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247 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Mar \ on: Bob Burnett interviews Jon Atack bitcoin

Interesting background. Is Gateway still around? I remember considering buying a computer from them once, but never ended up doing it. (Forgot who I went with ultimately).

The most interesting part of the conversation to me was about the world where we have multiple bitcoin implementations. Burnett (formerly the CTO of Gateway) makes the analogy to the personal computing industry circa the early 2000s. He suggests that personal computing was similar to Bitcoin, with each PC company (Gateway, Dell, Toshiba, etc) needing to maintain a loose consensus around PC designs so that things like USB or other standards could be adopted and utilized across the industry.

There's always gonna need to be a social consensus of some kind. No way around it.

Another interesting thing Atack points out is that there is grant money available for developers who are interested in working on alternative implementations to Core, but mostly there has been a lack of qualified applications

That's fascinating. Did they say if it was because everyone wants to work on Core, or because there's a general lack of developer interest in Bitcoin at all?

I'm kinda afraid the answer is the latter. AI is probably sucking all the air out of the room for anything computer related

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389 sats \ 0 replies \ @sedited 18 Mar

From my perspective it is the latter. There have been some significant recruitment efforts this year again, and so far not much has materialised from them. The project is not in a terrible place manpower wise either, it managed to attract some great talent the past few years. It is clearly getting harder to get new graduates to be interested in it, and with the past decade it has spent on the market already, many established developers that would be interested in it, are already captured in its orbit, or moved on to other things.

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68 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 18 Mar

Check out 1:56:00 or so

ATACK: but the the problem is not that that there isn't funding from say open s to fund not developers. It's just that there have not been any applications to fund not developers by someone who was good. Fair enough. I I don't recall seeing one, but apparently there was one that wasn't very good that I hadn't seen. So um and core is also currently having a problem. I have been led to understand that the developer pipeline has also dried up. Maybe Bitcoin is not it anymore. Maybe AI is the hotness. But core hasn't seen a lot of new people coming in. Not there hasn't haven't been any applications. Funding is there.
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104 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Mar

Perhaps it's good if Bitcoin isn't the "hotness".

I wouldn't want the developers of Core to be interested in it because it's a good career move or looks good on a resume.

Yes, that probably means fewer applicants, and less qualified applicants. But for something that has a certain ideology attached to it, I do prefer devs that are somewhat more ideologically motivated.

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