Writing on Bitcoin Core development: CoreDev retrospectives, open-source funding, testing, and the culture of decentralized development.
The Decentralized Development Paradox
The decentralized development paradox is simple – decentralized development processes that give bitcoin its strength and resilience come at a significant cost to efficiency and effectiveness. The tension this creates looms over Bitcoin Core the software project, where nobody is “in charge,” and therefore, nobody is compelled to do anything.
Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2024-2025
For a sixth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. Below is a summary of the results in a format similar to previous years’ surveys.
Evolution of Bitcoin Core Priority Projects
In April 2023, Bitcoin Core developers initiated the Priority Projects experiment to address a recognized bias in the development process towards smaller patches over more significant projects. The initiative aimed to help maintainers prioritize significant projects when facing competing demands for review attention.
Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2023-2024
For a fifth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. Below is a summary of the results in a format similar to last year’s survey.
Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2022-2023
For a fourth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. Below is a summary of the results in a format similar to last year’s survey.
Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2021-2022
For a third year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. Below is a summary of the results in a format similar to last year’s survey.
Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2020-2021
For a second year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they’re able to contribute effectively. Below is a similar presentation of the results in a format similar to last year’s survey.
How to Help Secure Bitcoin’s Immediate Future
Working in education affords me the opportunity to meet lots of prospective contributors who are eager to contribute to Bitcoin. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal does an excellent job describing the dynamics of large-scale open-source projects and Bitcoin Core suffers from many of the challenges and extractive contributions captured in the book. Recently, I was talking with Jarol, an up-and-coming prospect, on how to add value to the project. It’s a natural first reaction for new contributors to feel the urge to fire up their text editor and open a pull-request. Writing code feels creative and getting code merged into Bitcoin Core delivers a dopamine hit that can keep a contributor chasing for a long time. From what I’ve observed, the best way to make an immediate impact on Bitcoin Core only has one road to success. Review.
Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2019-2020
In January, John Newbery sent out a Bitcoin Core contributor survey in preparation for the March Coredev meeting, which was later canceled due to COVID-19. Given that the year is coming to a close, I thought it might be good timing to retrospect on those responses (even though they are now somewhat outdated) in preparation for another survey in early 2021.