Bitcoin Forum

Let's see. Bitcoin now has a $10 billion market cap.

And 1 (one) paid developer.

Does anyone else see a big problem with this?  I mean, if Bitcoin were a private company with a $10 billion market cap, it would have dozens of the worlds top developers and they would be getting nice salaries.

This is where open source has its biggest weakness - the ability to move forward and adapt swiftly.

But, not to digress, I simply want to know why there aren't more brilliant full time developers being brought on board. Bitcoin should be able to attract some of the best and brightest. As long as they are paid.

What am I missing here?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204283.0

https://blog.conformal.com/btcd-not-your-moms-bitcoin-daemon/

http://bitsofproof.com/?page_id=343

Thanks. Help me understand what I am looking at though. Are these independent developers who are submitting things to Gavin for approval? Or are they working separately.

Of course, I may not fully understand Gavin's role. I was under the impression that all changes to the core bitcoin code went through him.

The "core bitcoin code" is just one implementation out of about half a dozen.

So the "core bitcoin code" only serves certain set functions? And the others are built on top of or beside it to serve other functions? These work together? Or separately?

You should know that Bitcoin is a decentralized system and an open source project. There is no one entity to hire lots of people to work on it. The Bitcoin Foundation pays Gavin and a few others, but if it has to take full development of the infrastructure on it, that would be a failure of the underlying premise (and would be politically dangerous, creating a single point of failure).

People and companies that profit from Bitcoin could hire their own devs. If you think there should be more devs, maybe you could learn Bitcoin development yourself and/or pool resources to hire one.

I believe, and hope, that a lot of development is going on independently in the background, some of which we won't see or hear for a couple more years. After which there will be an explosion of software and applications. Look at how the smartphone and in particular apps exploded forth. It won't happen over night so whatever bit you have should be stored for this future.

As more companies move into the bitcoin space you will see more paid bitcoin developers. The companies that already exist contribute to the code. When you see paypal get on board you will see them be very active in development as well.

Strictly speaking, open source is not mutually exclusive with a private company with a $10 billion market cap and dozens of the worlds top developers.
The Linux project for instance has thousands of developers, and many of those are excellent engineers. Same with Google, Red Hat, Intel, IBM and Facebook.

That said, I'm also a bit surprised that the reference implementations doesn't have more developers by now.