A Defense of Having Fun (and maybe staying poor)

Hi Devs,

Today's post is a little more philosophical and less technical. Based on the private feedback I received (from >1 persons, perhaps surprisingly) I'll continue to syndicate the remaining posts to this list.

Here it is: https://rubin.io/bitcoin/2021/12/14/advent-17/

To having a little fun every now and again, as a treat,

Jeremy

Hi Jeremy,

> Eugene just dropped a project he’s been working on, and it’s really freakin’ cool. He basically implemented a human v. chess engine in Solidity that mints beautiful interactive NFTs of representations of the contract’s internal states.

Not sure why NFT is involved here but experiment looks interesting. Maybe Eugene should try few things on Lightning as well: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-December/019619.html

> Why isn’t Eugene working on Bitcoin?

There can be many reasons however Eugene can answer this question better.

> Working on Bitcoin is can be fun. But mostly it’s not. My post yesterday? Theone describing new techniques to make Bitcoin more decentralized? I had a lotof fun writing it. And then someone claimed that my work is “very dangerous” toBitcoin.

I don't support what someone said about you in IRC however people do say crazy things online which has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be different things for everyone.

> Bitcoin development has a bit of a burnout problem, with multiple contributors stepping down their engagement recently. A likely cause is the struggle it takes to ship even the smallest features, not to mention the monumental effort it takes to ship a single large project.

I am not sure if this is the reason for people who will be less active in Bitcoin development now. And its a part of life, people will come and go. Show must go on. There will always be another developer who is more passionate and got more ideas to contribute. Funding in open source projects is an issue which exists outside Bitcoin as well and it is being addresses by several individuals and organizations.

> It’s hard to tell people, especially younger folk just entering the space, to work on Bitcoin full-time. What I say is as follows:

It is hard but not impossible. I tried recently in a meetup in India. Ethereum is not the answer to all the problems in the worlds. If someone has issues with Bitcoin development, they can be solved.

> I don’t think I’m going to convince you here to care about NFTs. But I am –hopefully – going to convince you to care about NFTs the phenomenon.

To be honest, its the trend right now and people care about it to get rich. There is nothing new or innovative about it.

> For example, scaling challenge in Ethereum have led to the development of Zero Knowledge Roll-Ups, privacy issues things like Tornado Cash, and more.

Rollups are memes and there are several articles, threads, research etc. to read about this. Most of their implementations are not even decentralized. Tornado Cash is not good privacy and even became worse after their governance token.