You’ve heard the phrase “follow the money” or the related phrase “cui bono” (to who’s benefit). Once you understand how the value flows, you understand the deeper “why” something is happening. With this, you can extrapolate and predict the future, which is what all of our brains are trying to do all the time. I’d like to add another phrase for your consideration: “follow the talent”. Once you understand where all the intellectual capital is flowing, you’ll be able to predict where technology and thus society is moving. If you followed the talent in the 70’s and 80’s, you’d have predicted the rise of the internet, email, and the tech startup scene in general. Right now, there’s no question: Bitcoin is attracting tons of talent in the form of developers, miners, node runners, and intellectuals. Regardless of how you feel about Bitcoin, if you care at all about predicting major societal shifts in the future, you should at least be curious.
Developers
When you talk to most people about Bitcoin, they’ll probably mention the price — is it up, is it down — but who cares? The price will come if Bitcoin works and people realize it’s the best money ever invented. A more informative signal than price is Bitcoin’s developer community. You want to look at:
how many people are contributing to the project
how often they make changes
how big are the changes
how many people “like” the project (on GitHub it’s called “star”)
how involved is the community with raising issues and submitting changes (pull requests).
It’s easy to see all of this for Bitcoin since it’s open source published on GitHub, as are most altcoins. You can see everything that everyone does, when they do it, how many people like the project, and so on.
GitHub has The Bitcoin repo has over 64.3k stars, which puts them at #63 in all of GitHub. For context, GitHub has over 100,000,000+ repos as of 2018. Bitcoin is beaten in stars by extremely popular projects like programming languages, common web frameworks, a machine learning tool called tensorflow, and, oh yeah, Linux, the thing that runs most of the internet. Rarified air, to be sure.
Bitcoin has over 32.5k forks, which is when someone makes a copy of the code, either as a way of bookmarking it or to make their own changes. This puts Bitcoin at #33 for all of GitHub. Again, it’s beaten by extremely popular stuff like Python, tensorflow, and Linux.
Bitcoin also super active.
In a single month, 36 people made 217 changes, merged in 138 suggestions, and closed 71 issues. Most tech startups don’t have 36 engineers, let alone the type of senior engineers working on Bitcoin, and this is just one month. The total number of contributors is over 100.
For comparison, here are stats on some altcoins:
ethereum - 37.5k stars, last commit was hours ago, to be expected from second biggest crypto project
dogecoin - 14k stars, which is decent, but last commit was Nov 2021, dead
monero - 7k stars, last commit 3 days ago, fairly active
litecoin - 4.1k stars, last commit ~2 months ago, kinda dead
Most people react more strongly to a visualization so I put together this video showing all the Bitcoin activity since it was created. You can even see Satoshi as s_nakamoto
early on in the video.
This is just focusing on Bitcoin — there are tons of developers working on wallets, Lightning, Bitcoin-related projects, and so on.
The Bitcoin Network
The Bitcoin network is composed of miners and node operators and every miner necessarily runs a node also. More nodes means more miners and people willing to run nodes . Here’s a graph showing the number of reachable nodes in the past 5 years:
This is only an approximation of the number of nodes on the network since some nodes aren’t reachable. They may broadcast and relay transactions from peers but can’t be connected to directly for survey. You can see the total number of nodes increased 50% from 10k to 15k starting around July 2021. And this is despite the fact that there is no strong incentive to run a node other than for mining and privacy.
Note the massive increase in nodes running on Tor’s onion network. It looks like the composition shifted slightly to Tor, but a lot of new nodes seem to be from the Tor group. I’m not sure why new nodes are specifically running Tor. It could be that hardware / software packages that make it easy to run nodes default to using Tor. It could be a change in Bitcoin made it easier to connect to Tor nodes. This is a long shot but it’s possibly driven by the desire for privacy. As I mentioned, the only “real” advantage to running your own node is that you can broadcast transactions through it instead of through someone else’s node which is a privacy risk.
One reason to be concerned about privacy is these are still early days and Bitcoin doesn’t represent a clear and present danger to government fiat monopoly. It’s unclear how governments react when their currencies either collapse or die slowly as Bitcoin offers a superior alternative. Things may get ugly, and a lot of people don’t want the monopoly on violence to know who has all the real money. Let’s not forget the united states government stole people’s gold in 1933 with executive order 6102. It’s not hard to imagine something like that happening again if government has a hard time funding all of its many wild expenditures with inflation.
Intellectuals
All of the best athletes in the united states go into football, baseball, and basketball because that’s where the money is, that’s what’s popular, and that’s what people want to watch. In the beginning, Bitcoin didn’t draw that many intellectual heavy hitters, but it certainly does now. When I first started, I only had two main sources of information:
Now there’s:
Michael Saylor — has bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin based on extremely sound philosophical principals
Lyn Alden — does investment research, writes very clever things about Bitcoin
Robert Breedlove — lays a lot of great philosophical and moral foundations for why Bitcoin is great
Bitcoin Magazine — held a Bitcoin conference in Miami, Florida with ~30k people, tons of great articles
Nic Carter — another clever Bitcoin proponent, investor, researcher
Marty Bent — Bitcoin miner, has some amazing arguments why Bitcoin mining is good for the energy grid
Dozens of other writers, thinkers, YouTubers, podcasters that I just don’t happen to listen to only because there’s not enough time in the day
Every top tier intellectual outside of Bitcoin such as Jordan Peterson are being asked to have an opinion about Bitcoin. They’re starting to take it seriously.
There’s also a small but growing number of academic papers written around Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. For example, there’s Ledger, which is a journal dedicated specifically to cryptocurrency.
Wrapping this Up
A fish doesn’t know its wet because it lives its entire life in the water. Similarly, most people have never thought about what money is or why their government gets to decide when to print more and whom to give it to. I suspect this covid-lockdown-induced depression we’re heading into is going to get a lot of people frustrated and some of them will scratch their heads and look around for theories to explain why gas and food are so expensive. They’re going to find meme’s like Money Printer Go Brrr:
Memes like this do a great job of cutting through intentionally obscure jargon like inflation, quantitative easing, monetary policy, etc. People see this meme and realize it really is that simple: the government is robbing them, they can’t really vote for it, and it enables massive corruption. If people dig into the theory a bit, they find that prices are information, and manipulating the price of money distorts the system, leads to mal-investment, and ultimately creates the boom and bust cycles. Until Bitcoin, there was no resource apart from violence. Competition is a good thing. It keeps everyone honest. Bitcoin is the competition. You can vote for it by exiting fiat and buying Bitcoin. It’s that easy.
Even if you knew nothing about Bitcoin or you were a certified hater, the amount of brainpower devoted to this thing demands you at least pay attention. This is what the beginning of a revolution looks like. Don’t get left behind.