Well-known Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille has stepped down from his role as Bitcoin Core maintainer and handed over the baton to Gloria Zhao. Wuille will continue to contribute to the development.
Bitcoin Core is the most widely used software for bitcoin, featuring both a full node full node Software that connects to the Bitcoin network, downloading and verifying the entire blockchain. Because the verification is done locally, there is no need to trust a third party such as a bitcoin wallet. The software is leading and counts by far the most Bitcoin developers. The development is done on the basis of open source, on github.
The code is fairly transparent and anyone can, in principle, contribute to it. New code is not added automatically, but goes through a critical approval process. If the community approves the code, it is the role of the so-called maintainers to merge the new and old code on github. You can read more about this in an extensive article by bitcoin security expert Jameson Lopp
It is an important role that requires a lot of responsibility, but it is also described by some as boring: as a kind of caretaker of the project. Maintainers are there to keep track of the project on github and thus have a lot of access rights. For security reasons, only a few maintainers have been appointed.
Changing of the Guard
For a long time, the Belgian Bitcoin veteran Pieter ‘sipa’ Wuille was one of the maintainers, but last week he indicated that he would stop. He submitted a request on github to revoke his maintainer access.
Incidentally, he only retires from the role of maintainer but not contributing to projects, he says via Twitter: “To be clear: I will not stop contributing code, reviewing, and all projects I am involved in. It is just so I don’t do much work as a maintainer anymore, so it’s time to let my privileges expire” .
The same day it was announced that Gloria ‘glozow’ Zhao will succeed him. Previously, a vote took place via github, with most of them agreeing. She previously worked on improving the mempool and Replace-by-Fee (RBF) transactions, among other things.??
Six maintainers
Besides Zhao, there are five other Bitcoin Core maintainers: Marco Falke, Michael Ford, Hennadii Stepanov, Andrew Chow and Wladimir J. van der Laan.
Nice to know: Van der Laan is, as his name suggests, a Dutchman and also the longest serving maintainer – since 2011.
