In fact the amount of people that truly understand the cryptography of Bitcoin might be less than 20 people.
This is very very wrong. I have a lecture at my university called "Introduction to Cryptography" with almost 1000 students.
That's just one university and one year. And only the introduction course and only for computer scientists.
Each and every one of them could write down the cryptography of Bitcoin (Hashes, signatures, public key generation, prime number factorization, elliptic curves etc...) and the mathematics behind it with pen and paper.
Bitcoins cryptography isn't complicated. In fact, it is build on the very foundational building blocks of cryptography. The magic about Bitcoin also is in this very fact that it was build so elegantly on these classics.
I am happy to hear that. Although I wonder if there is a difference between looking at the code and understanding how it works ... and
being able to fix it/upgrade it.
This was the opinions of Aaron van Wirdim an Nvk in a recent bitcoin.review at least.
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Let me put it like this: Few people know very deeply how the Bitcoin code works. But if the core developers were to onboard a new person there would be millions of coders/engineers/architects that could onboard into the team and become a fully fletched member.
Or let me put it another way: Onboarding a new person into Bitcoin-core shouldn't be substantially harder than Apple onboarding a new person for the Training App on Apple Watch.
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Nice description of foundational elegance.
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