#8 - The Summer of Bitcoin Experience
Open-source developer tools available for bitcoin developers, chat with SOB 2022 intern Adithya Vardhan, and best bitcoin jobs for freshers!
Hello Summer of Bitcoiner!
In the past editions, we have shared a ton of resources on understanding bitcoin. Once you’ve understood how bitcoin works, the next step as a bitcoin developer is to start building. There are numerous bitcoin developer tools that you can leverage to make your development cycle faster, better and smarter. Jameson Lopp, Co-Founder & CEO of Casa, has compiled important resources around bitcoin development tools.
Here is a comprehensive list:
Bookmark it!
Are you starting out in bitcoin today and want to learn how to build apps on the bitcoin blockchain?
Build On L2 (BOL2) is a community-led effort by contributors and companies building on Core Lightning and the Liquid Network. It's a space to connect with bitcoin builders, product managers, designers and developers through events and mentorship programs and learn from experts building the future of bitcoin.
Completely free and accessible, each layer-2 protocol has a respective community platform that will host activities including:
Localized hackathons
Virtual networking events
Project bounties and other incentive programs
International builder tournaments
Career development programs
Mentorship and coaching
AMAs with leading developers
Visit buildonl2.com to join the community and learn how to build killer apps on bitcoin.
Interview with Adithya Vardhan
We spoke with Adithya Vardhan, a 20-year old university student of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India and a Summer of Bitcoin 2022 intern who contributed to Alby. Adithya worked on Alby, which aims at bringing bitcoin payments to the web with in-browser payments and identity; he worked on refactoring the front-end for Alby as well as worked on batteries to introduce lightning payments to the web. We spoke in depth about the massive potential of the Lightning Network in areas of micropayments, streaming money and disrupting search engines. Spoiler alert: it's not ChatGPT.
Listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.
You can also watch a video of the conversation here.
Read the full transcript:
ADI SHANKARA: Welcome to the Summer of Bitcoin Experience. Tell us a bit about yourself.
ADITHYA VARDHAN: Hello, everyone. I'm Adithya, and I'm a fourth-year college student at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and pursuing Electronics and Instrumentation. I'm a front-end developer and I'm focused on building on the Lightning Network and hence on bitcoin. I participated in the Summer of Bitcoin last year in 2022. It has been a wonderful experience and I'm very excited to share it with you guys.
SHANKARA: Great! Let's talk about bitcoin - when was the first time you heard about it? What made you stumble down that bitcoin rabbit hole?
VARDHAN: I first came across bitcoin while scrolling through some random YouTube videos. It felt interesting to me how an anonymous person came out of nowhere and proposed a wonderful piece of software that solves the age-old problem of transacting without any intermediaries over the internet and then I started researching on my own, in other words, failed attempts to find the real Satoshi Nakamoto and then finally gave up and started learning more about the software he proposed instead - that was my orange pill moment!
SHANKARA: Why do you think it's important and why should we pay attention?
VARDHAN: Bitcoin is important and worth paying attention to because it's a potentially disruptive technology that could have a major impact on the financial industry, and also how we transact, we can finally transfer value through the internet without trusting any other third parties. And that can change things to a great extent, especially from the Lightning Network perspective, we now don't even have to wait for 10 minutes for smaller transactions. And now we seem to also have a solution for the blockchain trilemma, which basically states that we can only have two out of the three from decentralization, security and scalability.
SHANKARA: Interesting! Talk to us about your Summer of Bitcoin journey. When was the first time you heard about it? And what was your first impression?
VARDHAN: It was during the time of February; I was actually deciding what to do during the summer. And it was exactly the time when I received an email from Adi saying that he found my GSOC project interesting and that Summer of Bitcoin is also a similar program, but with open-source bitcoin organizations instead. So, the next moment I found myself going through the Summer of Bitcoin website and it felt like an amazing opportunity, because I already knew the benefits of open-source programs like these, and especially after GSOC that made me apply without any hesitation.
SHANKARA: Tell us about your experience with the application process and which organization you ended up choosing and why.
VARDHAN: The application process was a bit simpler for me because my application got fast tracked because of having prior experience in GSOC, and not just GSOC, if you guys have any strong rating on any coding platform or have participated in any other open-source programming equivalent to GSOC, you will be eligible to proceed directly to the next round, which is called as the proposal round. So, I entered the proposal round and basically you get the discord invite where you can find almost all the resources you need to get started. And there are channels for each participating organization to chat with them about maintenance and discuss the listed projects and also suggest new project ideas. In my case, I wanted to work on front-end issues because I was more inclined towards front-end development, but I didn't find any related project to that, so I went through all the GitHub repos of these organizations and found Alby to have more front-end issues to work on, so I discussed the same with the mentor of Alby and he happily agreed to that.
And out of all, I went with Alby because I felt like I was not yet ready for core bitcoin development in the beginning, and also front-end development, like I said, it was something that I'm really passionate about. So, I thought why not help the front-end of bitcoin projects while learning about it parallelly and that's what I did the entire summer because ultimately, you will have to learn the fundamentals of bitcoin to successfully work on a bitcoin project, regardless of whatever you're working on. So, I'm really happy with my decision to go with Alby because now I get to do both front-end development and also create meaningful impact for people by building a product on the Lightning Network.
SHANKARA: For those of you who don't know what Alby is could you just briefly say what it is?
VARDHAN: Alby is basically a browser extension, which runs on the Lightning Network. So basically, we all must be familiar with the UPI (Unified Payment Interface) IDs. In the bitcoin world, we have these lightning addresses. So, by using a lightning address, you can transact a value you can send and receive payments on this layer two network and if you guys don't know, Lightning Network is a layer two protocol built on top of bitcoin. So basically, it doesn't even require you to wait for 10 minutes to process every transaction because it's off chain, and then it goes on chain afterwards. Alby provides something like a basic browser extension for you to maintain all your wallets, basically different lightning addresses and also to send and receive payments.
SHANKARA: Right. And just to add to that, if you browse the web today, you know, it's very hard to make payments online, like it takes a couple of steps and needs you to interact with your banks, and things like that. And so that makes it very hard to make payments and especially micro payments, right if you want to, let's say send one cent or two cents to an article author because you liked the article. It's obviously impossible. There's a limit on the amount of money that you can send. And the reason is because it's going through multiple different intermediaries, it's going through the payment processor, then it's going through the banks and what not.
Instead, on the Lightning Network, you can literally do that level of micropayments without going through any intermediaries. And that's basically the power of what Lightning Network brings to the table as far as internet native payments is concerned.
SHANKARA: So Adithya tell us about the specific project idea that you worked on with Alby. And what were the benefits of that project?
VARDHAN: Sure. I worked on fixing front-end issues and also on improving the overall design, like from the front-end perspective. I initially started working on TypeScript refactorings. And then I started shifting slowly towards more important things. And I worked on improving the accessibility of this extension, and also implemented new user interfaces on various screens. And I also developed the wallet export feature which basically helps people with different lightning addresses to get the information of these lightning addresses that they have and also help smoothen the developer workflow by fixing bugs and other developer warnings. And then I started working on batteries for different websites. So batteries from an extension perspective are basically things which search for lightning addresses in the web pages. So basically, we search the DOM object, and then we find the lightning addresses there.
So what do we do with these lightning addresses? We send it to the extension and we help people tip. For example, let's say we have the website of an author with a famous book so this author can basically put a meta tag on his website with the lightning address and then this extension can find that and can show you that this person has a lightning address on his website, so you can send sats to him. So you can basically send value to him for the value he is providing. So basically, this tipping is a very important part of the work we're doing at Alby because this will enable something called value-for-value. So we are not just book authors, even podcasters can do the same with the podcast that they have on the websites. They can basically add this lightning as extension address to their podcast description and even blog bloggers can add this in their websites.
And basically, we are now adding value to the information that is being provided. And this is just one example of adding value to information. There are various ways of doing that. And this is actually very interesting because it has the potential to disrupt Google Search and it might be funny, but it is true because you can see many articles on the internet about the issue of Google Search - not the recent ones, which are based on ChatGPT because Google obviously has equivalent models, but I'm talking about the issue with people appending Reddit, IMDB, GitHub at the end of the search queries to find more relevant information instead of advertisements, because Google is starting to show more advertisements on certain things. So it is all because of the Page Rank algorithm used by Google which works similar to how research papers work, which basically work like, the more citations, the more valuable the research paper is, but in the context of search, it doesn't work well. So instead, we can go with a market rank, because this lists websites on their market value. And how can we get to know this value? We have to know this value in a marketplace, for example, like Reddit, Quora or Twitter, we have to go by the currency of these marketplaces, which in Reddit, it's upvote. And if it's a Twitter, it's a like; the one with more upvotes is of high quality, if we somehow unify it and try to list based on this market value, then we can get more relevant information in the search and we can rank things better, better than this SEO thing that we have, right?
So this paradigm shifting idea when combined with bitcoin's lightning network can do wonders because now we can have a unified measure of value across websites, and that is Satoshi. Satoshi is basically the smallest unit of bitcoin. And for scale, 100 million satoshi is equal to one bitcoin. So, it's not even that much, just like Adi said, basically not even equal to one cent, it's even less than that. And people can without any thought, contribute sats and can use it as a measure of the value - basically like upvotes or likes, and this can be used to measure the value and hence can be used to list websites while searching and this can help us find useful information faster. So, this is of course, an idea in the initial stages and can produce its own challenges, but challenges are opportunities for growth and success. There are so many interesting things that you can do here. That's why it's an important deal. And that's why I'm very happy working with Alby.
SHANKARA: That was brilliant! So, you actually touched on three breakthrough ideas that are enabled by Lightning Network, one is obviously something that we touched on which was micropayments on the web, without going to any intermediaries and something that happens instantaneously.
The second thing that you mentioned was the podcast ecosystem where it's not just a one-time tip that you can do on the Lightning Network, but you can also literally stream money to the podcaster as you're listening to their episodes. So that is obviously something that is simply impossible with the traditional financial system. And the third thing that you said was how, with bitcoin and lightning, enabling a native currency of the internet, that actually helps us evaluate websites across the board and can be potentially disruptive to how we do web search, and how this can be disruptive to Google Search itself. Awesome.
SHANKARA: Tell us about your mentor you worked with. One of the co-founders of Alby. How was your experience working with him?
VARDHAN: My mentor was Michael Bumann. He is the co-founder and CEO of Alby, and he has tons of experience in the field of software development. He has more than 20 years of experience in this field. And I was also mentored by Hannes, who is again, an experienced front-end developer at Alby. Both of them are very kind and humble people and were willing to help me at any point of time, like they always find time to explain things if I get stuck anywhere and they always keep pushing me to do more. And overall, it was a delightful experience working with them.
SHANKARA: What are your plans now? Are you currently working on any bitcoin project?
VARDHAN: After an awesome summer at Alby, I received an offer from them to continue part time along with my university. So, the plan is to continue building products on the Lightning Network because we at Alby are bullish on lightning!
SHANKARA: Sweet, switching gears back to Summer of Bitcoin and the program.
Do you have any piece of advice for, you know, beginner developers who want to contribute to bitcoin open source and any specific tips for your friends and anyone who's listening to this?
VARDHAN: One of the most important resources that I can assist you guys with is Chaincode Labs because they offer an amazing self-paced course and it's definitely the place to start, if you want to learn bitcoin, or even Lightning Network. It's basically a collection of all the useful resources you need to master bitcoin. So it saves you both time and effort. And it's also what we do during the Summer of Bitcoin program to learn about bitcoin groups so you can stay ahead of the curve if you're actually trying to apply to this program.
SHANKARA: Sweet. Alright, Aditya, thank you so much for sharing your experience with Summer of Bitcoin and your thoughts on bitcoin and the Lightning Network. I'm sure a lot of people will be excited and especially feel bullish on lightning.
VARDHAN: Thank you so much Adi. Thank you, everyone for participating. It's been awesome. Thank you for providing me with an opportunity in Summer of Bitcoin as well!
JOBS IN BITCOIN
If you are a fresher straight out of college, here are a few exciting job postings we recommend:
Engineering:
Lead Mobile Engineer | Galoy | Remote | Apply
Senior Front-End Developer | Wavlake | Chicago, IL, USA - Remote | Apply
Rust and Node.js engineer | Mercury Wallet | Remote | Apply
Senior Back-End / Full-Stack Engineer | Coinbits | Remote | Apply
Senior Front-End Engineer | Coinbits | Remote | Apply
Software Engineer | Mash | Remote | Apply
Lead Open-Source Developer | Saving Satoshi | Remote | Apply
iOS engineer (Lightning, Nostr) | Bookmark.org | Remote | Apply
Backend Engineer (protocol and API development, Lightning, Nostr) | Bookmark.org | Remote | Apply
Protocol Engineer | Lightning Labs | Remote | Apply
Vue.js developer | LNS | Remote | Apply
Lightning Infrastructure Engineer | Lightning Labs | Remote | Apply
IT Technician | Riot Platforms, Inc. | Corsicana, TX, USA | Apply
Software Engineer Intern | Riot Platforms, Inc. | Austin, TX, USA | Apply
Full Stack Linux Software Engineer | NCR (LibertyX / LibertyPay) | Texas (Remote) | Apply
React Native Developer | Synonym | Remote | Apply