No one controls the focal point for Bitcoin development, said Jameson Lopp in his latest blogpost.
The Bitcoin veteran, who has been a crucial part of crypto developments since the beginning, opened recently about how developers run the world’s biggest decentralized financial network without fragiling it. He also attempted to answer individuals and groups that criticize bitcoin core, a large group of software veterans, programmers and even newbies, for controlling the network’s present and future developments by taking unilateral decisions.
How Bitcoin Development Works
The central point throughout the Lopp’s post remained how Bitcoin Core reaches a consensus whether or not it would merge new code proposals into their GitHub repository. Lopp explained that while the core has “maintainer” accounts that have the ability to merge code into the master branch, their duty is more janitorial than authoritative. That said, the core picks maintainer for their provable contributions over a period of time.
Each maintainer holds a unique PGP key and only these encrypted jargons could commit merge codes to the current framework, he added. A malicious actor, in this case, could still use its administrative privileges to inject code into the GitHub repository without maintainer’s consent – through a Pull Request feature.
“While these keys are tied to known identities, it’s still not safe to assume that it will always be the case — a key could be compromised and we wouldn’t know unless the original key owner notified the other maintainers,” Lopp