Open source is often romanticized as a space where developers collaborate freely, driven by passion rather than profit. In this story, contributors are usually imagined as well-paid engineers hacking on side projects after work, generously donating their time to the commons. Sometimes that image is true. But increasingly, it is incomplete and dangerously misleading.
A significant amount of open-source software is built and maintained by people who are not financially secure. Unemployed developers, students, contributors from low-income regions, or individuals without a safety net routinely spend months or years maintaining infrastructure that others depend on. Their work powers startups, corporations, and entire ecosystems. The value they create is immense. The compensation they receive is often zero.
This asymmetry exists across the software world, but it becomes especially troubling in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin presents itself as an ethical response to a broken financial system. It promises sovereignty and an escape from extractive intermediaries. And yet, much of Bitcoin’s open infrastructure is built on the same old pattern: unpaid or underpaid labor at the base, capital accumulation at the top. The irony is hard to ignore. Poor contributors are, quite literally, helping rich people become richer.
This is not usually framed as exploitation. Contributors are told they are earning reputation, experience, or optionality. But these currencies only work if you can already afford to wait. You cannot pay rent with GitHub stars. Long-term upside is meaningless if short-term survival is not guaranteed.
Open source claims to be open to everyone. Technically, this is true. Socially and economically, it is not. The system rewards those who can afford to work for free. Time, stable housing, healthcare, and emotional safety are invisible prerequisites. What looks like meritocracy is often just privilege with good branding.
This is not a moral failure of individual contributors. Most are acting rationally. Open source is one of the few domains where barriers to entry are low, credentials are optional, and participation is global. For many, contributing is an act of hope. That hope, however, is routinely captured and monetized by actors with more capital, more stability, and more leverage.
The real failure is structural. Open source has no default mechanisms to sustain the people who maintain it. It relies on altruism to prop up systems that generate enormous economic value. When maintainers burn out, disappear, or collapse under financial pressure, the ecosystem reacts with surprise, despite having depended on their unpaid labor all along.
Bitcoin solved a profound problem in monetary design. It did not solve the problem of funding public goods. It did not eliminate power asymmetries. And it did not magically align incentives for human labor. If anything, it exposed how deeply those problems run.
And the uncomfortable truth will remain: the people building the tools of escape are often the least able to use them.
