Gloria Zhao, a dedicated Bitcoin Core developer, shares her journey as a second-generation immigrant choosing grant-funded projects over Silicon Valley giants. She discusses the critical role of Bitcoin Core in ensuring decentralization and security, touching on the importance of self-hosted nodes. Gloria highlights potential threats, including nation-state attacks and the implications of AI and quantum computing on Bitcoin's security. The conversation advocates for transparency in funding and governance, emphasizing community responsibility in Bitcoin's evolving landscape.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Choosing Grants Over Big Tech
Gloria chose grant-funded Bitcoin Core work over corporate offers to honor her family's sacrifices.
She found meaning in building open, verifiable money rather than working on ad-driven products.
insights INSIGHT
Verifiability Is Bitcoin's Superpower
Bitcoin's core strength is that anyone can fully verify the system by reading code and data.
That verifiability gives developers and users stronger trust than opaque financial systems.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Run And Maintain Your Own Node
Run Bitcoin Core or use software that relies on it if you want strong, direct participation in the network.
Check Bitcoin Core releases and maintain your node to stay secure and synced.
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In this episode with Bitcoin Core dev Gloria Zhao we discuss:
Second generation immigrant pursuing grant-funded development over job at Google, Meta, etc.
The verifiability of Bitcoin
Do we have enough nodes around the world?
Block scarcity
Is Bitcoin really nation-state resistant and unhackable?
Should people put all their money into Bitcoin?
Financing core devs and incentives
Can AI or quantum computing crack Bitcoin?
Will there be another Block Size War?
GLOSSARY:
Bitcoin Core: Software considered the reference implementation for the Bitcoin protocol. It is the continuation of Satoshi Nakamoto's original bitcoin software released in 2009.
Block: A block is a record in the blockchain that contains transactions. Roughly every 10 minutes, on average, a new block is appended to the blockchain through mining.
Block Size: The amount of data that can be stored in a block. This size is limited to maintain the efficiency and integrity of the blockchain.
Node: A computer that connects to the Bitcoin network.
Private Key: A private key is a piece of data that proves your right to spend bitcoins from a specific wallet through a cryptographic signature.
UTXO: Unspent Transaction Output - An output that has not been sent to another address. The bitcoin wallet balance is calculated from adding up unspent outputs.
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BIO: Gloria is one of the maintainers of Bitcoin Core, primarily focused on the peer-to-peer protocol. Her projects include package relay (BIP 331) and TRUC (BIP 431), aimed at reducing censorship vectors and fee-bumping inefficiencies in transaction relay. She is sponsored by Brink, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting open source Bitcoin development. Visit https://brink.dev and https://bitcoinops.org.
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