#98 5 conferences
We live, we learn, we scale.
I’ve been back from BTC Prague for a week, the last of my five planned conference visits for the first half of this year. Overall, it was a great thing to do. I learned a ton, met lots of friendly and interesting people, and had many valuable conversations. It was fun and also very much helped me get better at what I do in various ways. I am also glad that the next months will be a bit more quiet so I can catch up projects and do the work. Let’s take a quick look back.
The only non-bitcoin conference I attended, this one is about how open-source works - what makes them flourish. Attendees were people who organize and manage open-source initiatives from many different corners of the tech world. It was very valuable to hear how open-source works elsewhere and how organizers go about and think about their work.
A big topic were Open-Source Program Offices (OPOS), which are departments within companies that manage how open-source is being used (see the examples of Mercedes, Munich and CERN). There is a blueprint for how companies can work with open-source, which I don’t think is broadly known.
I can highly recommend this one if you are in an organizational role in open-source.
A very technical conference, this was my second year of attending. I helped out with the LDK hackathon, and otherwise tried to absorb as much as possible about what bitcoin developers are cooking up, like BitVM, FROST and Ark. With the recent discussions around scaling, I really wanted to understand how the things that are being worked on function. This was also a great chance to ask various people about their views on scaling.
This visit was similar to my goals with Advancing Bitcoin (which is more about the bitcoin network), but this time with the lightning network. What are people working on? How will this enable new or different behavior and software products? What can we do on the design side to help with adoption?
It became pretty clear that no one has all the answers. There is no clear scaling roadmap, no one I spoke with could lay one out with some amount of confidence (even just hypothetical). Part of it might be that people understand the term scaling differently. For some, it just means making the tech more efficient so it can do more. Or adding another network on top for extra capacity. For others, it doesn’t start from the technical side, but from the human side. They start with ideas like getting small amounts of bitcoin into the hands of people without access to financial infrastructure, and then look for tech that enables that. It’s a bit of a push and pull dynamic. To have a holistic scaling framework, you need to consider both approaches.
And of course there’s the discussion around self-custody. Do you really own bitcoin if you don’t personally hold the keys to your UTXOs? If we draw that strict line, is it even possible to allow the world’s population to be self-custodial (answer: no). Then what are we scaling? I gathered my thoughts on all this stuff in a presentation I held at BTC Prague, which I re-recorded and am embedding right below. I’ll probably continuously update the slides as I learn more.
While I understand that it is a hard problem, I do think it is necessary to have a framework to guide decisions and have the most impact. And if it’s hard to pick one, you can just have two or three and think through those, and adjust over time.
I had heard a lot of great things about the forum, and the experience absolutely lived up to the hype. It just really leaves an imprint on you when you hear about all those human rights problems around the world, directly from people who face them day-in-day-out. One of the tools used by many authoritarians is financial oppression, something that bitcoin can help with in some aspects. Then you have various broken financial systems that very poorly serve people. There are real use cases and needs here that bitcoin can uniquely address. I hope we can have a bigger impact in the community in that regard.
The main reason for attending BTC Prague was that we helped organize the design track at dev/hack/day again. There’s a a short summary and photos in the latest community newsletter.
It was super cool to have four recipients of foundation grants there. Even if we’re only giving small grants at the moment, it made the foundation activity so much more real. Everyone got along super well, had a lot of fun at the conference, and almost everyone presented and got to share what they are working on.
Alright, as I mentioned above, it was very worthwhile to attend the conferences. I also got worn out towards the end as they can be quite intense, and others felt the same way - too much of a good thing. I also fell behind on various project contributions, and I don’t like it when work slows down because of me.
So now it’s back to the day-to-day, and the last week meant a lot of catching up. I’ll probably need another 1-2 weeks to be fully back on top of everything, and it will require quite some discipline.
It’s Monday morning, so I’ll get right to it now. Here’s one more video about an ( already outdated) Bitcoin Core App wallet selector design.
Peace & democracy.
✌️