Jonathan Bier serves as an independent director on the board of Brink, the non-profit that funds Bitcoin protocol engineers. He brings direct experience of the problem: he administered the BitMEX Open Source Developer Grant Program, one of the earlier attempts by a Bitcoin business to pay for protocol work it did not control.
He is the author of two books. The Blocksize War is an account of the 2015 to 2017 dispute over whether Bitcoin's block size limit should be raised, and how that dispute was settled without a change to the consensus rules. Reckless: The Story Of Cryptocurrency Interest Rates covers the lending businesses that grew up around the asset. He has also written a series of research articles for BitMEX.
Brink's board is Bier, Alex Leishman, and co-founder Mike Schmidt, and it is separate from the grant committee that decides which engineers are funded.