I wonder if, after serving in the trenches of the Bitcoin development industry—where there is a war against women, adversarial thinking is a must, and you have to fight hard to get anything of substance done—we become unsuitable for traditional corporate jobs, where you have to be quiet and obey authority, and even arguments to clients are vetted by your PMs.

Bitcoin development is the Hotel California of professional fields. You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave. Once you’re in, the commitment to its principles and the fight for change is something you carry with you indefinitely. It’s not just a job but a cause you can’t easily walk away from.

The relentless drive to question, challenge, and push for something better is what sets this field apart—and what makes it essential to keep advocating for inclusion, equity, and human rights within it.

This rabbit hole has no exit. And if you are an oppressed minority, it is like a war we have no option but to show up for. I wonder if there are other organizations genuinely concerned about what is being done to women in the dev communities that onboard beginners.

We have to preserve the privacy of financial transactions—wait who's minting runes?

Happy you're coming to Brazil!

The third place, a term for social environments outside of home and work, is very important. I’m happy to have returned to a traditional college with in-person classes. Real-life interaction matters.

I want to share a situation and gauge the community’s thoughts on it.

In Brazil, there is an organized hate group within Bitcoin development circles—the developers who are into Bitcoin and cluster together in technical communities—targeting women. These group members are influenced by popular figures who propagate anti-women’s rights and anti-feminist ideologies.

I’ve launched a Bitdevs in my city, the first in the country initiated by a woman. To make this happen, I had to compromise with developers who are members and promoters of this group to bootstrap the event.

When they discovered I had received a grant from the Human Rights Foundation to create a healthier environment for women developers, they couldn’t restrain themselves and began sabotaging my efforts intensely. We established a code of conduct to protect women, but it was completely disregarded. Their hateful agenda is not mild, and I have gathered a long collection of evidence in case we end up in court someday to seek justice.

Now, I am considering closing the Bitdevs to make it women-only. How do you feel about this? It’s either that or risking the event being overrun with gender-based hate and trolling.

I’m thinking of giving it one more try, keeping it open to all, but if the 4chan crowd strikes again with another hate prank, I may have to close it to women-only. Otherwise, we’ll end up with no Bitdevs that is healthy and respectful of our presence. We want to code and learn Bitcoin development, not deal with the constant disrespect because of our gender.

Imagine the uproar from the anti-woke crowd when they find out there’s a Bitdevs exclusive for women. Many people in Bitcoin communities seem to struggle to find legitimate reasons to feel outraged, and I suspect they might come after me with full force—fulfilling the very agenda we are trying to combat.

My sister Lorraine would likely advise me to close the event to women already, not to give it another try. But I keep holding onto the hope that the world around me will change, especially because I envision a Bitcoin development space that is fair and free from artificial barriers and covert wars disguised as cooperation.

Is anyone else facing similar issues in other parts of the world?

Thanks!

When I began exploring Bitcoin development, I was caught up for too long in the full-node scene. Here is my experience installing Bitcoin Core from the source repository.

https://youtu.be/2D-PjasEbeE?feature=shared

🔥

I've switched vibes here, too. The landscape is fully qualified, now let's get to work.

*this

It is a mess. Everyone will flock to Nostr after his mayhem. I've learned to appreciate and feel very grateful for this technology and its developers.

Although doing the work for free is part of the open-source ethos, there is no such thing as unpaid work.

Even when I volunteered 24/7 in Bitcoin FOSS to finish a vital book translation, I had to earn and save the money I was spending in my previous job.

The expectation of volunteer work implies that you can't be a pleb if you want to contribute meaningfully, as even small contributions require time, dedication, and countless hours of study. This, I believe, might exclude very young students and underrepresented groups right from the start.

My motivation for volunteering in Bitcoin open source was that I was the only person in the room with a command of Brazilian Portuguese, a deep curiosity about the topic, and an intuitive understanding of its significance for human rights. The weight of social responsibility was too heavy to ignore.

I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night, knowing that the book might still be untranslated if it weren't for me taking on and completing the task in 21 days with minimal breaks.

I think, and this is just speculation, we need to be careful not to purity-test the lurkers too harshly and risk losing them—and here I am considering the open developer communities that don't practice discrimination, of course. There should be a clearer path to how they can start earning Bitcoin in open source and understand how much they can earn. People should minimally aspire to a career in FOSS and view it as a viable, meritocratic option worth pursuing.

From my experiences, if anything is hindering Bitcoin development—aside from the small-minded bigotry among the plebs before they even join the projects—it’s *the mystery*. Many Bitcoin experts profit from this mystery, especially those who wrap it in some ideology and nurture parasocial relationships with their audiences to drive adoption. It's profitable outside of FOSS and a harsh reality within it.

I also heard stories about how taxing working in FOSS can be and how some of our current contributors are burnt out and on the edge of a mental breakdown. Even if they are well-paid, they are clearly overworked or a proxy for something unhealthy in FOSS.

Semantically speaking, if FOSS is to be this pure, magical, self-assembled entity composed of mysterious individuals united by their sheer passion for Bitcoin development, then from my perspective, I can say FOSS, or what it could be, is deteriorating, becoming insalubrious and unsafe over time. If ignored, this culture will continue to seep through and naturally undermine Bitcoin FOSS as a whole.

If you believe this doesn’t impact the quality of code and product output, then you’re undervaluing the human factor in producing science and technology. We must not repeat this oversight in the new social systems we’re trying to build to escape today's traps that were built disregarding human needs in the first place.

If my view is obstructed and my opinions are wrong, that is just another piece of evidence that the problem is not me, but how the information is being presented to actors who are doing my type of work.

And I’d rather not start on how a man in my position would likely have better access to quality information, community support, and opportunities to thrive. Let’s assume we’ve reached a near 50/50 meritocratic system already.

Sometimes, it feels like we’ve taken the 'anarchic cypherpunks write code' ethos a bit too far and even out of context. In our attempt to preserve the original character of open-source software development, we might be harming it instead.

The classic Bitcoin Development Philosophy, now in Brazilian Portuguese.

https://github.com/Scalar-School/btcphilosophy/blob/main/filosofiadevbitcoin.pdf

Watching a Bitcoin Core Code Review live with achow101 and 9 other people. Moments like this make it feel as if there's a bug in this simulation. Why are we so niche? Where is everyone?—7 people online as I finish writing this.

Once, as a beginner dev and bitcoiner, I broke my Umbrel node by messing with the command line. I was sure that my channel funds were lost.

Then I recalled I had nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5 on my phone, and I was able to close my channels through the mobile app and recover my funds. I will never forget all that you do for us. Zeus is freedom, self-sovereignty, and safety all at once.

Scalar School is a unique project with its own merits in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It is catering to Brazil. Although we adopt new tech well—we used to be Orkut's slaughterhouse and data provider guinea pigs, now Meta's, and so forth and so on—we develop slowly.

We are insulated by the Brazilian Portuguese language and the odd fact that we don't need English to make it inland—different from the reality of a European, for example. We are isolated, and we carry a very unique modus operandi.

Scalar School is entirely conceived by a woman who navigates the dream of becoming a Bitcoin Core/FOSS developer herself and has found several unfair, gender-based obstacles along the way.

Was I delusional from the very start? It doesn't matter. No one should go through the double standards that exist in the larger Bitcoin technical communities where the dreams start being nurtured and our future talents start being bred.

This is a project with a vision. I am the user, the product, and the ethnographic researcher. I am walking the walk, fixing the hurdles, and opening space for the women coming behind me, even though I am not there yet.

I am not using shortcuts for advantage. I like to carefully design solutions to difficult problems and work really hard to implement them, and I like freedom, and I like to be treated fairly and not receive differential and worse opportunities because I am a woman at the base. I have a strong sense of justice, an insatiable will to learn and teach, and a resilience that is larger than my sense of self.

I am not trying to build a meritless, bound-to-fail path for women. I never even agreed to make it 100% for women in the first place. I try, but I can't. I might do it, but it keeps not happening, especially when a man asks me, "Is that only for women?".

I can't pay them with the same currency of isolation, and I might contradict myself in my goals to increase the number of women in Bitcoin as fast as possible. And here comes another point: it is easy to sell promises and loose dreams to get people to flock to you. It is easy to make people users of Bitcoin by wrapping the code in ideology in such a way that it is difficult to unwrap. It is easy to cater to a community that has been there for over a decade by just agreeing with everything they do, no matter how unethical and wrong.

And if that is the KPI you're looking for, you won't find it. And people will judge, and will say it is a waste, and will claim it is a net negative for Bitcoin itself, and will ignore our efforts. But achieving the ambitious goal of Scalar School is hard. We have to fix history. We have to repair the lack of women confidently diving into bits and bytes and scrambled code and math and finding the meaning in it, and creating solutions, and solving problems, and opening meaningful PRs, and making a life out of open source by their own merits.

The open-source world is wild. And it won't divide the ocean in two just for women to pass. We'll have to figure out how to make it together. My role is to not let them fail at the base. My role is to lead by example. To be a mirror they can look at and ask questions, and get answers, without the overhead of discrimination. My role is to use my privilege to advocate for them.

My role is to make it myself, and by making it, to hand them the map. To show them the way. Most importantly, to be there for them. That is representation. That is how you inspire minorities to see themselves winning and go for it despite the adversities, the scrutiny, and the harassment of a local community that is offended by seeing a woman carving her path without giving them the possibility to make her stop. My role is to be the resistance, and by showing an alternative path, to put terrible ideas in check despite the retaliation by those profiting from them.

As a woman in Bitcoin development, I've had my time and my capacity wasted by teachers who abused their position with sheer negligence and deceit. By colleagues who couldn't respect the competition. By friends who extended a hand and guided me through traps only to ensure I would fail.

And this is the generational heritage that I am fixing and rebuilding. It is deeper than heated events full of sellers and enthusiasts. Scalar School is a quiet revolution. I am grateful to the nostr:npub17xvf49kht23cddxgw92rvfktkd3vqvjgkgsdexh9847wl0927tqsrhc9as for sharing this dream with the Brazilian women developers in Bitcoin, and its impact won't be limited to Brazil. I hope to make my sponsors nostr:npub1szpa7cypmyd59083qs3pte9lez22lzfu6pl2guhgqx7q09x68y6qquh3td and nostr:npub1trr5r2nrpsk6xkjk5a7p6pfcryyt6yzsflwjmz6r7uj7lfkjxxtq78hdpu speak proudly about Scalar School. You're the only people to whom I'll ever owe an explanation. Thank you. See you on the other side.

This is the future.

Join Stallings and nostr:npub1v799vkkxjasjtjcrr4wh2ral5vcklqhg0tyyvc6gvfe5qfrd57mqutqrup as we dive into the essential mathematical and cryptographic principles that underpin Bitcoin.

Before we explore the depths of Bitcoin technology, we’ll cover some foundational topics.

Prime Numbers (Chapter 8.1)

Fermat and Euler's Theorems (Chapter 8.2)

Primality Testing (Chapter 8.3)

Modular Arithmetic and Discrete Logarithms (Chapter 8.5)

Finite Fields in the Form GF(p) (Chapters 5.1 and 10.3)

Abelian Groups and Elliptic Curves (Chapter 10.3)

Elliptic Curve Arithmetic (Chapter 10.3)

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECDSA) (Chapter 10.4)

Random Number Generators and Pseudorandom Functions (PRFs):

Principles of Pseudorandom Number Generation (Chapter 7.1)

True Random Number Generators (Chapter 7.6)

SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm) (Chapter 11.5)

Applications of Cryptographic Hash Functions (Chapter 11.1)

Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (Chapter 13.5)

Properties and Requirements of Digital Signatures (Chapter 13.1)

Hash-based MACs: HMAC (Chapter 12.5)

Public Key Distribution (Chapter 14.3)

At Scalar School, we are committed to never skipping any foundational steps and are not afraid to start small. This careful approach is designed to ensure that when we begin delivering code and content, it is of the highest quality.

The open-source landscape is competitive, and we aim to prepare our students to confidently stand among the best.

We are dedicated to building a robust foundation and increasing the representation of women in Bitcoin development and education, empowering a new generation of developers to innovate and excel in this dynamic field.

Success won’t happen overnight—we are here to walk the good walk and actively engage with and learn from the feedback of the global Bitcoin FOSS development community.

Is there anything else you’d like to see covered, or do you feel something important is missing? Let us know in the comments.