Why Rajarshi Maitra quit his job to become Bitcoin’s newest full-time developer

Four years ago, 29-year-old structural engineer Rajarshi Maitra hadn’t heard of bitcoin — and didn’t even know how to code. Now he's about to become a full-time Bitcoin developer.

On May 19, Maitra, who is from Kolkata, India, announced he was quitting his job as a structural engineer at Systra — currently working on a flyover building project — to focus on Bitcoin, supported by a year-long grant from Square Crypto. This was exactly one year to the day after his first contribution to bitcoin’s codebase.

Maitra plans to boost the bitcoin ecosystem in two ways. He wants to help review suggested changes to bitcoin’s code, along with building out Square Crypto’s Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK). 

The Block sat down with Maitra to learn more about his new role, why he left his old career behind to take it on, and what he thinks of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recent contributions to the long-running debate over how to make the Bitcoin network more scalable.

Unwrapping the Bitcoin onion

Six years ago, Maitra was studying for a masters in civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology while weighing up the option of doing a PhD afterward. Instead, he decided to get a job and use his spare time to study topics that interested him. 

With his civil engineering background, he started working in the oil and gas industry, before working at a company building water treatment facilities. But at the same time, he was studying other subjects, particularly in the fields of mathematics and physics. All just for fun.

It was in October 2017 when he discovered bitcoin. Since he didn’t have a computer science background, many of the terms and concepts related to it were very unfamiliar. In a blog post last year, Maitra described how the first few weeks were overwhelming as he struggled to understand the way bitcoin combined computer science, mathematics, economics and politics. 

But he knew he was onto something big. 

“As I started scrolling down through, I realised bitcoin is not exactly what I thought it was. Every peel of the onion you unwrap, you realise there are deeper things going on inside,” he told The Block in a recent interview.

Maitra was attracted to the way bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. Namely, how it manages to find consensus, or a source of truth, among people that don’t trust each other. 

The achievement is “the most interesting point of the system that screamed at me when I was looking at it,” he said. “This is something huge because in general this is not possible with standard software.”

To understand how bitcoin worked, Maitra started experimenting with it. But he realized that to really do so, he had to learn how to code. So he started writing code in different programming languages, including Python and Javascript.

“It was not my plan to be a software developer from the beginning. Trying to understand how this works was all just fun explorations for me,” he said. “Naturally what happened, in order to understand it better, I needed some interface with coding and software languages. That drove me into learning code.” 

Maitra ended up becoming more comfortable with the Rust programming language. A lot of bitcoin open-source software is written in the language, because it offers good security and safety guarantees, he said.

His first Bitcoin Core pull request

Over the next few years, Maitra hoped he would be able to add to bitcoin’s code in some way. But since he was such a novice developer, he was uncertain that it would happen. 

The first notch on his belt came earlier than expected. On May 16, 2020, he posted a pull request — the process for making a suggestion for code to be added to bitcoin’s codebase — adding a minor change to make it easier to find bugs when performing a certain task. 

Just three days later, Bitcoin Core maintainer Marco Falke merged it into the main bitcoin codebase, so it would be implemented during the next software update. “It was fascinating,” Maitra said. “It definitely does feel good to get your code merged into such a big project.” 

On top of that, it came just two years and five months after he first wrote a “Hello World” program in Python. 

Elon Musk and the ‘forever loop’ 

Once Maitra finishes his notice period at Systra, he will start focusing on two key areas of bitcoin development. 

First, he will actively contribute to bitcoin’s main codebase. But rather than writing code designed to be added to it, he wants to spend his time reviewing other people’s code to make sure it’s safe and worth adding. Crucially, it’s important to ensure that new code won’t expose the network to a possible attack.

Second, he will be helping to build out Square Crypto’s BDK. This is a piece of software that makes it easier for anyone to integrate a bitcoin wallet into an application. Maitra will be focused on improving the kit itself, while encouraging more applications to use it.

“Square Crypto and [project manager] Steve Lee have allowed me to divide my time as part of my suitability. It’s kind of like a liberating experience to work in such an arrangement,” he said.

In contributing to bitcoin’s code, bitcoin developers consider the opinions of the wider bitcoin community. And Elon Musk has been the latest person weighing in on the future of the network. 

He suggested in a recent tweet that Bitcoin’s base layer should process all human transactions, adding that the Lightning Network — the second-layer protocol that has been designed to make payments faster and more efficient by confirming certain peer-to-peer transactions off-chain — is needed but only “for now.” 

What does Maitra think about Musk’s latest ideas about Bitcoin? First, this is nothing new, he said. Every market cycle, new people enter the space and jump to conclusions based on either negative news events — colloquially referred to as FUD, standing for fear, uncertainty and doubt — or technical questions.

In this case, Musk’s view is similar to that voiced by many Bitcoiners during the 2017 war between those who thought Bitcoin should process all transactions on its base layer, and those who preferred a layered approach. This disagreement led to the network splitting into bitcoin and bitcoin cash. 

So, it’s no surprise that someone like Musk has shown up and immediately leapt to the conclusion that putting all transactions on the base layer is the easy solution.

Musk is wrong, according to Maitra. He’s a fan of having a multi-layer system where transactions achieve full finality on the base layer and networks like the Lightning Network are used to scale to millions of more transactions.

Either way, Maitra is under no illusions that Bitcoin's scaling debate will be settled any time soon. “It seems that [the scaling debate] is probably going to be a forever loop,” he said. “I don’t know how it ends until every single person in the world knows how bitcoin works.”