This is an update for the past 3 weeks, which have been very busy. First I went to FOSS backstage, a conference about what makes open-source projects flourish. Most people there were involved on organizing open-source communities & events, foundations & boards, open-source funds, OSPOs, and similar. Talk recordings are live, some really interesting ones there. You could tell that everyone really cares about what they do, so there was a really good energy throughout. Mo and I also got to meet a couple of local bitcoiners while we were there which was nice.
Then last week I was at Advancing Bitcoin. Also a super good audience full of interesting and friendly people, a nice setting and lots of good talks. I also helped a bit with the LDK hackathon. Plus, there was a BitDevs (first one I’ve been to) and a Bitcoin London Meetup. Ark and BitVM were the interesting topics for me, since I’d like to understand what type of products and user experiences they might enable in the future.
I can’t say enough good things about these conferences. Huge props to the organizers. Both the learnings and the personal connections are very meaningful.
Other great things that happened were our announcement of the first grant of the Foundation to Erik for this work on eNuts & Cashu, and also our second big donation after Spiral from the Human Rights Foundation. Several more grants are in the discussion phase, and fundraising continues. Lots of communication and ops activities happening there behind the scenes.
Another nice update is that we have 3 projects and 4 mentors for Summer of Bitcoin. I like the projects we identified and I think it’s great to offer those opportunities to students. We heard from several of them now that their Summer of Bitcoin involvement helped them find jobs afterwards.
The page about human-readable addresses is finally up as a pull request, and there has been some good feedback. It is a little more tricky to respond to as it’s not just about typos or wording, but the actual proposal, which itself is very new and there are some aspects that split the minds.
Something I briefly looked into is how we might let users choose between different lightning service providers. What information do users need to make an intelligent decisions? How can services present themselves well? The same is likely needed for Ecash mints and Ark ASPs eventually, maybe also swap providers and other services. Just an input field for a URL is not enough, IMHO, to establish a trusted relationship with a service provider.
But overall, despite this being a 3-week update, I didn’t get to do a ton of hands-on design and project work. My to-do list has increased quite a lot on that end, also because I was sick the past 2 days.
Next week are school holidays and we’re visiting family, and the week after I’ll head to the Tuscany LN summit, so I’ll work on a reduced basis. After that things will quiet down and I’m looking forward to being more focused on the hands-on work again. That list needs to shrink again.
Happy Friday. You’re the best.
✌️