It’s Wednesday night and I’m at one of my favorite Bitcoin meetups in New York. It’s a socratic seminar where attendees talk through the technical details of individual pull-requests to the Bitcoin source code and banter back and forth about the various Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. The meetup is special because it’s taking place during crypto-week in New York, a week-long series of conferences and events headlined by the $2,000-per-ticket industry trade show, Consensus.

The meetup begins with an announcement, that out of respect for privacy no pictures or videos will be allowed. Next comes introductions, where we go around the room and everyone gives a quick 15-second blurb about themselves and why they’re here. The introductions come with an interesting disclaimer from the host. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to”. It struck me as a strange thing to say, and I almost thought he was joking, but right on cue someone in front of me introduces himself: “My name is Dan, that’s all I want to say”. The next person follows in turn “I’m interested in Bitcoin that’s all I want to say”. The introductions continue and I’m amazed by the quality of people in the room. There’s core developers of the Bitcoin C++ client, venture capitalists, lawyers, hackers, and finance bros all sitting side-by-side as equals in awe of what is being built. Everyone in the room is powerless to actually exert any control over Bitcoin, so the only thing anyone can try to do is to keep learning more about it and build a more informed mental model to compile new events against.

The chronocracy driving Bitcoin is real. Chronocracy meaning an ecosystem where your status is defined by the amount of time you put into it. It’s the governing philosophy of Japanese samurai dojos and Bitcoin development. I’ve never liked the vitriol intertwined with Bitcoin communication, because it’s so obviously off-putting to most developers and stifles mainstream adoption, but I’m coming to respect the ideology behind it. If you speak out of turn you get smacked down. If you don’t respect the wizards you get smacked down. And unless you have put in the time to become a wizard yourself, then there is a zero-tolerance policy for your probably-terrible ideas.

One of the topics discussed at the meetup is ASICBoost, a mining technique secretly being used by a collective of Bitcoin miners. ASICBoost allows for a 20% increase in the efficiency of calculating a part of a SHA-256 hash. Because Bitcoin mining is predicated on calculating SHA-256 hashes, the technique allows for more efficient mining and increased profits for all the miners that have been secretly using it. ASICBoost has become a hot-button issue recently because a proposed upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol called SegWit is currently being blocked by miners without an obvious justification for it.

The ASICBoost exploit was discovered after reverse engineering the hardware on a popular ASIC miner. A post on the Bitcoin listserv by Greg Maxwell describes how the SegWit upgrade actually invalidates the advantage miners had been receiving from discretely using ASICBoost. And violà, now we know why miners have been blocking it. The cat’s out of the bag.

I’m amazed at how high a level this game is being played at. I was excited because my friend and I built a simple circuit to run an Ethereum node inside a vending machine. But reverse-engineering firmware? I sit in awe of the brilliance of the people working on this technology.

At the same time, at every Bitcoin event I go to I pick up on the same undertone — that Bitcoin doesn’t have the dynamics of a mainstream technology. The room of people is too weird. Too obsessed with privacy and decentralization in ways that most people aren’t, and too unaccommodating to anyone who hasn’t put in the years of work to play the game at such an elite level. Bitcoin’s growth mechanics are too stagnant. You buy Bitcoin and then do what? You hold it. But that only grows the network linearly. Each new user adds one new interaction. In order for something to go viral you need exponential growth, where each new user adds hundreds of new interactions because there’s an entire ecosystem of applications that already uses the technology. How does that ecosystem get built? By being approachable to developers. I’m not sure Bitcoin is in the position to do it.

I fly out to Boulder, Colorado a couple days later for LambdaConf and experience something similar. I’m blown away by the technical competence of the Haskell developers, but I can tell that Haskell will never be mainstream technology. Haskell forces you to think about paradigm-altering programming concepts like corecursion, monads, and category theory. But it’s going to be a lifetime of study for me to truly understand, it’s not the kind of thing that I can just hack on and tell people about. I wonder if the most elite anythings share this dynamic and are unwelcoming to a mass audience. The best engineering schools and mixed martial arts academies are probably unwelcoming to beginners as well. I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing or not, it’s just something I’m suddenly aware of.