How some hobbyism is suffocating Bitcoin

By Mr21

I’ve been complaining for a while now about things like “silent payments” (BIP-352) not being properly baked into wallets and services. Or some Lightning and Nostr services (NIP-05) being run in an amateuristic way.

For the last few months, I’ve been looking for solutions, and after reading some feedback it finally clicked: the whole thing is stuck because of a simple infrastructure gap.

It’s not a tech problem anymore; it’s a “who the f*** is actually running the backend” problem. For instance, Silent Payments need solid indexing servers, and Blindbit-style public services that don’t shit the bed every other week. Without that, it’s just another cool BIP that sounds great on paper but dies in real-world use. Adoption won’t happen if people keep hitting “transaction not found” or suffering privacy leaks because some node went offline again or you can’t even reach any decent server that doesn’t rate-limit you scanning a few Bitcoin blocks.

Same goes for Nostr, by the way — we need reliable Blossom relays for some media types. Silent Payments is just an example of a deeper issue within the Bitcoin space: the lack of real funds being used for the better good of the community.

A clear example is the Silent Payments wallet compatibility page, where the supposed wallets that support it are listed. Right now, after checking them all one-by-one, there’s only two that work half decent:

  • DANA wallet (with a pure SP implementation — some bugs and no 24-word seed support, only 12-word). But it’s the best there is right now.
  • Cake Wallet (a multi-coin wallet that has solid send/receive support for Silent Payments and works fine… but Bitcoiners won’t use it because it supports shitcoins).

There are others on the list, but some don’t work at all, have a scammy setup, or only offer “send” functions (BlueWallet is okay there, although the interface is still a nightmare to actually find that function).

If we’re supposedly a high-tech circular alternative economy with a worldwide payment network and value transfer that is immutable and uncensorable, then why can’t we scrape together funds to get the basic plumbing running for that same community?

Money for nothing and chicks for free Think about it — we’ve got hundreds of billions sitting in Bitcoin, the market cap is screaming “success”, yet we can’t even keep a handful of proper Blossom servers or public Blindbit indexers online in a redundant, decent-capacity way.

How does that even happen? Are we really still a bunch of hobbyists who can’t scrape together maybe 10k–60k a year globally to run this stuff properly for the community?

Like block explorers — how many went bust because of a lack of funding? We now have basically two real ones left that are at decent capacity (and in that particular case, it’s enough for that specific use).

Maybe we need to broaden our horizon a bit and get a global infrastructure company set up, purely for Bitcoin projects that serve the whole community. See it as a sort of “community utilities company”, but without the corruption and hidden bookkeeping tricks (you can run this with an open-bookkeeping mindset).

This would actually make Bitcoin more usable, certainly when the fiat problems keep mounting. We need to be ready with all of that, otherwise we’ll onboard people into a system that they’ll immediately be repelled from.

(like explaining to someone new how to run a node, and having to explain that there are two “visions” and mindsets to do so, and in the end the person just leaves it at that and doesn’t run a node at all because we still haven’t figured out how to make that software user-friendly — unless you buy some expensive box from a pre-made factory line).

Honestly, in some areas of Bitcoin it’s getting downright embarrassing. The contrast is insane: whales moving millions around while the plumbing that would let normal people use advanced privacy features runs on hope, weed, and duct tape.

The contrast between the talkers on stage and the sometimes dreadful reality in the “real life” Bitcoin space couldn’t be bigger (and it’s not only infra, tech or code… documentary makers, artists, entertainers…).

So look at the conference circuit for example: the ten different voices on stage hustling “credit as a service,” Layer-2 fantasies, or straight-up fiat schemes wrapped in corporate branding. They sell you the same hardware wallet you don’t need three times in a row, they sell you yield-bearing assets, or Bitcoin-powered coffee beans or “quantum ready” hardware shenanigans.

Or even worse, Bitcoiners trying to “prove” something by sending funds to anti-Bitcoiners like Peter Schiff, instead of helping their own community out.

Meanwhile, some simple, actually useful indexing service (not naming names) can’t even stay afloat because $200 a month is apparently too much to ask from the entire ecosystem.

I genuinely don’t get it.

Why the hell aren’t we throwing real money at infrastructure, maintenance, audits, even regulatory buffers? Especially now when AI companies are sucking up capital left and right and everyone acts like that’s the future.

Bitcoin has the funds, it has the ideological fire, but somehow the boring but critical stuff stays chronically underfunded.

So here’s the raw question I keep asking the Bitcoin community: Why can’t we get serious funding and backing together to build a global, redundant Lightning + Silent Payments network that actually works?

One that doesn’t rely on some dude in his underwear running everything off a Raspberry Pi and a beat-up five-year-old laptop, rebooting servers every few days when they crash.

Real respect to those people, by the way — at least they’re shipping something instead of just being poster boys at events, hyping god candles, or selling you credit derivatives while lodging and travel on your dime and ticket sales at corpo-confs.

The Bitcoin community has the sats, we have the talent, we have the need.

What we don’t have yet is the maturity to treat real public infrastructure as the highest priority instead of an afterthought. Until we fix this gap, Silent Payments will stay a niche toy instead of the privacy upgrade Bitcoin actually deserves.

Time to stop romanticizing the “starting in my garage” style setup and start funding the backbone of our Bitcoin ecosystem.

Let’s talk turkey — Some numbers

For starters… we need to build a “BBnetwork” — a series of Blindbit indexers we desperately need to make Silent Payments work at capacity. The Electrum servers were supposed to have it by now, but bet they don’t.

Let’s break down the reality of what it costs to run this properly for an initial launch of 1,000 users a month, across 3 geographically redundant regions.

Note on the tech: Silent Payments require scanning every on-chain transaction for ECDH tweaks. This means the backend cannot run on pruned nodes; it requires high-I/O, performant servers running full nodes plus the Blindbit Oracle indexer.

1. Infrastructure (The Metal & Pipes)

  • 3× High-Performance Servers (8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, 2TB NVMe): Unpruned nodes + indexing requires fast I/O. ~$150/mo each = $450/mo
  • Bandwidth/Egress (Serving 1,000 users initially, scanning blocks): ~$200/mo (scalable to 5,000–10,000 users for $400/mo)
  • Load Balancing & Failover IPs: $50/mo Total Infra: ~$700/month (or the price of one night stay and a decent meal at a ‘whale room’ at a corporate conference)

2. The Human Layer (Follow-the-Sun Maintenance) You need 3 people who know the tech to maintain this so it doesn’t crash. If we pay them a modest part-time/retainer rate to ensure uptime:

  • 3× Tech Retainers @ $1,500/mo each = $4,500/mo (or decent AIs that do it for 1/10th)

3. Legal & Coordination

  • Specialist Lawyer (Regulatory setup & “cover our asses” retainer): ~$1,000/mo (Initial setup would be a lump sum, but keeping counsel on retainer is crucial).
  • CEO/Coordinator AI + Open-source tool integration: $300/mo (API costs, automation tooling).

Total Runway:

  • Monthly OpEx: ~$6,500/mo
  • Starting Budget (CapEx + Legal Setup + 3 Months Runway): ~0.5 BTC ($36,000). This gets the entity formed, the open-source app integrated, and buys time to figure out sustainable community funding and the plans to go forward.

Then we need a FREE tool that’s open-source to actually work with it on any phone, desktop, and website… (I know a person who built this — it’s READY to go as we speak… but it won’t work without the proper infrastructure). Once that tool is out in the open, it can be maintained open-source under MIT licence by the community of coders (we sure have enough of them with all the open-source people now).

Conclusion

All in all, we need a bit of work, and some funding. Funding that’s peanuts for most OG Bitcoiners, but they won’t just give charity donations — you need a decent plan and know-how.

This is solid, the tech is there, and it’s proven to work (I tested this myself for weeks now… it can be done, I can prove it). It’s time to deploy things for real, because the world isn’t waiting for more discussions and plans without funding or the next wunderkind to stand up and do a video blog about his coding stuff while the server is online about 30% of the time.

If we stay in this low-level hobbyist realm forever, that’s fine as well… but then don’t ever expect to actually have a reliable service or “fix the money.”

”Fix the money, without any money” unfortunately is not our slogan.

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by Mr21 as “AVB” (@avb_21) https://allesvoorbitcoin.be/donate if you like my thoughts, work and creations: allesvoorbitcoin.be/donate

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