I think bitcoin infrastructure and tools need to be free open-source as that is a prerequisite to a fair, neutral global money. However, I don't see why businesses and services that adopt bitcoin as the medium of exchange need to avoid charging money or trying to create vendor lock in. IMO it will be business as usual competing in the market place by offering the best product to the right set of customers. Bitcoin factors into this by simply offering a unique new form of money that likely unlocks to customer bases and new types of services.

This can be challenging. The nominal Spiral grant is $100k for 12 months. We also support developers getting additional grants from other funders as long as it is for the same project/work, and HRF, Gemini, and others have done this before.

There also may be full-time opportunities at some companies that allow you to work on FOSS bitcoin, although typically that is in conjunction with working on a commercial product.

[Here's[(https://twitter.com/moneyball/status/1558840214545731584) my attempt at steel manning the PoS argument.

I personally think it is a good and healthy thing to have both PoW and PoS systems that are well developed and experimented with, as the 2 systems have distinct characteristics. But I strongly believe PoW is the key invention of Satoshi and critical to deliver bitcoin's unique properties, and PoS makes the wrong tradeoffs for a global money that is fair and neutral to all participants.

I think this debate is a trap and is useless. We should ignore it totally. I really do not understand why @moneyball bring it on. Maybe just to tease shitcoiners or stir the shit?

Most founders I talk to say 1 dev -> 2 devs yields 1.5x output. I suspect dev output scales logarithmically with the number of devs, ie every dev reduces the output of all the others, until you start adding managers.

Communication just scales really poorly so it makes sense from that perspective. If you have N devs, there are N(N−1)/2 relationships.

It depends on whether they're working on LNURL or bolt12 ;-)

Stacker News of course! :) I really like what Stakwork is trying to do too.

There are also a group of folks working on an LSP spec which, combined with the maturity of the LSP market, should really help mobile wallet developers.

I spend most my time thinking about mobile wallets, so my answer will be biased toward that. Some things that can help include:

Certainly need more developers. But I actually think at this point the marginal value of 1 more PM would provide more value, as a great PM can unlock a lot of untapped value in a project that already has multiple developers. When I use PM in this context, I'm referring to what I'd call a "decentralized PM," a person who helps a FOSS project get more organized, coordinate between other related projects, helps recruit more developers to the project, helps find designers to help the project, creates a plan to grow adoption of the project, and speaks to users of the project to learn more about their needs.

I think my time at Google helped prepare for open-source PMing. When I PM'd at Google (at least back when I was there), my team had developers all of the world, and developers held most of the power. I learned how to build credibility with the developers as well as build relationships with other functions including legal, marketing, business development, and external partners. At no point did I have authority over anyone or any decision, but I was able to identify stakeholders, listen to their needs, and help develop an overall plan that people bought into.

These same skills are crucial in FOSS projects particularly bitcoin. For any aspiring FOSS PMs out there, my advice is to build relationships with folks and learn what motivates them and what is important to them. It then just becomes a matchmaking problem where when a problem arises, you know who likely needs to be involved to solve it (often cross-project and cross-company), and often the people will organically come together to solve the problem. These ephemeral Team Bitcoin projects are one of the coolest things about working on bitcoin.

Generally speaking I've always had dozens of mini-projects going on simultaneously, so if one of them gets blocked (for whatever reason), it is easy enough to pick up another important project and make progress on it.

There remain major issues with UX, security, privacy, and scaling. I think most UX, security, and privacy issues have known solutions, many of which are actively being worked on. Given some of these changes require modifications to the spec itself, then the LN implementations, and then the wallets, this is a multi-year development roadmap. However, in a 5 year timeframe, I expect LN-enabled bitcoin wallets to offer an excellent UX with good security and privacy. My biggest concern at this point is that it "only" scales a few orders of magnitude over on-chain bitcoin, and if we want to offer the benefits of bitcoin to the entire planet, and possibly machine-to-machine as well, we'll need to innovate our way to that. Or, worst case, LN will just complement other systems that have different tradeoffs, such as Fedimint.

I've been really impressed by Jack and the Block organization that they've held true to their word, 3 years later, of never telling us what to do. They've trusted us to do the right thing for bitcoin.

I think the value Spiral has already delivered not only benefits all of bitcoin, but has clear benefit to the company itself. I'd strongly encourage other large companies in the space to create similar types of organizations as it seems like a no-brainer. You can invest far less than 1% of a company's R&D budget in such an org in order to meaningfully accelerate bitcoin's adoption, and if bitcoin succeeds, the organization is in a much stronger position than if it were simply standing on the sidelines the entire time.

hi

I really like what the team at Block is building. They're prioritizing improving recovery and creating more peace of mind for mainstream users. I don't think the current suite of products are well-suited to normal folks.

Taproot will be a part of the solution to improving self custody. I think there is room for much more experimentation with social recovery. And inheritance too.

There's been tremendous progress the past 10 years for self custody, but I believe we'll see even more progress the next 10 years. The UX and security will become so good that the question will flip from "Why would I self custody?" to "Why would I trust a 3rd party?"

Here's our criteria. Happy to answer any more specific questions.

I've generally found the bitcoin community to be supportive of Spiral (and Block), which I've been really happy to see. So perhaps it has to do with how large organizations approach funding and engaging the open-source bitcoin development community.

That finding and training developers is harder than finding $$$ for support. Both of course matter and more money is needed from new funders, but FOSS bitcoin devs are hard to find. Not only do they need to know how to code, they need to be passionate enough about bitcoin to want to work on open-source bitcoin, and they need to be able to "be their own boss" by defining their own projects, manage their time well, and be able to self-motivate. It is a rare breed, and we're lucky to have those that are doing it.