I want to expand on the following Twitter conversation and our forum seems like a great place for writing > 140 characters.

How Bitcoin got a non-traditional start:

I feel that the Bitcoin/blockchain industry had a rather strange beginning where the technology didn’t come from the tech industry or research labs but was started by anonymous hackers. This beginning is very different from typical life cycles where you see research grants from the NSF, DARPA, etc., research communities coming together under IEEE, ACM, or USENIX, leading to research labs working on early prototypes before we start seeing startups or products from large companies. Think about DARPA providing the initial funding for the Internet, the original TCP/IP paper getting published at IEEE Transactions on Communications (1974) or DARPA’s 2004 self-driving car challenge and advancements in machine learning / AI regularly getting peer-reviewed and published at well-established conferences.

Bitcoin/blockchains came out of nowhere i.e., from a non-traditional channel. Academia is beginning to adapt to it and (after years!) has started accepting blockchains as a valid/interesting technical area. For example, our Blockstack paper got published at USENIX’16, and Gun Sirer’s Bitcoin-NG paper got published at NSDI’16 (the top systems/networking conferences).

Concerns engineers bring up about working on Bitcoin/blockchains:

When I talk to traditional distributed systems engineers, people who’d go and build the next-gen systems at Google, for example, they’re reluctant to give this technology serious thought; some don’t want to touch Bitcoin with a 10-foot pole. Some of the concerns people have brought up are:

(a) there is a lot of drug money involved in that space

(b) it’s built on technically shaky grounds

© the community this space attracts is just weird and strange, and “normal” engineers don’t want to interact and associate with this community

(d) there is a lot of political drama, public fights, and personal attacks

Most of all, engineers have basic questions and concerns about the technology, and you need to walk them through all the concerns before they start to feel that there might be something interesting here. Concerns I’ve seen include:

(a) Can the governments just shut it down?

(b) Are we wasting too much electric power on a “stupid” use case?

© Can a public/global network ever scale?

(d) How are all the federated/private blockchain use cases different from systems we’ve been using for decades?

Steps we can take to get more engineers interested in the space:

I do feel that once engineers get answers to their questions and poke around the technology, they genuinely get interested. So to get more engineers involved in the space, we should: