Working in education affords me the opportunity to meet lots of prospective contributors who are eager to contribute to Bitcoin. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal does an excellent job describing the dynamics of large-scale open-source projects and Bitcoin Core suffers from many of the challenges and extractive contributions captured in the book. Recently, I was talking with Jarol, an up-and-coming prospect, on how to add value to the project. It’s a natural first reaction for new contributors to feel the urge to fire up their text editor and open a pull-request. Writing code feels creative and getting code merged into Bitcoin Core delivers a dopamine hit that can keep a contributor chasing for a long time. From what I’ve observed, the best way to make an immediate impact on Bitcoin Core only has one road to success. Review.

Article posted 9 months ago