Bitcoin : Although developers are vital to the health of a BlockChain system, they are not necessarily experts. Fundamentally Bitcoin is an economic incentive system, with deep aspects of game theory. Not all devs are good at that.
Sometimes I think developers want to act like they are the experts of the system, when it may not necessarily be the case. There [is a big difference between generalists, and specialists as Peter Rizun explains](https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-184#post-6654). Bitcoin is fundamentally an economic incentive system, which is why people like csw really understand the system better in some ways than specialist developers. The code is only the skeleton of the system, the real magic is the economic and social interactions between the different participants in the system. People like [Ryan X Charles and csw seem to understand this](https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8yliv1/ryan_x_charles_bitcoin_is_not_a_crypto_system/):
> “Bitcoin is not a crypto system, Bitcoin is an Economic System that uses cryptography. If you think about it that way things just make a lot more sense. Its an Economic protocol, and yeah we use crypto and computers and stuff like that, but its really economics first”
I think people like csw have a real deep grasp on the game theory, and economic incentives of how Bitcoin works. This is clearly evident from [his excellent paper about POW and theory of the firm](https://nchain.com/en/blog/proof-work-relates-theory-firm/). I think a lot of the drama stems from the fact that developers don’t like their expertise to be challenged because they want to feel like they are in charge, but often they lack economic/game theoretic understanding of how Bitcoin works, and that is a huge problem. That may be the biggest problem in Bitcoin today. Sometimes devs [just miss the forest for the trees as Gavin Andresen has said](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3yok2s/jeff_garzik_and_gavin_andresen_bitcoin_is_being/cyfmchm/).
But this is not to say developers are not important. Developers need respect and they are vital to the health of this system. Although their power and influence can be dangerous and their egos should be kept in check, we also must be able to respect them and make them feel welcomed, and appreciated. We have to encourage them to work. Its a very fine balance that we have to maintain of respecting the devs, but not holding them up on a pedestal either. Peter Rizun kind of [sums up the dev/specialist perspective as well and I think it helps everyone to put themselves in their shoes](https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-184#post-6654):
> I’ve always been annoyed with the attitude that some engineers and scientists have of being “bored” with lower-level implementation details, viewing technicians as second-class problem solvers. In my opinion, you don’t really fully understand a problem or design until you get into the messy real-world details. When I joined the community in 2013, I was surprised that we had a sort of “reverse prejudism” instead, holding people that actually do the coding in higher regard intellectually (you don’t even GitHub??
So it seems the main problem we have is that we have generalist type experts and specialists. Or to put it a different way we have different levels of experts, and everyone has ego and is threatened by the others. We have to learn to work together and put the drama aside. Realize that we need all types of people. Economists, coders, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians. Bitcoin is a hugely complex system and probably there is nobody that is a true expert of every facet of the system. Everyone has their specialty, even if their specialty is a more general understanding/birds eye view of the system. So perhaps csw needs to work on respecting the devs more and appreciating their understanding of the small details, and the devs need to respect csw’s understanding of the larger system. We have some really strong and talented members of the community. Its like a basketball team. If everyone tries to hog the ball and do it themselves you get nowhere, but when we work together we achieve great things. Hopefully some will appreciate this as food for thought as we move on into the future.
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