Organizations Funding Bitcoin Core Developers

So, in 2023, the total amount offered to Bitcoin developers hit $8.3 million. Honestly, I never thought about the fact that Bitcoin core developers have sponsors. I always figured they must have earned a ton of bitcoins early on and just dedicated themselves to building and maintaining the network without needing sponsors. Dan O'prey and Mas Nakchi put together this magazine where they say they did some digging into the companies and people who provide grants and jobs to Bitcoin core devs. The list includes: Open Sats Btrust Brink Spiral Digital Currency Initiative Aside from these projects, there are plenty of other organizations like Bitpay, Xapo, and Bitmex that have put money into Bitcoin and Lightning development. But it seems like their support isn't very consistent, and a lot of their developer grants are inactive. Toward the end of the magazine, there's a chart showing folks like Jack Dorsey and Jay Z as contributors to Bitcoin core developers through the companies mentioned earlier, like Btrust, where they both helped fund it with 500 BTC. This is the first piece I've read on this subject, but I'm curious: why is there so much more focus on miners' earnings compared to the core developers?

Open source development is not a business - it relies on contributions to give the developers a living.

From the little I know Miners are incentivized while core developers are mostly voluntary. In the article presented the we will agree that bitcoin has no company, no treasury, no leader everything this core developers earn from the network is primarily from funding, community support , grants or freelancing ,  and comparing it to how much miners earn per block it almost nothing.

Because the mainstream media doesn't hype it every day whereas they constantly talk about mining! It's a delicate matter that needs to be approached fairly if you aske me. On one hand we have contributors to an open source software that technically do the job for free. But that is not just any software, it is the protocol for a money that is currently worth $1.8 trillion and lots of businesses are built using it that rely on its healthy existence. Developers who are being incentivized to continue doing good work are better than developers who may give up and seek employment elsewhere to make a living in this worsening economic situation. But on the other hand when we have centralized entities paying their "wages" (even if it is not exactly employment) one would question their motivations and possible demands and how much corruption is "seeping in"...

The media constantly talk about mining activities. Also the government keep shutting down large mining farms for reasons such as electricity consumption. These and more keep miners activities on the mainstream. Also consider the market volatility. As the bitcoin price keep going up, miners earnings increases and people talk about them much during network congestion. In the other hand, developers work just behind the scene. Is there any data to show how many core developers are also miners?

As some of the users have mentioned above, FOSS comes out of passion and a strong motivation to support the initiative. The developers contributing to the project know what they're signing up for and their work would not necessarily be compensated. However, there are other benefits of being a core Bitcoin dev that devs can capitalize on. For instance, any distributed networking/Blockchain company would get a Core Dev board of their founding/advisory team which would pay the devs in hefty amounts. If the funds are directly not coming from the project sponsors, Core devs have a huge demand outside of the project to make profits from. Its up to the dev how much they want to dedicate themselves outside of the project.

I never find such a statistic. I don't think they will answer either since it might affect their privacy. I'd assume the time they spent working on coding will take more time compared to other activities, so it's unlikely for them to focus on running a mining rig. Running a node is still possible IMO, which is done by many people too. CMIIW.