1336 sats \ 12 replies \ @sn OP 29 Sep 2023 \ on: Stacker News Roundtable #1 - Building on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Culture, and More bitcoin
Question #2: What steps are each of you taking to attract new Bitcoin builders to your respective projects? Are you constrained by the talent pool of Bitcoin builders today?
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We can post a job description and get hundreds of the most qualified people within hours. This is because we are working on bitcoin and have a strong mission. Bitcoin is a cheat code for recruiting.
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There are primarily two sets of bitcoin users we attract. Those that call themselves 'bitcoiners' that typically live on bitcoin twitter and those that have no idea about 'bitcoiners' or bitcoin twitter and just want a better way to increase their spending power and savings. The first group is numbers in the thousands, the second group numbers in the hundreds of millions.
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We aim to make bitcoin valuable people today by using the properties that already make bitcoin successful-- a savings technology that can increase purchasing power and accelerate/protect savings.
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This is because we are working on bitcoin and have a strong mission. Bitcoin is a cheat code for recruiting.
Does that cheat code also translate into better employee retention for Bitcoin companies?
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From our experience, yes. I could count the number of people that voluntarily left our company on three fingers.
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I think most students to date to come to a Base58 class (particularly ones out side the bitcoin ecosystem already) have been through someone talking about Base58 on a podcast. If you're a podcaster, please keep talking about Base58 classes on your podcast. Thank you for your service.
To some extent the ordinals/inscription run has seen a lot of new builders pouring into the space. I also see new hires to bitcoin engineering orgs as a place for growth, as well as long time bitcoiners who just want to learn more about how bitcoin works.
So no, I don't find things particularly constrained; I think we could probably go a long way on just upskilling + educating existing bitcoiners on how bitcoin works.
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I think it isn't the attraction -- its the repulsion.
A brilliant developer wants to build. They would love nothing more, than the ability to create something beautiful, from scratch. That's actually the problem with the best devs -- they insist on doing everything themselves. They hate working with code that they don't understand; and for them writing code takes about as long as reading it anyway (or so they think).
So, in order to attract the greatest builders to a project, they need nothing more or less than complete freedom to do whatever they like. This is exactly what Bip300 allows -- users can change anything about the blockchain that they like: the blocksize, the dependencies, even the programming language. All they need to do is follow the Bip300 rules, and coins will travel back and forth between their project and L1 Bitcoin.
To facilitate this, we have minimal sidechains released. They work perfectly but they don't do anything. The idea is a developer will fork them and add whatever they like.
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I think it isn't the attraction -- its the repulsion.
Repulsion to the stasis of the bitcoin protocol?
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It is very unlikely that a new genius developer, would know how to navigate the political landscape.
They would probably come in and redo everything from scratch -- everyone would tell them to get lost, and they would. This is what happened to Vitalik for example https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=431513.0 even though he was a longtime writer for Bitcoin Magazine.
I am not a believer in Vitalik's idea -- but no one serious tried to help him implement it on Bitcoin. So it is with many Bitcoin ideas.
Building on Bitcoin, or even getting new Bitcoin merchant adoption, has fallen out of favor.
You will get support if you "build on lightning" but that is frankly part of the problem -- it reduces creativity by funneling people all into one narrow sub-field of Bitcoin.
It isn't True Creativity unless your invention will put dozens of other people out of a job.
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They would probably come in and redo everything from scratch -- everyone would tell them to get lost, and they would.
This rings so true! In this framing, bip300 is an outlet for those people and it would seem beneficial to provide an outlet for them.
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I strongly believe that the ordinals movement (which we joined with Taproot Wizards, but in no way started) is the single movement that attracted the most new Bitcoin builders this year.
I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to new builders every single day who are making their first steps in the ecosystem, building new wallets, self-custodial marketplaces, new sidechains, zero-knowledge research, truly at the forefront of bitcoin innovation. I’m incredibly bullish on these guys.
Are you constrained by the talent pool of Bitcoin builders today?
I think that comes down to how you define ‘Bitcoin builders’. We’ve seen a ton of interest from developers and entrepreneurs who made their first steps in other ecosystems like ethereum/solana/etc, and decided to jump into ordinals. They had some catching up to do at first, but we’re 1 year into this at this point, and today I feel confident to say they’re some of the most skilled bitcoin builders I’ve ever met.
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I strongly believe that the ordinals movement (which we joined with Taproot Wizards, but in no way started) is the single movement that attracted the most new Bitcoin builders this year.
This certainly seems true anecdotally. Why do you think ordinals had this impact when sound money didn't?
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Why do you think ordinals had this impact when sound money didn't?
Sound money doesn’t look very attractive when it loses 50% of its value :)
I think that narrative clearly attracted a lot of people in 2021-2022, and probably would again if/when we see another raging bull market. But when the markets are slow, new usecases tend to do more to ignite people’s imagination than just talking about stagnating prices
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