It is a question that many in the crypto community must have asked themselves at least once. The news of Wladimir van der Laan taking a temporary hiatus, prompted us to explore what some might consider to be an improbable, yet highly impactful situation. A Bitcoin Core developer that is also a maintainer of the project's GitHub account (i.e., someone who can “merge code into the master branch”) is a rare commodity. To put this in perspective, if a Bitcoin Core developer is a black belt, then someone like van der Laan is a third-degree black belt. To set the …

On September 7, Bitcoin Core developer Wladimir van der Laan tweeted that he may be "done with coins" all together. He later confirmed to Cointelegraph that he was indeed taking a break from his duties as a Core developer and one of the custodians of the project’s Github repository. One of the factors that led him to this decision was a Twitter storm that lasted for days and was caused by the renaming of a variable that specifies a list of characters that cannot appear in filenames due to operating system restrictions. Source: Bitcoin Github repository. How could something this …

Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen today proposed a hard fork change for Bitcoin XT in order to allow for an increased block size limit on the Bitcoin network. So far, however, it has failed to appease most critics of his previous proposals to increase the block size limit. Hard Fork It is widely agreed that at some point an increase of the block size limit will be needed to allow the Bitcoin network to handle more than seven transactions per second. The Bitcoin Core development team, however, has so far not been able to reach consensus on the correct timing …