El Salvador!? Pretty cool! Are you there temporarily or maybe planing for residence...?

Country with Bitcoin as legal tender is very tempting...

How affordable longger-term rent there, if some expat would want to stay there for longer period (such as maximum allowed without residence)?

Any clues how beef, mutton are available/expensive?

Is it hard to speak with locals in English? Maybe you know some Spanish?

Thanks!

has the level of bitcoin adoption in el salvador exceeded, met, or fallen short of your expectations?

I'd also like to point out how incredibly safe I've felt in El Salvador so far: in El Zonte, in San Salvador, in El Tunco, in La Libertad, and in the mountains in Chiltiupian where I stayed and have been travelling around with a motorcycle. The usual caveats of privilege or naivete apply, but I've felt far more safe than in the US or many other countries. At Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte, which granted is an unusual area, it seems reasonable to leave the door unlocked where you are staying (say, in a shared house) and there are more local-style places some people stay at that don't have a door or any walls. One even hears about a bitcoiner who basically slept for a good while, for free, outside in a hammock near a volcano :). I haven't seen any petty crime yet, while being a fair number of times in a situation where one could take advantage of me, yet I've only experienced friendliness and kindness so far. I know a few young women who have been traveling solo all around the country without issues or being hassled. Maybe this is only a honeymoon phase, but it's impressive.

From what I've heard, this safety may have been a recent result of the mass arrests of the gangs -- I write this naively, as it's hearsay from locals. Most Salvadorians I've talked to are in favor and very happy with the change, though not all, as some of the people arrested were apparently innocent (locals speak of 10% arrested being innocent, some may have only been guilty of having a tattoo or being in the wrong place or with the wrong people at the wrong time, etc.), which may not be surprising given the way the arrests may have happened. Again, it's only what I hear from local people -- I don't know firsthand.

In the city (San Salvador), one sees private security men with guns protecting the businesses, and locals say they were necessary, at least until recently. I haven't noticed security like this in, say, El Zonte.

In any case, all the places I saw so far this past month, on foot or by motorcycle, seemed safe or very safe.

From my humble point of view, the best way is to look at, evaluate, code review and test the proposals to do so, as this is what seems to be the bottleneck that constrains progress.

I think it's worth mentioning that privacy is vital, but we nevertheless cannot trade off decentralization, censorship resistance or robustness for it.

Perhaps an under-appreciated way is user education.

One, use bitcoin in a direct peer-to-peer way as much as possible, and separate that use from any that involves CEX/KYC/AML gateways.

Two, in addition to not reusing addresses and other privacy practices that are described in https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy (highly recommended reading), my understanding is that not many node operators are running behind a VPN (from talking to people and from polling the audience at conference talks).

Three, fewer still are using alternative P2P networks like I2P with their nodes that could provide private peer connection redundancy when Tor isn't working well.

See https://jonatack.github.io/articles/using-alternative-p2p-networks-with-bitcoin-core for more.

Maybe that it doesn't involve writing code so much as reading and reviewing/testing and also mentoring/education. That what is most lacking (and perhaps needs to be incentivized more/better) is experienced and constructive review.

I think it's good to both (a) talk to users and affected parties (e.g. users, node operators, wallets, miners, bitcoin startups, LN implementations, etc.) and (b) have extensive experience using the software, at least in the area you are reviewing. There is always the danger of finding oneself siloed in an ivory tower.

Of course, you can still always review and test the PR in question to give feedback or report any issues or bugs found.

My first decade of professional software development was working in assembly language. I suppose that I like low-level fundamental work.

Agreed. Pull requests welcome.

Hm, if by weird we mean esoteric, some of the crypto primitives and math ones come to mind. Or the ones that drop down to assembly for optimization or improve our lock contention. I should look at more of those.

Article now finished.

In retrospect, given the current state, breadth and nuance of the -mempoolfullrbf discussion, I think it's fair to say that the PR25353 adding the config option would not have been merged. It was merged relatively quickly, following which we began to hear feedback from affected users and from the most experienced currently active Bitcoin Core developers who think the most deeply about these issues and who proposed reverting or postponing that change in various ways for reasons that I consider valid. To that end, it may have been wiser to release v24 without that controversial change. In general I believe Bitcoin Core should move slowly and carefully and when in doubt choose prudence.

Haven't read it, thanks! It will be interesting to see how things evolve in the coming 5-10 years. We live in...interesting times.

The freedom. The politics.

Great question. My advice is written in detail in my articles in https://jonatack.github.io/articles. I suggest starting with https://jonatack.github.io/articles/how-to-review-pull-requests-in-bitcoin-core.

Sure! I describe this process in detail in the articles in https://jonatack.github.io/articles and suggest starting with https://jonatack.github.io/articles/how-to-review-pull-requests-in-bitcoin-core.

I describe the process I went through in https://jonatack.github.io/articles/how-to-review-pull-requests-in-bitcoin-core and in https://youtu.be/Bduon80-4CE.

Wladimir van der Laan invited me to join the two GitHub teams (bitcoin and bitcoin-core) in early November 2019 after almost 8 months of contributing. IIRC I was the only addition to those teams in 2019.

Wladimir van der Laan's humble, intelligent, experienced, service-oriented, uplifting, tolerant, reluctant leadership style as lead maintainer of Bitcoin Core over a decade provided the original inspiration for me to consider returning to open source and working on Bitcoin Core. I think Wladimir is the gold standard and best example I have seen of open source maintainership that people can aspire to.

JS and React may well be in-demand skills for some startups or companies in the Bitcoin space. You’d have to check around (https://bitcoinerjobs.com, etc). Or perhaps there are open source projects that use those.

Bitcoin Core is in C++ (and in Python for the functional tests). I learned both languages in order to work on the project.

Like elsewhere, it varies a great deal, a lot of education is needed and it will take time.

I haven't looked at them yet. Generally, I look at a BIP in detail when reviewing a pull request to implement it in Bitcoin Core. Often, the spec ends up being updated or adjusted to the final form of the implementation, in a bottom-up fashion.

I'd recommend subscribing to the bitcoin-dev mailing list and to the Bitcoin Optech newsletters to follow the discussions.

There is the resources aspect, the technical know-how and understanding, and the education on why it is important. At least in Bitcoin Core, we can work on the first one or two.

I think an important aspect of work on Bitcoin Core itself is about minimizing resource needs to do IBD and run a node (and also improving documentation where needed) to help more people do that. Another is working to make the nodes run more robustly and help users' understanding. See this WIP article for an example: https://jonatack.github.io/articles/using-alternative-p2p-networks-with-bitcoin-core

I don't have an informed opinion on that. Maybe a combination of land, commodities, precious metals, and a couple of cryptos. I don't give these subjects much bandwidth at all though, nor do I trade, in order to focus on the work.

You're welcome!