Bitcoin Developer

Jack Dorsey To Launch A Legal Defense Fund For Bitcoin Developers

12/01/2022 by Idelto Editor

The initiative seeks to minimize legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively contributing to Bitcoin.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block and ex-CEO of Twitter, has proposed creating a nonprofit organization to protect the rights and interests of open-source Bitcoin developers, who are often subject to “litigation” and “threats.”

Dorsey explained in an email sent to the bitcoin-dev mailing list on January 12 that the nonprofit’s intention is to defend Bitcoin developers from these threats in an attempt to prevent contributors and maintainers from capitulating, often a reality as many lack legal support.

“The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a nonprofit entity that aims to minimize legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively developing Bitcoin and related projects such as the Lightning Network, Bitcoin privacy protocols, and the like,” the email read.

In October 2021, Bitcoin Core maintainer Jonas Schnelli stepped down from the project citing increased “legal risks for Bitcoin developers” and suggesting that new contributors “join anonymously.” In December, two other developers also left the project. Samuel Dobson said early that month he would no longer maintain Bitcoin Core after three years of dedication to focus on his Ph.D., followed a few days later by John Newbery, who stepped away from working on Bitcoin development saying that he was “moving on to other things.”

Dorsey’s initiative aims to prevent such losses from happening by “finding and retaining defense counsel, developing litigation strategy, and paying legal bills,” per the email co-signed by the Fund’s board, composed by himself, Chaincode Labs co-founder Alex Morcos, and academic Martin White.

“This is a free and voluntary option for developers to take advantage of if they so wish,” the email said. “The Fund will start with a corps of volunteer and part-time lawyers. The board of the Fund will be responsible for determining which lawsuits and defendants it will help defend.”

According to the email, the Fund’s first activity will be to take over and coordinate the defense of the Tulip Trading lawsuit, in which Craig Wright claims he is a victim of theft of the private keys connected to billions of dollars worth of bitcoin that were drained in the Mt. Gox hack. Many defendants are prolific Bitcoin developers and Bitcoin Core maintainers, including Schnelli, Wladimir Van Der Laan, Marco Falke, Pieter Wuille, Peter Todd, and Matthew Corallo, among others.

The email also said that the initiative isn’t seeking additional funding at the moment, but may do so if needed in the future at the board’s discretion.

BitMEX Announces Two New Grants To Bitcoin Developers

23/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

The bitcoin exchange will support the work of Rene Pickhardt and Chris Coverdale with $33,333 each over the next eight months.

Bitcoin trading platform BitMEX announced two new open-source Bitcoin developer grants to Rene Pickhardt and Chris Coverdale, marking the end of the company’s 2021 grant program. Rene and Chris have each received an eight-month grant of $33,333 until May 2022, which would be equivalent to $50,000 per annum. According to the announcement, this interim funding is designed to help aspiring developers move into full-time Bitcoin development.

“With the addition of Rene Pickhardt and Chris Coverdale to the open source Bitcoin developer grant programme, that makes six open source developers in total,” said BitMEX CEO Alex Höptner, per the announcement. “We’re proud of our long term commitment to Bitcoin and open source technology. We are delighted to welcome Rene and Chris to the program and will continue to support Bitcoin development for years to come.”

Rene will work on improving the reliability of the Lightning Network’s payment process. In March, he published a paper introducing probabilistic path-finding, which became the foundation of his follow-up work on optimally reliable and cheap payment flows, submitted in July. Rene intends to implement his new path-finding algorithm coined “Pickhardt Payments” as a library that can be leveraged by nodes, wallets, and service providers in the Lightning Network. BitMEX’s grant will allow Rene to further develop his optimal payment flows algorithm and work on the several follow-up questions laid out by his paper.

Chris, on the other hand, will be focusing on bitcoin mining. The developer will work on building an implementation of the Stratum V2 Bitcoin mining pool protocol, which he has been working on since February. The protocol allows end miners to select transactions and contract blocks themselves, rather than delegating these choices to the mining pool operator, improving data transfer efficiency and the censorship resistance of Bitcoin. Slush Pool/Braiins are also working on an implementation of that protocol. Still, BitMEX’s grant seeks to empower Chris in his independent implementation as well as improve the chances of success for Stratum V2.

In addition to Rene and Chris, BitMEX also supports Bitcoin Core maintainer Michael Ford, Gleb Naumenko, Utreexo developer Calvin Kim, and Bitcoin Core developer Sjors Provoost. BitMEX shared that all six grantees have funding secured until May 2022, when the company will assess renewals.

Senegalese Bitcoin Developer: Bitcoin Is A Weapon To Fight Oppression

15/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

Fodé Diop explains why Bitcoin and Lightning have the power to end monetary colonialism in the developing world.

Fodé Diop, a Bitcoin and Lightning developer from Senegal, has recently shared his thoughts on why Bitcoin is so important to billions of people worldwide that are still victims of monetary colonialism. The developer highlighted the central role that Bitcoin’s open-source technology could play in providing financial sovereignty to those in the developing world.

“Today, people like myself have the means and the power to fight, and there has never been a time in the world like that until Bitcoin came in 2008,” Diop told Reason. “Everything is possible actually, because money is everything.”

Diop was accepted to Emporia State University in Kansas to study engineering and play basketball as a high school senior in Senegal. His father had saved just enough money for his tuition, but before enrolling, their savings were cut in half overnight due to a deal spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and France. To this day, the IMF and the French government still control the currency of 15 African countries.

“If you are in a country where your money might be devalued on the whim of other nations interfering with the local economy, storing your money in Bitcoin might be a better deal to preserve your wealth,” said Diop.

Bitcoin didn’t exist when the CFA franc, which had been pegged to the French franc for Diop’s entire life at 1 to 50, got devalued to 1 to 100 in 1994 after France conceded to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank.

“The cruel irony was that the economic fate of millions of Senegalese was completely out of their own hands. No amount of protest could overthrow their economic masters,” wrote the Human Rights Foundation’s Alex Gladstein for Bitcoin Magazine in “Fighting Monetary Colonialism with Open-Source Code,” an article that also recounts Diop’s story.

The Senegalese Bitcoin developer echoed Gladstein’s remarks to Reason, saying that “the local people felt robbed, because their purchasing power was cut in half overnight,” and there was nothing they could do about it. It wasn’t until Diop encountered Bitcoin that he started to glimpse how his people could fight monetary colonialism.

“When I read the [Bitcoin] white paper I said, this is a weapon for us to fight oppression. I feel like maybe governments are still threatened, but to me, open source technology is just beautiful,” Diop said.

Bitcoin’s open-source technology, along with the scaling and empowerment brought by Lightning, gives citizens worldwide the very weapons they need to fight the oppressor and reclaim their monetary independence.

“I believe that our work is so important that we have to do it no matter what the consequences are,” said Diop. “You can leverage this open source technology to fight the oppressor, so why not use it?”

Indeed, the Senegalese developer has been doing just that. In July, Diop announced the launch of Bitcoin Developers Academy to teach students how to build Bitcoin applications from the ground up using the Rust programming language.

Empowered by open-source code and an antifragile peer-to-peer monetary network that cannot be debased or controlled by third parties, Diop, his students, and millions of others are now able to regain sovereignty over their finances — whether the IMF and the World Bank like it or not.

From Exxon to Crypto: the Story of Joey King on the Humans of Bitcoin Podcast

15/05/2019 by Idelto Editor

Joey King, a developer at Bitcoin.com, is the latest character to have shared his story on the Humans of Bitcoin podcast with Matt Aaron. The interview covers how he went from working in the oil industry to being a crypto programmer to how he sees the propaganda efforts of Napoleon reflected in the market today.

Also Read: Why Cryptocurrency Investors Are Renouncing Their US Citizenship

Listen to The Education of Joey King

In the first part of the interview, Joey King talks a little bit about his early years, like growing up outside his homeland of the U.S., and coming back to get an American higher education. Much of the segment also focuses on his time working for oil giant Exxon and what it taught him about the inner operations of big businesses, government control of the economy, geopolitics, international banking and other related topics. From there the Bitcoin.com developer describes how he first heard about cryptocurrency and the path that took him from his work for Exxon all the way here.

The second part of the interview focuses on the current cryptocurrency ecosystem, the problems and threats it faces, as well as how the way forward will look. King talked about some surprising lessons that bitcoin cash (BCH) supporters need to take from political and military history. The developer also candidly shared his personal experience as an investor during the highs and lows of the volatile cryptocurrency markets and how it affects your better judgment.

Make sure to check out the Bitcoin.com Podcast Network to see all the available shows and follow them on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Former Core Developer Mike Hearn Returns for Some Bitcoin Cash Q&A

06/04/2018 by Idelto Editor

On April 5 the former bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn came back to do an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on the Reddit forum /r/btc. It’s been a while since Hearn has chatted with the bitcoin community, and one could say he left the development scene a few years ago due to the vitriolic strife over the scaling debate. Hearn explains ever since the birth of the Bitcoin Cash network he’s been getting a lot of emails asking him to return and help develop the nascent BCH blockchain.

Also read: New Karate Combat League Arena Features Bitcoin Symbol

Mike Hearn Discusses Bitcoin Cash and His Project Corda With the Community

Mike Hearn is a well-known figure within the bitcoin community, as he was the first developer to author the Bitcoinj client a library that uses Java and connects with the bitcoin network. Further, Hearn has talked with Satoshi Nakamoto numerous times over email communications. The developer was also a contributor to the bitcoin core development team and he left in January 2016 due to the scaling debate, and rising network fees. Since then Hearn has joined the banked-backed R3 Cev project, and he’s been building a distributed ledger project called ‘Corda.’

Hearn has a lot to say about Corda throughout his AMA and says the project “scales a lot better than bitcoin, even though bitcoin could have scaled to the levels needed for large payment networks with enough work and time.” Hearn explains that this is possible because Corda doesn’t use the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. Corda doesn’t have a native cryptocurrency as Hearn says the protocol is an app platform much like ethereum so coins can be created on top of the Corda ledger.

‘Worth Considering How Frequently You Want to Hard Fork’

Hearn then discusses what he thinks about the past hard forks and even the latest May 15 fork slated to bump the block size up to 32 MB.

“Hard forking is an implementation mechanism, not a governance mechanism. Governance is a process, and often an institution, for arriving at a decision — A hard fork is just the software event that makes it real,” Hearn states during his scheduled AMA. “I note with some alarm that bitcoin cash is planning a timed hard fork in just one month, with no attempt to measure support or whether people are ready or even agree — The content is not going to be controversial in this community now, but a lot of organisations would find it hard to schedule and test a software upgrade on one month’s notice,” he adds.

There’s a risk that miners who do upgrade will be split onto a minority chain by accident even if everyone intends to upgrade, and have to roll back, making them even more conservative than they already are.

Bitcoin Cash Strongly Resembles the Bitcoin Community of 2014

Hearn then goes on to respond to another question and reveals that he thinks the bitcoin cash ecosystem strongly resembles the BTC community back in 2014. He tells the /r/btc AMA participants to “liberate themselves from just proceeding along the path Satoshi imagined and be willing to think radical, even heretical thoughts.”

“That experiment [Bitcoin] was tried and it didn’t work. It’s tempting to think that what happened was a freak one-off occurrence, but I don’t think it was,” the former core developer states. “I think it was inevitable given the structure and psychological profile of the community at the time. So just trying to ‘get back on track’ as I see it, is nowhere near radical enough.”

The developer says the bitcoin cash community does need to address methods to deal with certain conflicts. Hearn states the conflicts as being:

Bitter, enduring conflicts between two opposing camps of roughly equal size who can never make up.
Very different attitudes towards perceived experts, intellectuals, towards academic qualifications etc.
A win-at-any-cost mentality by one of the camps.
Different views on the validity of the preferences of the majority / “will of the people” etc.

These conflicts cannot be avoided but they can be contained and channeled. If the bitcoin community doesn’t establish systems for containing this conflict it will arise again over some issue that appears superficially different to the block size debate, but underneath looks much the same.

Hearn further states he won’t be joining the current developers working on bitcoin cash network and plans to continue exploring his Corda project.

“I don’t plan on returning to bitcoin but if you’d like to know what sort of things I’d have been researching or doing, ask about these things. I do not own any BCH,” Hearn adds.

What do you think about Mike Hearn’s /r/btc forum AMA? Let us know what you think about Hearn’s responses in the comments below.

Images via Pixabay, and Youtube.

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