Core Developers Call for New Bitcoin Software Strategy at MIT

By November 18, 2015Bitcoin Business

mit, gavin andresen Bitcoin Core developers Gavin Andresen, Cory Fields and Wladimir van der Laan expanded on their larger vision for development of the open-source bitcoin project at an event held yesterday by their new employer, MIT Media Lab. In the hour-and-a-half session, moderated by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, Andresen voiced his belief that bitcoin needs to evolve away from having one dominant software implementation of the bitcoin software, stating that he believes the project to be in the midst of this transition. The remark comes amid a larger debate focused on updating bitcoin’s software to allow for a greater number of transactions to be included in blocks, and found the developers seeking to add nuance to the debate. For example, Cory Fields, compared the current situation as analogous to when the Internet primarily relied on one browser. "Internet Explorer 6 at one point defined the internet," Fields said at the event. "There are complications in bitcoin that make it harder, but we’re in the process of trying to get away from that one true implementation that we have now." Overall, the talk found the developers seeking to make known their vision for an open-source project that, despite being the subject of more than $900m in venture capital investment, remains mired in governance considerations and philosophical debates. The process found Andresen, bitcoin’s long-time maintainer, offering his interpretations of how the project should be defined: "There are three things I think of when I hear bitcoin, the digital currency, the digital cash of the Internet, that’s lowercase ‘b’ bitcoin, there’s bitcoin the code that runs the network and then there’s bitcoin the protocol." Fields said that, to date, development discussions have so far grouped together management of the code with the protocol itself. "A lot of other protocols […]

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