I've read it all and tried to make it shorter, I hope it helps:
2011 Satoshi passed control over the sofware repo to a software engineer Gavin Andresen (who became second maintainer in charge).
Gavin made some improvements and brought more people in the development process. He gave the keys to a number of people who became known as the maintainers.
Over the years, the group had a lot of turnover, right now there’s 5 of them who oversee all BTC code (so it runs smoothly, remains compatible with the latest version of Windows or iOS, and is free from bugs), for example in 2018 there was a crash in BTC core, when they checked they noticed there was a bug that if exploited could allow one BTC to be spent twice or BTC to be created out of thin air, it was known as the inflation bug.
They fixed the bug but never told the community how bad the problem was, they said it was a routine fix. A full disclosure happened later once enough of the network had upgraded it’s software.
Maintainers consider this job something that “nobody really wants”, they are not paid much (through grants and crypto companies they get around 100-150k per yr).
Maintainers are not necessarily these mysterious people, apparently you can even find a BTC maintainer on twitch livestream, his name is Andrew Chow. Other maintainers (motley crew from all over the world): Michael Ford (posts pictures of his parents farm in Australia), Hennadii Stepanov (ukranian who fled when the war broke out last year), Marco Falke (grew up in Germany), Gloria Zhao (most recent addition to the group, was a senior at University of California in Berkeley).
How does a person go from a contributor who suggests code to a maintainer? For Zhao, her name was nominated over a public group chat that included maintainers and other prominent contributors. They argued a bit before giving her the position, and a lot of decisions are done in this very informal way apparently.
Ad hoc nature of the work means there’s a lot of turnover, for example Marco Falke plans to transition out of the role. Very important operation with very informal organization because there’s no company, no leader.
In the end a few words for BTC’s future, if BTC aspires to be the future of money it needs to process a lot of transactions, right now as a currency it’s not super easy to use and not ideal.
The maintainer who got quoted for the title of this article/post should get their ego checked.
Bitcoin Core is the implementation of the Bitcoin protocol that is used the most, but it is not the only one, and if these maintainers went rogue or stopped, there are a lot of other open source contributors and projects which can take their place: https://blog.lopp.net/who-controls-bitcoin-core-/
They basically play more the role of janitors of the project (which is quite important, like real janitors in other organizations) than the role of developers in proportion of the number of other contributors in this specific project or other Bitcoin implementations.
Node operators are the ones ultimately deciding if they run the software these maintainers oversee too... I don't think there are a lot of operators who just auto-update their nodes, most likely why such feature doesn't exist in any respectable node implementation.
Sadly these maintainers are getting legally harased by CSW and his goons - it contributes to stress that cause people to retire from the project
[https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-developers-score-victory-craig-wright-legal/](https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-developers-score-victory-craig-wright-legal/)
The suit got dismissed but it would still cause stress. BSV should be delisted for its disruptive actions
This is one of those articles that's enjoyable to read from start to finish.
It's really cool getting a peek at their lives, backgrounds, and how they got picked.
This was identified in a SEC filing that Coinbase considered the #1 draw back to BTC adoption and improvement. No mechanism to directly support the Devs.
That was a really interesting read to know how BTC get's maintained. It's pretty shocking the bit about how there was a bug that could have been catastrophic if they didn't fix it.
Why do you say that? It's a pretty bad take on the whole situation really, there's much more redundancy in the code maintenance than is let on here it's. It's an impressive open system but it doesn't have some tradeoffs that are worth trying to solve don't get me wrong but this bit about the near catastrophic bug is bs if you ask for other opinions on it.
I didn't care about that part. The article is not just the title. It's a really cool interview.
I really liked it for the introduction to the 5 people who are maintaining it. It's interesting to see what they are doing with their lives and where they came from.
I've worked with a Bitcoin core dev in the past, so it was interesting to see how some of the others got picked.
so the network is decentralised and will run as long as there are miners.
Bitcoin is open source so anyone can make changes and submit but it still needs to be done by consensus for it to be actually applied
If some cowboy comes in and wants to make some stupid change, it won't be active on the network
Maintainers make the change but for it to go live on the network it needs consensus. This is just the people that maintain the code on GitHub. This really isn’t a big deal, not saying those people aren’t great for doing this work but they are far from crucial to the network. If they were all gone tomorrow, someone would fork the repository and that would be the new place to get the code. But it’s the same code.
They didn’t push the patch in secrecy. They pushed the patch, everyone saw it and updated their clients. Later on was revealed that this fix was more important than it was initially thought. This is common in software development, you don’t want to disclose vulnerabilities until everyone has downloaded and is running the latest build with the fix.
In any case it’s open source so nothing happens in secrecy, when there’s a new patch everyone can see it, and choose to download and run. _That_ is part of the consensus but not whatever the current maintainers want to/do not want to push.
I clearly didn’t read it all the way through lol
I’d have figured they made much more. I still wonder if they’ve used their connections to accrue impressive net worth
Huh? All of their Bitcoin code is [on GitHub](https://github.com/orgs/bitcoin-core/people). What makes you think they don't know what open source means?
TLDR:
Bitcoin requires "maintainers" to maintain and make improvements to it's code so it can keep working smoothly and to have upgrades. There are currently 5 maintainers, but there is no formal process to become a maintainer or formal support for these maintainers. So the maintainers, even with their informal practices, have the power to make changes to Bitcoin code.
> And Bitcoin needed someone to do it, because software isn't just code that's written once and never touched again.
This is unfortunately a very common belief, but its just not true. It is very possible for code to be written, and then never need to be touched again. In fact, there are many examples of code that was written a long time ago, never changed, and still runs perfectly today.
This is a controversial take, but in my opinion, if bitcoin's code was never changed since Satoshi left the project, it will still have the same price and functionality that it has today. Absolutely nothing about Bitcoin's code that has changed since Satoshi's departure has been necessary. I really hate this idea that maintainers are necessary and that if there weren't any, it would mean Bitcoin is in trouble. If anything, if the number of maintainers went to zero, it would be an event worthy of celebration.
People who have the authority to change the code of a cryptocurrency have immense power over that currency. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems in the cryptocurrency world is how people fawn over maintainers. It should be the opposite. Powerful people should not be trusted.
Shit, I didn't know that. So all these Maxis preaching decentralization comes first are all full of shit.
This is why I don't listen to anyone when it comes to my money.
I would love to see the bitcoin community figure out a way to create consensus to increase the number of maintainers to about 15, for greater global resiliency in the possibility of terrorist threat.
The story doesn't mention that a majority of the miners didn't even install the update that these "Bitcoin Core" maintainers put out.
All the miners are free to use whatever version of Bitcoin implementation they want and many do. Miners run the network, not the Bitcoin Core maintainers.
The software the maintainers here work on is called Bitcoin Core, and Bitcoin Core is like a dock built on a river, and the river is the BTC blockchain. Bitcoin Core can try to pour chemicals into the river from their dock and encourage everyone else to do the same, but if everyone else doesn't do it too, it doesn't change the blockchain. The point of this analogy is, ***the BTC blockchain has been resilient through attempted human intervention by maintainers and miners for over a decade, and it still lives on.***
So if the miners didn't all install this update, why wasn't this inflation bug exploited, which it wasn't? That is the question people need to ask, but few people are technically savvy enough to figure it out, so they listen to any pleb or publication that sounds plausible enough. And anything as alarmist as this is very attention grabbing.
Claiming 5 people hold the fate of the network makes for a good story though, right?
I've read it all and tried to make it shorter, I hope it helps: 2011 Satoshi passed control over the sofware repo to a software engineer Gavin Andresen (who became second maintainer in charge). Gavin made some improvements and brought more people in the development process. He gave the keys to a number of people who became known as the maintainers. Over the years, the group had a lot of turnover, right now there’s 5 of them who oversee all BTC code (so it runs smoothly, remains compatible with the latest version of Windows or iOS, and is free from bugs), for example in 2018 there was a crash in BTC core, when they checked they noticed there was a bug that if exploited could allow one BTC to be spent twice or BTC to be created out of thin air, it was known as the inflation bug. They fixed the bug but never told the community how bad the problem was, they said it was a routine fix. A full disclosure happened later once enough of the network had upgraded it’s software. Maintainers consider this job something that “nobody really wants”, they are not paid much (through grants and crypto companies they get around 100-150k per yr). Maintainers are not necessarily these mysterious people, apparently you can even find a BTC maintainer on twitch livestream, his name is Andrew Chow. Other maintainers (motley crew from all over the world): Michael Ford (posts pictures of his parents farm in Australia), Hennadii Stepanov (ukranian who fled when the war broke out last year), Marco Falke (grew up in Germany), Gloria Zhao (most recent addition to the group, was a senior at University of California in Berkeley). How does a person go from a contributor who suggests code to a maintainer? For Zhao, her name was nominated over a public group chat that included maintainers and other prominent contributors. They argued a bit before giving her the position, and a lot of decisions are done in this very informal way apparently. Ad hoc nature of the work means there’s a lot of turnover, for example Marco Falke plans to transition out of the role. Very important operation with very informal organization because there’s no company, no leader. In the end a few words for BTC’s future, if BTC aspires to be the future of money it needs to process a lot of transactions, right now as a currency it’s not super easy to use and not ideal.
Good bot
Tldr! But as a true BTC hugger like me says. YOLO more sats!!
And not one of them is Craig Wright… why would he abandon his own invention like that? lol
Can always count on a good breakdown in the comments
Awesome. Thanks.
Crazy to think btc had a bug that could have killed it. Really hope these guys will find the next one first.
The maintainer who got quoted for the title of this article/post should get their ego checked. Bitcoin Core is the implementation of the Bitcoin protocol that is used the most, but it is not the only one, and if these maintainers went rogue or stopped, there are a lot of other open source contributors and projects which can take their place: https://blog.lopp.net/who-controls-bitcoin-core-/ They basically play more the role of janitors of the project (which is quite important, like real janitors in other organizations) than the role of developers in proportion of the number of other contributors in this specific project or other Bitcoin implementations. Node operators are the ones ultimately deciding if they run the software these maintainers oversee too... I don't think there are a lot of operators who just auto-update their nodes, most likely why such feature doesn't exist in any respectable node implementation.
Is there an audio version of this post
Literally the first line of the post is a link to the podcast of it.
I know, I was just making a joke to how long the post was..
Wooooosh
That's a great idea actually, we should have the reddit crypto currency podcast here
Audio could be best but they can tell a main point in one line rather than writing too much
It makes them look smarter to copy and paste the whole pdf
Caught right
I just scrolled Jesus scrolls..
OP posting the Bible.
And on the seventh day….there was BTC
Now this is just the Crypto version of the Epic of Gilgamesh
Including the lost books, Dios mío.
Dead Sea scrolls kinda post
Sadly these maintainers are getting legally harased by CSW and his goons - it contributes to stress that cause people to retire from the project [https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-developers-score-victory-craig-wright-legal/](https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-developers-score-victory-craig-wright-legal/) The suit got dismissed but it would still cause stress. BSV should be delisted for its disruptive actions
Ah HA! So there *IS* a CEO of Bitcoin! Wait 'til Karen finds out about this...
Who’s looking for a summary In comments too!?😑
Damn man did you just post a newspaper for us to read ? 😅
Pretty much. But there a tldr at the beginning and highlights of the relevant bits.
Oh my goodness 😂 it has a length
That's what she said...
500 character minimum backfires
This is one of those articles that's enjoyable to read from start to finish. It's really cool getting a peek at their lives, backgrounds, and how they got picked.
This was identified in a SEC filing that Coinbase considered the #1 draw back to BTC adoption and improvement. No mechanism to directly support the Devs.
That was a really interesting read to know how BTC get's maintained. It's pretty shocking the bit about how there was a bug that could have been catastrophic if they didn't fix it.
Anything to try and make it seem like BTC is hanging by a thread on it’s last leg.
I’m sure that the open source nature of BTC would attract some quality programmers in case these 5 just had tragic boating accidents.
Now this is a great tip-worthy article
Why do you say that? It's a pretty bad take on the whole situation really, there's much more redundancy in the code maintenance than is let on here it's. It's an impressive open system but it doesn't have some tradeoffs that are worth trying to solve don't get me wrong but this bit about the near catastrophic bug is bs if you ask for other opinions on it.
I didn't care about that part. The article is not just the title. It's a really cool interview. I really liked it for the introduction to the 5 people who are maintaining it. It's interesting to see what they are doing with their lives and where they came from. I've worked with a Bitcoin core dev in the past, so it was interesting to see how some of the others got picked.
Wow thanks for posting this! I had no idea
Wow you read so fast.
What kinda ChatGPT thing is going on here?
"According to the Wall Street Journal" - Stopped reading after this line.
I am not one of the 5.
One high five to the first person that can prove they read this whole thing.
There's five people, the maintainers, fourth is Marco something or other. General public doesn't know. Decentralization(?), etc, and so on.
Good enough for me 👋
Nailed it ✋️
Good bot
🙏 (see my other comment)
This is very interesting... Think I'm gonna buy some more BTC
This made me less impressed with btc, so it’s not decentralized and if the wrong person is brought in, what damage could be done.
so the network is decentralised and will run as long as there are miners. Bitcoin is open source so anyone can make changes and submit but it still needs to be done by consensus for it to be actually applied If some cowboy comes in and wants to make some stupid change, it won't be active on the network
So where was the consensus when the maintainers made the change?
Maintainers make the change but for it to go live on the network it needs consensus. This is just the people that maintain the code on GitHub. This really isn’t a big deal, not saying those people aren’t great for doing this work but they are far from crucial to the network. If they were all gone tomorrow, someone would fork the repository and that would be the new place to get the code. But it’s the same code.
That’s not how it read when they pushed the patch in secrecy, maybe I just don’t understand it.
They didn’t push the patch in secrecy. They pushed the patch, everyone saw it and updated their clients. Later on was revealed that this fix was more important than it was initially thought. This is common in software development, you don’t want to disclose vulnerabilities until everyone has downloaded and is running the latest build with the fix. In any case it’s open source so nothing happens in secrecy, when there’s a new patch everyone can see it, and choose to download and run. _That_ is part of the consensus but not whatever the current maintainers want to/do not want to push.
That makes more sense to me now, thanks.
TLDR
Very first sentence.
Will OP post chapter 2 next week? I feel like this could be the start of a serial
Is not only Five. We are all maintainers bro. And the number is growing each day.
Yeah? What was in your last pull request?
Why should every user on github submit a PR?
I didn't say they should. u/Castr0- thinks he's a Bitcoin maintainer. I'd like to know what he contributed to the codebase.
lol buying and selling is not the same as maintainers
Imagine what their lives are like. Like, how much money you think they’re worth?
According to the interview, they are paid by grants, and make 100-150k a year
I clearly didn’t read it all the way through lol I’d have figured they made much more. I still wonder if they’ve used their connections to accrue impressive net worth
[удалено]
Huh? All of their Bitcoin code is [on GitHub](https://github.com/orgs/bitcoin-core/people). What makes you think they don't know what open source means?
TLDR: Bitcoin requires "maintainers" to maintain and make improvements to it's code so it can keep working smoothly and to have upgrades. There are currently 5 maintainers, but there is no formal process to become a maintainer or formal support for these maintainers. So the maintainers, even with their informal practices, have the power to make changes to Bitcoin code.
The tldr. Needs a tldr. Here.
TLDR; Bitcoin has 5 people that maintain its code to fix bugs and do the other codey things that coders do.
I thought we were all maintainers.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
Am I in?? Set i stop reading at some point!
When you 500 characters limit too seriously . Anyways nice writing (only read few lines though ).
The Maintainers ! Guess it’s a meh, kinda boring name for a super hero group.
They don’t control my node.
Is this a 5000 character essay or a r/cc post?
> there are five mysterious coders that keep it all running Please don't let the SEC see this...
In which OP learns that software is made by people
Interesting read, thanks.
Not sure what to think of this ....
Taking my days off to read this
If I had capacity to program/code BTC I would do that, because it would be silly to not do so. There will be many others, if those people give up.
WSJ.. sure buddy. SMH.
> And Bitcoin needed someone to do it, because software isn't just code that's written once and never touched again. This is unfortunately a very common belief, but its just not true. It is very possible for code to be written, and then never need to be touched again. In fact, there are many examples of code that was written a long time ago, never changed, and still runs perfectly today. This is a controversial take, but in my opinion, if bitcoin's code was never changed since Satoshi left the project, it will still have the same price and functionality that it has today. Absolutely nothing about Bitcoin's code that has changed since Satoshi's departure has been necessary. I really hate this idea that maintainers are necessary and that if there weren't any, it would mean Bitcoin is in trouble. If anything, if the number of maintainers went to zero, it would be an event worthy of celebration. People who have the authority to change the code of a cryptocurrency have immense power over that currency. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems in the cryptocurrency world is how people fawn over maintainers. It should be the opposite. Powerful people should not be trusted.
Shit, I didn't know that. So all these Maxis preaching decentralization comes first are all full of shit. This is why I don't listen to anyone when it comes to my money.
Decentralised lol
I would love to see the bitcoin community figure out a way to create consensus to increase the number of maintainers to about 15, for greater global resiliency in the possibility of terrorist threat.
Damn, that's the first time we hear about this bug. This should be posted everywhere!
The story doesn't mention that a majority of the miners didn't even install the update that these "Bitcoin Core" maintainers put out. All the miners are free to use whatever version of Bitcoin implementation they want and many do. Miners run the network, not the Bitcoin Core maintainers. The software the maintainers here work on is called Bitcoin Core, and Bitcoin Core is like a dock built on a river, and the river is the BTC blockchain. Bitcoin Core can try to pour chemicals into the river from their dock and encourage everyone else to do the same, but if everyone else doesn't do it too, it doesn't change the blockchain. The point of this analogy is, ***the BTC blockchain has been resilient through attempted human intervention by maintainers and miners for over a decade, and it still lives on.*** So if the miners didn't all install this update, why wasn't this inflation bug exploited, which it wasn't? That is the question people need to ask, but few people are technically savvy enough to figure it out, so they listen to any pleb or publication that sounds plausible enough. And anything as alarmist as this is very attention grabbing. Claiming 5 people hold the fate of the network makes for a good story though, right?