Bitcoin Takeover 2026: Lisa Neigut Shows Up With Solutions Lisa Neigut was a Java backend engineer at Cash App in 2018, maybe five months into learning the Bitcoin protocol for her work, when she spotted something odd in the block header, the data structure containing six pieces of information about every Bitcoin block. The timestamp field, she realized, would eventually run out of room and 'roll over'. It was not an urgent problem. But Neigut wanted to know how to fix it. She went down a rabbit hole Googling developers working on the Bitcoin block header, eventually finding the authors of a related BIP, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, the technical blueprints for changing how the protocol works. Three names came up. One whose contact information she couldn't find online at all. The other two had blogs. She picked the one she liked better. "Don't tell Peter Todd," Neigut said, laughing. She sent an email to Rusty Russell, who happened to be the lead maintainer of core lightning and a longtime contributor to the Linux project. She didn't know any of this at the time. Russell looped in developer Pieter Wuille. The three of them started going back and forth about the timestamp issue. Wuille proposed a fix. Neigut pushed back, citing a constraint from an earlier BIP the two had co-authored. Wuille agreed, she was right. Within five months of that first email, Russell would offer her her a job at Blockstream, working on core lightning. "I was like, well, I don't know anything about C. I don't know anything about lightning and I'm brand new to Bitcoin, but I'm happy to come work with you, you know, as long as you know these things about me," Neigut recalled. He hired her anyway. The willingness to show up before feeling totally ready was a skill learned in her first engineering job. Neigut started her career as an Android developer at Etsy. The company built everything internally, its own payment processing system, its own analytics platform. No plugging into Stripe. No leaning on Google Analytics. "The attitude there is really focused on 'code is craft'," she explained. "We handwrite everything. We don't outsource anything." That culture of doing the work yourself, she said, turned out to be a natural fit for Bitcoin development, where minimizing dependencies and maintaining your own code standard practice. At Cash App, Neigut was approximately the fifth engineer hired to the Bitcoin team. The role gave her proximity to the protocol and an opportunity to develop depth, which came from independent research, reading Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, pulling apart the block header, cold-emailing strangers. Her path from curious engineer to core lightning developer took less than half a year. After Blockstream, Neigut founded Base58, a nonprofit school that teaches how Bitcoin works at a technical level. She also launched Bitcoin++, the conference series aimed at giving Bitcoin developers a home to present their technical work. The first event ran in Austin in 2022 and Neigut described it as "Bitcoin-only technical counterprogramming." Casey Rodarmor gave his first public talk about what would become Ordinals. Jimmy Song taught a masterclass on Taproot. Adam Back showed up to the afterparty. Bitcoin++ has since expanded globally. Neigut recently returned from Brazil, where the event ran its first "exploits edition," a hackathon track focused on finding bugs in open-source projects. Participants identified at least 10 vulnerabilities in 24 hours using advanced tools and techniques such as fuzzing. The philosophy behind Bitcoin++ conferences mirrors the development culture Neigut absorbed from Russell and Etsy before him. Show up with work, not opinions. In lightning specification meetings, she said, a proposal is not considered complete until the author has both a written spec and a working implementation. "You show up with solutions," she said. "That's maybe the more management way of saying it." Ideas are welcome, but feedback does not arrive until someone builds something that runs. Neigut sees deep alignment between that builder ethos and her home state. She grew up in Houston, the capital of American energy markets, and describes Bitcoin as "natively Texan," a system rooted in self-sovereignty, energy expenditure, and independence from centralized authority. Texas runs its own power grid. Texans, in her telling, understand spending energy as a form of wealth. Bitcoin fits. For builders coming into the protocol now, "Doing hard things is still worth doing," Neigut said. Over a decade of protocol development doesn't mean all Bitcoin problems have been solved. Self-custody, she believes, still has user-experience problems that deserve serious engineering efforts. The next event, Bitcoin++ "Villains Edition" at the Hoover Dam in late April, is built around that premise, exploring contrarian ideas about moving Bitcoin forward where consensus does not yet exist. That engineer who went down a rabbit hole to resolve an odd timestamp bug is still hunting for problems worth solving.