absolutely agree. the labour cost of the devs is wildly mis-priced. especially in respect to bitcoin specifically. if this is the worlds money, you’d expect people to be able to live a good life while working to maintain and work on supporting it.

Too much funding certainly ruins incentives by attracting people who are lazy/uncommitted. But so does too little funding, since it drives away hardworking/committed devs who have bills to pay. There’s a sweet spot - an Aristotelian mean. From my experience as an open source Bitcoin dev, we are no where near the point of too much funding. I took a ~70% pay cut when I quit my job to work on Bitcoin, and ended up having to return to the fiat mines after my funding dried up. I know that’s just an anecdote, but I think overall that’s not entirely unusual.

ethereum has way more developers than bitcoin and nostr they are very well paid the result is shit because most do not care the slightest about the work

I struggle to pay bills like every normie. If I become a “contributor” I won’t have to worry about bills? Gosh darn I think I’ll do my best to convince the right people that I deserve funding. Lots of very important work to do of course.

This is a fallacy unfortunately. We've seen this with politicians, CEOs, etc... Greed begets greed. It's actually putting a priority on having enough contributors that have values beyond currency. Donations are great, but allowing monies to dictate your dev flow, meanwhile pretending you're impartial is dishonest & can be nefarious.

💯 without funding innovation slows down… we’d be reliant on people’s spare time VC’s aren’t rushing to bitcoin because there’s no illusion of easy money… shitcoins are over funded because their incentives are flawed Bitcoin has to have genuine philanthropy and altruism to allow for experimentation In the realm of pure innovation you’ve got to have either unquestionable funding, big balls, or be totally reckless