Why funding open source is NOT philanthropy with Pavlenex | SLP734
@pavlenex, Bitcoin open source contributor, joins me to discuss why funding builders matters, how open source projects evolve, and what’s new with Stratum V2 & BTCPay Server.
Timestamps:
(00:00) - Intro
(01:09) - Open source is not philanthropy
(05:07) - Reaction to @MARAFoundation_’s initiative
(06:40) - Stages of open source projects
(11:51) - The necessity of economic incentives
(16:42) - AI's impact on open source contributions
(19:48) - “Upstream decisions, downstream impact”
(24:33) - Open source as a complement to R&D
(28:46) - Navigating corporate funding & control
(31:14) - Identifying & supporting the right projects
(35:56) - Directed grants vs Open grants
(39:55) - The importance of supporting open source
(42:41) - Updates on @StratumV2
(47:02) - Updates on @BtcpayServer
(48:47) - What is the Samrock protocol for BTCPay?
We’re surprised @in3rsha couldn’t think of educators and advocates who have publicly praised his work, but maybe that’s exactly the problem: many of us took it for granted.
We’ve run multiple educational programs, host 900+ bitcoin tech learners in our Discord, and Learn Me A Bitcoin has always been an obvious go-to resource.
And we’re not alone. We’ve collaborated with, or had visibility into, programs and communities run by @ChaincodeLabs, @btrust_builders, @libdesatoshi, @bitshala_org, @Bitcoin_Devs, and @summerofbitcoin, and Learn Me A Bitcoin is so complete, unique, and thoughtful that people naturally find it, share it, and bring it into their own study paths, often before we even need to recommend it ourselves.
So here’s the urge: if Greg’s awesome explainers and diagrams helped you or your community, say it publicly. Work like this deserves more appreciation.
@andrewfenton@gladstein The EIP-1559 fee burn and transition to proof-of-stake were both heavily promoted as surefire ways of increasing monetary soundness so that ETH could NGU enough to flippen BTC.
You literally hard forked just to troll?
Three years of working with fellow bitcoiners to understand what they need to build V2 of Bringin
The intent is simple: to allow you to move money into self-custody and use it anywhere in the world.
Starting from Europe. Soon for the entire🌎
Win for us is simple: EU bitcoiners saying- this is exactly what I was looking for - hope you feel that way when you explore this app!
Wallet of Satoshi POS (our Point of Sale app for businesses) is getting an upgrade.
Soon, any POS currently using a custodial Wallet of Satoshi address will stop accepting payments.
To keep accepting Bitcoin, just set up a self-custody Wallet of Satoshi address. It only takes a minute.
Why?
Global government reporting requirements for custodial services keep getting worse. Rather than collect your data, we’re moving POS to something better:
⚡ Self-custody
🔒 More private
🌍 Available globally
The technology is ready, and we think this is a better future for Bitcoin payments.
Thanks for accepting Bitcoin with Wallet of Satoshi!
11/ Get money addresses for every use case.
→ [email protected] — receive Bitcoin, zaps, donations. From 1 sat.
→ [email protected] — merchant doesn't accept Bitcoin? Send to your .card address, spend on your Visa instantly.
One address. Both the rails.
A few days ago I wrote that disruption from below is the fate that awaits the big AI inference providers.
This analysis, which I think is sound, strongly reinforces that projection. The upward pressure on costs is inexorable. But the harder the big providers push to recover a viable revenue stream, the stronger the incentive gets for their customers to bail out.
By "bail out" I mean buying on-premises AI engines that sacrifice some of the speed and capability of frontier models in return for giving customers better control over their future inference costs.
This is an absolutely classic setup for disruption from below. Because both the expensive frontier models and the cheap low-end models are going to keep getting better.
As I pointed out before, at some point the cheap low-end models will get good enough and the bottom will fall out of the cloud inference market. With the cloud inference providers desperately raising their prices rather than lowering them, the jaws of that trap will close faster.
Run a @BTCPayServer shop with Bitcoin arriving directly on your phone!
@BullBitcoin_ Wallet 6.10 now supports the SamRock Protocol. UX:
1. Install the SamRock plugin on your BTCPay
2. Install the BULL wallet on your mobile device
3. Scan a QR code
4. Done
Silent payments aren't just about privacy. They also make addresses far more secure and usable because they enable human readable addresses: https://t.co/UStkPcAL5M
Update on my latest IBD: I ran it again, this time with assumevalid 0 turned on. I went to bed before it finished last night, but snapped this screenshot right before bed.
It took a little over a day to do a full sync on a five year old laptop.
The spam didnt hurt IBD at all.
Peak Apathy.
My latest piece is out for @_checkonchain subscribers, and we have a special treat.
Today I build ontop of a terrific work @SullyMichaelvan has done measuring Bitcoiner sentiment, and overlay where onchain data corroborates, or diverges.
https://t.co/FHJ3uboXVd
1/ Most El Salvador content online is written for single guys moving to Bitcoin country.
We view EL Salvador through the lens of family - with our toddlers and retired parents.
Here's everything — for families. 🧵
Claiming that a thing which greatly improves a privacy issue is not a privacy improvement because it doesn't improve other privacy issues, besides the one that it actually greatly improves, is retarded.
Unsurprisingly, this new nonsense wave mostly comes from Monero shitcoin scammers, notoriously very bad at logic.
The reason agents are so good at Linux is that all 40 million lines of kernel code was part of the pre training. Along with every other open source dependency. This really does make every obscure error message shallow, and the system completely malleable.
Between the users of Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Cash App, and more, there are approximately 900M users with the ability to pay a lightning invoice.
Lightning has won.
This is a fantastic post about why jobs aren’t going away in the way some predict. We are constantly making the mistake of confusing task completion with AI with being able to eliminate the whole job.
Even as we can automate one or many tasks within a job, the definition of the job almost inevitably just expands to do vastly more of those tasks, do them at a higher quality, or move on to the type of task that hasn’t been automated yet.
And as a result of being able to do more of the tasks or at a higher quality level, the job becomes valuable in a new way. And in many cases for now an entirely new audience as well.
This will be true for coding, legal work, sales, or marketing. The small business or non-tech company that wants to now take on larger software projects finally can, and they’ll hire to do so. The small business that couldn’t afford a full marketing agency can hire or contract out to a marketer that can do as much as an agency did before now with agents. And so on.
Don’t fall into the trap of confusing tasks with jobs.