap, documentation, thinking about adoption or how adoption should look like. I don't know, in my experience, PiRL does, does that well. They don't really throw money at the organization, or an individual. They First, they, they through, through a bunch of people in, in the organization, they try to reach out, learn about, obstacles you're facing. They are trying to help you think strategically. They are trying to have you think about, ecosystem at a wider scale, about Bitcoin ethos when you make decisions and all these other things. And I think this is, stage where, this kind of support, is also important. And then we hit maturity stage. Let's say we are out of baby stage, we hit this early adopter Option community formation stage, now the project is in a maturity stage. So this is where, you know, we have a lot of contributors joining, most of them aren't funded, they are providing tremendous amount of value. There is, maybe one or two big, we call them power users, maybe, so things are starting to scale. And this is, usually where community donations or smaller donations don't really help projects, scale from that, because it's not enough to have a couple of folks, just, and I speak I've seen this from, from personal perspective on multiple projects, like I've seen this on BTC Pay Server, on Bitcoin Design, on Stratum v2. I've seen, projects hitting this stage where, you know, users maybe don't even understand the value of supporting the project, and this is the stage where I actually think that companies can really help the project and that, you know, all these co-corporations that I speak about can really provide tremendous amount of value for themselves and for the project." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "11:10", "start": 670.27, "text": "you think? Yeah. I guess I'm- I'm curious there because it's like, I mean, many things in life, you know, they kind of follow like a power law distribution, and sometimes there are just very large users, usually like a big company or a very, you know, wealthy individual, like, you know, like a Jack Dorsey, who can fund things at that larger scale, right? That it's kind of just beyond just small, you know, few community donations and things like that. And so I guess- What you're talking about there is once the project has reached a certain level of maturity, it may require larger forms of funding, but I guess you're gonna try to make the case that it's not just philanthropy. So can you, yeah, spell that out for us?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:51", "start": 710.65, "text": "Exactly. So what I will try to, to, to make a case of is like up until this stage, philanthropy is helpful, after the maturity phase, actually it can be counterproductive because, you need, economical in- Just you need incentives, you need entities funding project who are thriving on the project, you need users who are making money out of the project, creating so project is generating value for them and they see support not as a philanthropy, but necessity. And there is like multiple reasons why it's a necessity. but yeah, I, I argue that once the project hits this stage, starts getting users, starts being used, because to be fair, like corporations aren't gonna use some small project that somebody just wrote, like they- Usually look at the code base, they see if it's regularly maintained, if it's something that they can rely on, and then you can get adoption. So it's not really like just some, it happens, but I haven't seen many convincing cases of like when a company wants to adopt, open source software that they will just adopt a random repository, start building of it. Usually they-- there needs to be certain, credibility behind the project for them to, to look into it. And then, yeah, I guess just the fourth stage, I will very quickly speak about this one because I don't think it makes a lot of sense. It's like more, sustainability phase where a company reaches the point where they, would, actually, it would be counterproductive to have like a single source of funding, because there can be corporate control over the project or all of these different other things. So in the sustainability phase, I think it would be great if there are like multiple entities supporting the, the project. So of course, this depends, on the size of the project as well, but ideally you wanna diversify funding, and you want that funding to be based on meritocracy, and we-- I wanna literally talk about this as well. I have a lot of topics I wanna rant about, meritocracy is one, but like, let's first stick to maybe these talking points that I already, outlined. So, I mean, does it make sense what I'm trying to say?" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "13:52", "start": 832.02, "text": "or Many people might have seen, there's like a famous XKCD meme of like these building blocks. I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about, where there's like all these building blocks and there are like profitable companies at the top, and at the end there's this one little small block that's being maintained by some random developer in Alabama or something like that, and he's doing it out of his own just- You know, 'cause he's a hobbyist or he loves it or whatever, and people don't realize how much of the web and how much of the modern, you know, technological world is sort of like that, that there are projects like this that are just being maintained for open source, but actually they may not necessarily be getting that much monetary funding because maybe the money is being made somewhere else in the stack per se." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:37", "start": 876.9, "text": "Yes, so that's, I think, one of the, like, talking points everybody knows about. Like, it's pretty obvious people say our company depends on this. we should support it. and, what I wanted to, to clarify there is that the company is al-already paying for open source, so they just, often pay late. you pay through outages, workarounds, breaking changes in your own software. So, you do pay eventually for, for, for the open source one way or another, whether it's like to supporting project and being informed on the changes and the direction, and you are, in la- Aligned with like strategic decisions that project is making, or you will pay later in hours and hours of engineering time, of your own employees having to go through breaking changes basically or patch vulnerability they weren't aware of and things like that. So, Main, I think, argument there is that, majority of these businesses depend on the open source software and, often there are, well, decisions and, things happening outside of their line of sight, right? you notice things only when they break basically, and by the time, you discover it, it's already probably too late and you have to spend a lot of, resources to, to patch those things. By being, more, strategically connected to, to these projects you depend on, you will get earlier visibility on the changes, developers may even reach out to you because they're aware of you, you know, you're supporting the project, and it's not just from financial perspective, they will support you as a power user's, project is incentivized to notify users on these changes and consult with them before they make such a, you know, change, for example. So, yeah. Basically, supporting contributors is one, way to close that gap of not having visibility of what's going on on the project." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "16:37", "start": 996.63, "text": "Yeah. I'm also, I think another obviously big thing nowadays, massive is AI, right? And there was a famous example, I'm sure you might be familiar with it, I think it was Tailwind CSS. Did you hear about this example? Where basically they, I think what happened is they ended up laying off a bunch of their engineering team. Now, this is a company, but I guess the point is more like- Like the advent of AI had sort of taken away parts of their business model such that they couldn't, like, have the same level of engineering talent. I'm curious if you're seeing any of this in open source world, like the impacts of AI, in terms of, like you know, I guess there's a few. One, so one I've heard is like you're seeing a lot of this kind of AI drive-by contribution, like slop contributions, and then that's like a thing of like the contribute, the maintainers have to sort of deal with that. And then, I guess that's one aspect of it. any comment you wanna make on those?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:32", "start": 1052.42, "text": "Right, so it's interesting, it's, AI and how it impacts open source, it's, a whole other topic we can discuss, but, I'm sure you also recently saw open source project, projects close sourcing themselves, like, KAL dot com, saying that, you know, with AI tooling, it's now way easier to find security vulnerabilities because if the software is open, you can, find security vulnerabilities and exploit it, you know, I, I, I'm not really, that argument Sense, but I'm sure they had other strategic decisions on why they went that direction. in terms of, contributions, it's pretty exciting. in the past, we always struggled with getting contributions and people to contribute. Now we are like, oh man, there is so many PRs, and all of them are AI-driven, which is great, like people are starting to learn how to contribute. It is definitely, you know, adding burden to maintainers, but what we can do is we can have our own agents, trying to be a gatekeeper Yes, just help with, basic things like test your own things or, you know, make sure to address these comments by AI before actual human can take a look at your, but I've, I've never been, more excited. I've met so many new people these days, like that I've never even, that aren't even Bitcoiners, like we have people that don't know what-- I'm sure they don't know what mining is, but they're helping us improve Stratum v2 website, for example, and things like that. So, and then through that Contributor, now wait, I need to learn a little bit about this project, what it is, and they start asking questions. So, open source is a great, filter, I think, for talent, these days, and it provides visibility of, high agency people basically as well. and I guess that's- Yeah." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "19:18", "start": 1158.09, "text": "So in a way, it lowers the bar for people being able to become contributors, whereas previously maybe they weren't able to or not willing to, and I guess, yeah. But, but as you said, the, the hurdle still" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "19:32", "start": 1172.02, "text": "Being willing to go out there and actually do something. anyway, I, I've sort of, I've sidetracked you a little bit. Let's get back to our main, arguments around. So you said you've got, so I think on your article, you've got four talking points, and listeners, it'll be in the show notes, of course. so do you wanna just talk us through some of those? So, the first one there is upstream decisions, downstream impact." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:53", "start": 1192.53, "text": "Yeah. So we covered that one pretty much. I think we, we, Because it's great and, you know, it, it helps your company build, and, and make money. I think th-this second one is something that I've been tinkering for a while now because for, for a very long time-" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "20:14", "start": 1214.24, "text": "The account" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:15", "start": 1214.62, "text": "pipeline, yeah? Yeah, yeah. So for quite a while, I was, you know, just thinking like, \"Oh, yeah, why would people support us? Like, we will just help them, you know, do their business.\" But actually, if done smart way, companies can, you know closely involved with, people in open source because it can help, them get access to global, global talent. And why am I saying that? Well, corporations are currently limited in where they can hire, most of them. Like, you can't hire in every country. But what you can do is give grant to any person on the planet basically. And that's how you can support, talent. So, and yeah, also open source for, for corporations gives a great signal on, you know, high agency people. Basically, it gives them, a way to better look at the future, hires, through maybe, res- through, contributions in open source. So, like, you can go to the GitHub and you can see, like, oh, wait, this guy is taking ownership. He ships, he reviews carefully. He engages with people, he co- so everything is open, like you can get a sense of who somebody is just by how they engage in the open source community, and, I think it's a way better signal for hiring, than, resume, because, you know, everybody can write anything, like, but this is like you can, by example, go to GitHub and see how somebody, It, who somebody is basically, how they work, in a team or alone, and how they solve problems, and I think this openness really helps, get, high quality, high signal employees, Basically, open source makes, all of these people more visible in a way that maybe traditional hiring or resumes never would, because, you know, so let's" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "22:07", "start": 1327.19, "text": "put that in company terms, in a way your search costs to find, to hire new employees might be lower because of, because of the work that you've done on the open source side of it. So maybe that's like one angle of like you can offset some other costs that you would have otherwise paid, just like what you were saying with, you pay for the open source either in the outages Dealing with that or upfront paying for the maintenance and the support development work, yeah, yeah. So that's the downside. And then you mentioned the kind of the regulatory aspect of maybe it's eas- in certain cases, I guess you're saying it's easier in certain cases to provide a grant than it would be to actually hire that person full, all the way. and then that's a way of kind of having them at a, not fully arm's length, but like somewhat in the middle, before you take them on fully as an actual in-house employee." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:57", "start": 1377.46, "text": "Exactly, exactly. if, if you even want to, like, maybe that person doesn't want, that doesn't mean that every open source contributor should start working at a corporation. But maybe, you know, there are people that through open source, even though they're very valuable and provide incredible amount of like value, at certain stage, they just feel that they can no longer, work in that chaos. They need peace, they need more structure, and this is where I usually suggest them to go find a job in like, a company, because If that's what you need, more structure, more instructions, you're not that self-driven, getting a job at a company maybe is a better idea for you, than trying to, you know, constantly swim in this chaos of open source, so," }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "23:44", "start": 1424.07, "text": "Yeah. I think people in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:45", "start": 1425.05, "text": "open source are, you know, mission aligned, they push themselves more in public, they are more ethos driven as well. So this is what companies, that look, that, that need that, that type of people can get them in open source easily and through grants or through donations, you, you have relationship built with these people, you have trust built. So, you know, what I've seen is a lot of, you know, grantees of certain entities later after like several years, they start and they- Take a job at this organization that originally provided entity, provided the grant, sorry, and the, the reason why they did it is because they simply enjoyed working with people or having conversations or having, you know, back and forth with people from the organization. People wanna be part of something. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly, exactly." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "24:33", "start": 1472.98, "text": "Yeah, okay. so let's go to the next one. You've got complementary R&D." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:36", "start": 1475.92, "text": "Yeah, this one is very interesting, and this is something that I don't think a-anybody has maybe thought a lot about it. But what I wanted to, to argue there is that, Free and open source funding can extend your R&D. So if you're a company, you may consider throwing or setting a budget for, for free and open source and give grants, and through that you can get access, same way you would through R&D, by funding a small number of, independent open source contributors, you can, have access to very wide area, of people or like wide technical area, which you probably wouldn't get with just hiring One engineer. So what I'm trying to say there is like you can have, I don't know, fifty thousand dollar per annual grant to somebody and, you can give it to like multiple contributors and you can, thrive from their work as well. Like you can give them money to experiment with the ideas that maybe your company is, not prioritizing, maybe they don't see value yet, maybe it's costly because hiring five, you know, full-time engineers to, to, to, do a prototype on an idea or to ideate, takes It's, just takes more time. so what I'm arguing there is not that open source replaces internal i, R&D, but it like extends it. It gives you just another way for your company to, to basically, get access to innovation." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "26:05", "start": 1564.66, "text": "Got it. So you can think of it like maybe a low cost or lower investment ways of dipping your toe in a certain area without having a full in-house R&D team on that particular research or development question." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:18", "start": 1578.21, "text": "Yeah, a company may not have capacity to work on protocol engineering research and all these other stuff, but if you're, you know, supporting these people that do work there, you can get ideas and you can get some prototypes that they build that they maybe not have in-- don't, don't have interest, resources to, to push on. So, I, I, I was arguing there that, yeah, by supporting free and open source, you are in a way extending R&D ecosystem and, actually this pitch went, went pretty well with a lot of corporations. They didn't really see it as that, but if you think about it, it really can be like you can set a small budget and just support people to experiment or you can maybe your company can't focus on certain like, problems to solve, but you can give small grants and allow people and, in open source To, to, to try to solve those problems and then you can support them further or, you know, maybe your company will a-end up adopting, the product that they built on." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "27:19", "start": 1639.06, "text": "Gotcha. okay, number four, small operational and legal overhead." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:25", "start": 1644.52, "text": "Yeah, so there, what I noticed is that like giving a grant is pretty easy, so it doesn't require huge, bureaucratic, you know, overhead because you just can sponsor somebody and it's pretty easy, like there are already open source, I think Spiral, HRF, OpenSats, all these entities actually, would help companies, with their own internal documents so they can share Share, templates on how they provide grants, and they've been-- I, I for sure know that Spiral has shared with several entities that I try to help, adopt open source. Spiral was always, happy to share these documents, and I'm sure other entities would. So, it's a very, one more thing, like, grant is a time-bound, there is no like this HRF, sorry, HR, HRF. I was, I meant to say, HRF also supports, but yeah, HR doesn't really," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:18", "start": 1698.44, "text": "So like bureaucracy there is, reduced, so, it's not a huge operational burden, for a company to do this, and it doesn't cost them much, but the benefits of it overall can be pretty big" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "28:35", "start": 1715.32, "text": "Yeah, gotcha. Okay, yeah, and that's, I guess, we kinda covered some of that in the earlier points as well, a little bit about lower cost or lower investment ways of getting things. And now another point is around this notion of corporate funding and corporate control, right? Now obviously we're in Bitcoin, that's kind of a, that can be a contentious point depending on what you're talking about, like if it's, you know- You know, people talking about influence on the protocol, and things like that versus, well, developers still have to eat too. So how do you balance that? How do you, how do you assess that?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:10", "start": 1750.42, "text": "Yeah. So I think the best way to kill an open source project is, to undermine the meritocracy that powers it. And in Bitcoin, we are already seeing this happening on, on, on certain projects, right? you found one person, you found one project that is closely related to this, and then all of this like pyramid of meritocracy starts crashing. so, what I personally am advocating there is that all- So these things can be solved if, more entities a-acted in their own self-interest, selfish interest basically. so the more corporate participation doesn't mean that the corporations have more control, it means that we now have more corporations, so it's like not concentrations of these entities that support, the, the project. So I know that like a lot of my open source friends may now listen to this podcast and maybe they will say, \"Oh, Pav is arguing that com-corporations- We just need to take control of free and open source. Somebody may end up with this idea that we are now debating here that, corporations should in a way take over and there is like all these benefits for them, but actually it's quite opposite. what we are trying to, to do here is set a case on why companies should support. The more companies support, the harder it is to, to centralize funding, the harder it is to gain control of a project if you have multiple entities. What we have in Bitcoin right now is, concentrated funding. And it- It's something that we need to solve long term as well, and that's why we need to help other entities understand the value of, funding open source if we want more companies to act in a self-interest. Maybe I've been working with miners, for too long that I now look at things through this lens, but I do feel like if we are able to speak their own language, we will be able to have them understand that there is a lot of, value that a company can get, from supporting an open-" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "31:11", "start": 1871.3, "text": "Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:12", "start": 1871.86, "text": "So" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "31:12", "start": 1872.02, "text": "I guess the other question will be sort of, what about the, the pitfalls of maybe s-funding the wrong thing, funding the wrong project, the wrong person, or wasting money because you structured it wrong? H-what are some of the ways that a company can do this the right way and avoid those pitfalls?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:30", "start": 1889.84, "text": "Yeah. So I think the best way is just, so if you're considering like who you should support, always reach out to the people on that project and learn like who they feel should provides value to the project the most and maybe isn't funded or needs help. that's one way to do it. So there, there is always some research you as an entity need to do and certain, take certain steps in order to do it properly, because I don't think anybody would like to provide funding for somebody not to do anything or do poor job. Or just, do something that can undermine the, the, the ethos, and the structure, of an open source project, and it happens. Like we are all humans, we make mistakes. I think, there are definitely examples maybe of wrong people being funded, or maybe th-those people that were funded didn't really understand how things work in open source. So, it's critical that meritocracy is the pillar there when, when giving a funding, otherwise we will end up in, in situations that, can cause chaos on open source project, and that's why I think it's important to have diversity in funding, more completely unrelated entities trying in, in, and even acting in like very selfish ways to get, to provide funding because it, benefits them, and this is how, the network becomes resilient, more economically, rational actors versus a single philanthropist that thinks, you know, open source should thrive and, provide support for it, and, that's It's li- literally what, why I wrote this is like to motivate companies to, to see the value and not for cor-corporations to take control." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "33:10", "start": 1990.47, "text": "And so inside the company, who is typically the best person to manage this process, monitor this process? In your experience, like you've been in this ecosystem now for years, who is normally the best person in the company to manage that kind of thing, like to, to have the right expertise, but also the right level of maybe budget to be able to fund this kind of thing? Who is How, how should it be managed?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:34", "start": 2013.77, "text": "Yeah, usually a person who likes open source, understands open source and its values is, is usually a very good and, a candidate for this, and somebody who doesn't mind doing operational things, who doesn't mind doing like talking to a bunch of people, doing a lot of research, trying to get a good understanding of, because like, I don't expect companies to have when they give grants, it's, it's very hard to expect that all of these companies- Companies will have technical understanding or like, to, to be able to, to evaluate certain applications, right? So what you need to do there instead of trying to maybe just give a grant, because like, better not give it than give it just for the sake of giving it. That's also something that I think is very, unpopular opinion maybe, but that's what I always try to do is like motivate people to really understand, like, first, when you're writing a grant, you really need to understand key areas where you can- help and like value you can provide, and then entity reviewing it should reach out to all of your colleagues, should review your work prior to, to giving a grant, and this is maybe that, that part can be a bottleneck, but I don't think it's, huge amount of time because you can just ask people, and, you know, the more people you're connected to, the easier you have access to information to learn if somebody doing work, is right can be. But I mean," }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "34:56", "start": 2096.2, "text": "typically, who, who will it be? Will it be like somebody in-- Will Engineering manager inside the company who is kind of managing this, is it a CTO, is it a, you know, CEO, like who, who's normally- I don't" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:10", "start": 2109.53, "text": "think CTOs would enjoy doing this kind of work, maybe they can help with evaluating the, the application, but yeah, as you said, maybe somebody has, PM, engineering manager, somebody who also cares about open source and understand it is, usually very good, high quality candidate to be able to work with. So they would be like a typical" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "35:26", "start": 2126.26, "text": "person inside these large companies who is, let's say, interfacing with the open source aspect of it. Because as, as we were talking about before, there is maybe also an element of maybe some of these companies they want to, but they just don't know who's the right person to fund or they're not close enough to sort of know who's good. But as you said, part of the Like the people who are already working on them or like maintainers there who is good, who is actually doing useful things. the other question I guess that might be interesting is, just like tied grants versus open grants, which is the right tool for the job, when should they be used? Like, should the companies be thinking, \"No, I'm gonna fund Pavlenex for six months or for one year to do X, Y, and Z, and he has to achieve X, Y, and Z,\" or \"No, it's just an open grant, I'm funding Pavlen" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:18", "start": 2178.26, "text": "Yeah, that, that's a very good and tricky question, and I'm not sure I will have the answer completely. what I personally believe is that company should have- Good understanding of like what areas they benefit from. So like in their selfish interest, they wanna see these areas of, we can talk about Bitcoin for example, I wanna see more privacy or I wanna see, you know, better scaling solutions or whatnot. I wanna see more, layers. I wanna see Bitcoin being used as a payments, more because it benefits my business. So they usually have like these areas that they like to, to fund. So I think Entities shouldn't really direct, people on like what should be done, but they should fund people who have good, and clear understanding on how they can contribute to certain areas. So, self-driven, self-motivated people who already understood pretty well how their work, can provide value in open source. Of course, I think maybe, corporation can engage and check with, with the grantee, for example, on how the progress is going and stuff like that. But I, I don't think they have capacity and or the, the maybe in most cases even the knowledge to understand like specifically how certain work im- impacts, certain areas. So they also need to have a little bit of trust in, in this person. Entities that I worked with in Bitcoin and, all of the contributors that I helped, get funding, or help them structure their grants, basically, yeah, I don't think any of the entity, I, I really don't re-recall a single conversation where entity reached out and tried to direct in a way to open source contributor, to do something. I think it can be pretty counterproductive. So if they can keep it a little bit more open, I think that's better way to approach. I guess that's what" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "38:15", "start": 2294.65, "text": "Yeah, yeah, and I, 'cause it's kind of a genuine like, 'cause there is a tension there, because on one side, maybe a company feels like they don't want to just fund people to just sit around and do nothing or do useless things, but at the same time, but at the same time Developers and people, recipients of grants, may also not want to be too tightly constricted, right? Even if they're genuine, they're not like trying to just be lazy and get money for nothing, they might just feel too constricted by that or maybe not as motivated. So I guess it is, there is a bit of a genuine tension there, but obviously people find a way, they manage it, through some form of structuring of the agreement." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:51", "start": 2330.73, "text": "Yeah. Well, personally, I've, I've never met a contributor in open source who- is not productive or doesn't work on, on. Like, I'm sure there, there are examples, there are always like rotten apples that we can, you know, maybe point out too. But like, I'm trying to remember, but I can't remember, like, if there is a person who maybe it's like a" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "39:11", "start": 2350.66, "text": "selection bias, you know, the only ones you know would be the good ones, you know what I mean? So could" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:15", "start": 2354.64, "text": "be. I, I try to work with, very highly productive people, that's true. But," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:23", "start": 2362.63, "text": "yeah, b-because your work What, what I saw is actually, pretty, the, the, the, the opposite. I saw contributors having so much pressure from having funding that they start like, they're" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "39:37", "start": 2377.22, "text": "over-delivering or they're really trying to work really hard to make sure, yeah, they, they, they" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:40", "start": 2380.32, "text": "like have a, a need to like over-deliver and provide like more value, which is probably always great, but sometimes can also, likely be counter, counterproductive as well." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "39:51", "start": 2391.05, "text": "Gotcha. Okay, so I guess kind of closing thoughts on this topic, FOS support programs support, supporting open source infrastructure. What's your sort of summary of the main points there?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:08", "start": 2408.05, "text": "Yeah, so the summary is that you should, if you're a company that in any way depends on open source software, even if you're a small one, like, I think maybe we framed this conversation too much as like corporate entities, what I actually meant is like, you can even set a five K annual budget and just give donations to the projects, try to build relationships, try to, like, there is a bunch of companies doing that, so it doesn't mean that you need You need to have like hundreds of thousands of dollars in budget to, to do this. Like, I think with, even small budgets, you can make impact and you can start small and then maybe grow from there and see if, open source provides value and maybe the talking points that Pavlenex gave on Stephan Livera podcast that motivated you to do this are bullshit and they don't work and then you're like, oh no, this doesn't work. but if you're a business that depends on open source, supporting open source, it's not a charity, it maintains infrastructure you It provides access to people worldwide. It helps you get, better, hiring pipeline. It helps you get access to talent. it helps you, innovate because you will earlier see, decisions, and you will earlier have a visibility into changes on like certain protocol, and you will always get this excited open source people telling you about the latest things that showed up. I think all of us working with open source are pretty enthusiastic and work on bleeding edge, so like you will get access to people who work freely, who collaborate with multiple entities, multiple companies. I think when you work in a company, com-competition is high, so you don't really get to engage with that many people. You're usually, you know- in a way, you know, put in a group, and this is where you work. But in open source, if I need something, I don't know, from BlueWallet, I'm gonna go and ask them and go to their support group and learn a bunch of things, and I'm gonna go to this other project, and I'm like, we, engage with each other, even like, you, you will see like companies are more open to talk to open source than they are to their competitors, and this is where innovation can happen, like open source people get this Edge ideas, that are happening, and I think that can be very, very valuable for you as a company to just be up to speed" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "42:28", "start": 2547.98, "text": "with what is happening. Got it. Yeah, makes a lot of sense to me. and I guess, we've got to also while, while we've got you here, we've got to get some updates from you on, SV2 and BTC Pay. So let's start with, Stratum V2. Any updates you wanna share for people?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:46", "start": 2565.51, "text": "Yeah, so Stratum v2, we shipped several major releases recently. we shipped the first time for, for years we now have a UI. So we ship something that we call SV2 UI, which is a frontend application that, puts together a bunch of complexities and just allows miners to have this very nice looking monitoring dashboard while in the behind the scenes we have something that connects to their own node to construct templates. We have something that allows them to run One, Stratum v1 legacy firmware basically, and connect to Stratum v2 pools. So all these complexities are abstracted from them. Main point there is that we are now at a stage of, adoption, we are connected with several, major pools, smaller pools, bigger pools. We are seeing people, putting SV2 on a hardware, on a firmware as well. So, we are seeing a lot of progress, and I think we are, at that stage when it's a snowball effect, So I think things are gonna start rolling out, out for Stratum v2 as an independent protocol for public good for entire industry to adopt. and I know, I read a lot, a lot of-- I, I read all the Stratum v2 comments, by the way, even the haters. I saw recently somebody compared it with COVID. So like, COVID was bad, so expert told me that COVID is, good, and people are telling me Stratum v2 is good, so like, people somehow managed to put these two together and say Stratum v Why it is taking so much time to adopt is something that I really wanna address now, because, working on a protocol that has a lot of, entities that are in a highly competitive, environment takes a lot of time to build credibility, to put all these people together, to learn about actual problems in mining that we need to address versus Theoretical engineering problems that we might have thought five years ago we wanted to address. So all of these things take time, things move a little bit slower, but I think we are doing them properly. Stratum v2 now is a public good. There are multiple entities, first and foremost, funding it. None of them are miners, by the way, all of the contributors are funded by different entities, which is something that we really wanted to make sure that all of us are funded by different entities, Very important when we speak, with the mining community. And then, yeah, UX is now easier, I guess, and that will be, another step towards, adoption. So I've never been, more bullish, to be honest. we are finally seeing these, technical things that we've been working on in the behind the scenes. Finally, there are users interacting, playing around, and now we finally have these early adopters that provide us, crucial feedback, and all these people honestly working on Stratum with To a phenomenal team, really, really high agency, very hardworking, guys that's been working on, on all of this for years. So if you're a miner, go to stratumprotocol.org, just click start mining, and you can already start using Stratum V2, and we are hoping very soon we get more entities to deploy it on the pool level, hardware level, and that Stratum V2 becomes the protocol it, it was meant to, to be for, for entire industry as a public good to" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "46:04", "start": 2763.91, "text": "adopt. I see, yeah, and, as I And is it demand pool? They're the main, like, one who is already doing fully SV2. who else is, like, who else, is at least publicly talking about it or doing something with SV2?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:19", "start": 2779.38, "text": "Yeah, one thing I always can't speak about because it's a highly competitive industry is, we as an open source community are in a way this interoperability layer between multiple companies. Right. So you-- There are people talking" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "46:32", "start": 2791.79, "text": "to you, but they're not willing to be public, yeah? Yes, yes," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:35", "start": 2795.01, "text": "because it's a highly competitive industry, but-- I hope very soon we will see," }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "46:41", "start": 2801.34, "text": "see," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:43", "start": 2802.52, "text": "progress on, on that end, I would say. We already have, I mean, as you said, it's" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "46:46", "start": 2806.1, "text": "been years and years and years, everyone's been, you know, talking about SV2 and, it's, good to see some of it finally landing. let's switch now to BTC Pay, let's get some updates from you there. BTC Pay server, obviously, long time, you know, free and open source payment processor. what are the big updates" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:06", "start": 2825.75, "text": "we are in the like few weeks away from shipping a major release, which will, give users a lot of UX improvements, a little bit multisig, we've been working hard on, on that end as well. We're working on, plugin ecosystems. So what we did with BTC Pay in a way was like we tried to push innovation through plugins. So, everybody wants to-- so a certain level or of scale at an open source project, you get people wanting features and even- If you really want that to scale, you need to say no to a lot of things. we through plugins try to say yes to everybody, so like, yeah, you can build it in a plugin and you can use it on your own without being bottleneck for all the other users and to, for the core project. So what we are seeing now is a lot of, Very talented developers building like Telegram bots with BTC Pay server so you can buy things from Telegram without ever having to interact with like what you know as BTC Pay server. we are seeing a bunch of companies building their own, second layer solutions. We have Stripe integration now so merchants can accept payments with credit cards through BTC Pay and then there is a plugin that allows you to convert this and buy Bitcoin on Strike. So there is a really insane amount of innovation happening. Plugins and I'm so bullish for, for plugins on BTC Pay, and I think the most important thing, all of this, we will speak about it in Prague on BTC Pay Day, so you can go to day dot btcpayserver dot org and get your free spot to join us, and, other contributors will speak way better about all these, updates than I, than I can." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "48:43", "start": 2923.33, "text": "Excellent. Yeah. And, look, I-- One other thing, I think a lot of people still aren't familiar with what Samrock protocol is. Do you wanna just give people an I, I think maybe there's a lot of people out there sleeping on that, and they don't actually understand that, even people in the industry, just because, look, there's so many things happening. So can you just explain for people what is the Samrock protocol, what does it mean for BTC Pay, what, what can a typical user do with that now?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:07", "start": 2946.74, "text": "Samrock is such a fantastic UX improvement, and I will try to give example like, so BTC Pay Server was always made for you to, initially to add your public key to the instance, and then you can receive payments without ever having to give us, you know, not us, the server, the, the private key. Over the years, Lightning started and all these other things, and it became very difficult to maintain that level of security, right? Because then now we need hot wallets, and like, there is a- A bunch of, wallets being made, different protocols, it's very hard for user to understand how, which wallet to basically use with BTC Pay server these days. And onboarding them, is very difficult. so the, the problem that the Rockstar Dev, and team at Aqua, Samsung, Mao, and all these other engineers tried to solve is like, how can we- Allow users to receive payments through their own wallet, while BTC Pay serves just front end. A website where they, you know, we show an invoice, somebody scans it, and that payment ends up directly in your wallet. So what they made is a protocol which allows you to scan a QR code on the BTC Pay server side, and you connect your Aqua right away. You connect all of the payment methods that Aqua has, so, Liquid, Lightning, and OnChain are all three set up in a single A click for the user, and then end user can just sit back, and get, see the payments, arriving at their own wallet. And for them, it's powerful because, you know, when they have a w- when they have a wallet in their hand, they feel like it's theirs, right? So they don't give control to anybody else, and they're like, \"Wait, how can you guys make all this magic that I can now receive and I can use this money right away here?\" So yeah, What we are trying to solve long term is like how to have more wallets have UX like this, where a user simply scans and connects and doesn't have to tinker about keys on the server or anything else. So it's more secure, it's better UX for them and, Samrock definitely there is specification so wallets can go and, incorporate this protocol as well." }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "51:15", "start": 3075.44, "text": "Fantastic, yeah, 'cause I think it's, it's a maybe under-known or under-appreciated. It's such an" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:21", "start": 3081.38, "text": "under-appreciated feature, yeah. So" }, { "speaker": "pavlenex", "time": "51:24", "start": 3083.53, "text": "because like you can think of it as like you're just kind of sharing your viewing key or watch, you're watching only, and then the BTC Pay server instance is kind of in a way helping route those payments, and then you can just be like everyday person on your phone with, you know, Acro Wallet or whatever, and it can just, the payments can just hit your wallet, and then off you go. So That's really useful, maybe a lot of people maybe just aren't familiar with that, because to be fair, there's so many things happening in Bitcoin. So, yeah, thanks for sharing all the updates today, Pavlenex. listeners go and check it out, I will put the link in the show notes and of course, follow Pavlenex on, X at pavlenex. and, yeah, thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:04", "start": 3123.54, "text": "Thanks, Stefan. It was a pleasure, as always." } ] }