Vinteum's 3 Year Report highlights the importance of in-person collaboration, meetups, and retreats.

Do you think online collaboration will ever get to a point of parity with in-person gatherings?

Online collaboration has improved a lot and it’s absolutely necessary. Bitcoin would not exist as a global project without it. Asynchronous communication, code review, and open-source tooling already work remarkably well for day-to-day progress.

That said, I don’t think online collaboration reaches parity with in-person gatherings when it comes to trust-building, mentorship, and deep alignment. In-person time compresses things that would otherwise take months: context transfer, informal learning, and the kind of high-bandwidth conversations that rarely happen in public channels.

There’s also something hard to replicate online: unplanned, informal conversations. Some of the most valuable insights don’t come from scheduled meetings or agenda-driven sessions, but from side discussions over meals, walks, or late nights, where people connect ideas across projects or question assumptions in a low-pressure setting.

This is exactly why we’ve been investing so much in in-person work. Recently, we hosted a retreat for the DIY open-source hardware signer community, and another one bringing together the Floresta team and close collaborators. We’re also organizing upcoming retreats for Stratum V2 teams and other Bitcoin infrastructure projects. These are small, focused groups, intentionally designed around working together rather than “events.”

Having a physical home for this matters too. Casa21 gives us a place where people can drop in, spend days or weeks together, and let those informal conversations happen naturally, not just during scheduled sessions.

What I consistently see is that people leave these gatherings with a much stronger mental model of each other and of the codebase. That translates directly into better online collaboration afterward. Reviews get faster, discussions get more charitable, and people are more willing to ask or answer naive questions because there’s already a human relationship in place.

I don’t think it’s an either-or. The most effective model is hybrid. In-person gatherings act as a catalyst that strengthens online collaboration, rather than replacing it. A few days together can set the tone for months or years of remote work.

So while online collaboration will keep getting better, I see in-person time as a force multiplier, not something that gets obsoleted.