One of Bitcoin’s most important security features, a crucial property that makes the system trustless, is its open source nature. Because Bitcoin’s code is open source, anyone able to read code can check for themselves whether it does what it’s supposed to do.
Plus, as per Linus’s Law : Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
But open source code doesn’t necessarily eliminate all risk. Users still need to trust that the software they run on their computers actually reflects the open source code as it should. To eliminate this risk, Bitcoin developers have developed a fierce security policy which goes beyond the open source nature of Bitcoin itself: “Gitian Building.”
Gitian Building is even increasingly embraced by the wider open source community. Development teams behind Tor, Debian, Mozilla and other open source projects are embracing the practice spearheaded by the Bitcoin Core development team, and it might very well become an open source standard before long.
Here’s why Gitian Building is important, and how it works.
On Source Code and Binaries
The problem that Gitian Building solves, at its heart, is that humans and computers do not speak the same language.
Bitcoin Core is written in C++, one of several programming languages. Programming languages – while obviously very different from actual languages – can be written and read by humans. And it’s this C++ code that’s open source, and therefore checkable and verifiable.But computer CPUs cannot actually read these programming languages. Instead, CPUs have their own “ machine language ”: binaries. Binaries, as the name suggests, are often represented as “ones” and “zeros.” But more important: binaries are not readable by humans.For a program written in human readable code (such as C++) to be executed on a computer, it must be “translated” into binaries. This “translation” process is called “compiling,” and is done […]
