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Climate imperialism is coming. Pakistan and India on the cusp of peace? Justice for Ajay Lalwani. Other developers can then subscribe to that repository and submit new source code as suggestions for improvement. Sometimes, a group of users manages the repository instead of an individual. Additionally, these platforms provide revision control features, which track every change in the source code so that they can be reverted, if necessary. In fact, these version control systems are central tools in collaborative software development in general, in open- source and proprietary contexts alike.
The technical interaction between these platforms and their users is strongly influenced by the use of revision control software.
So that every participant in the cryptocurrency network sees the same transaction history, a new block is accepted by agreement across the entire network. More investors, seeking a safe haven investment similar to gold, bought into the idea of a decentralized currency. Google Scholar Dow, J. Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. This implementation draft can then be submitted as an ordinary source code pull request using the participation process described above.
The platforms provide teams with a central storage for the source code while publishing it at the same time. Some platforms also offer social networking functions that enable users to stay up-to-date and discuss and review changes to the code. In this way, these platforms help manage projects and organize the collaborative workflow and, in a sense, determine the primary categories of participation. The social interaction on that platform is where the refinement of the code can best be observed and is therefore a good starting point to examine the governance group behind Bitcoin.
On GitHub, registered users can work on the code repositories that belong to their accounts and make use of the described features like version control. Users can also work on the source code together with others by adding collaborators to a repository. Members of an organization can be structured in teams and granted different levels of permission:. Bitcoin is one organization on GitHub. The source code of the core client and several other repositories are managed through this organization structure.
This means, in essence, that anyone with the ability to program and the will to participate could be seen as an aspirant for membership of the governance group. Because any person could submit snippets of new source code to the organization, anyone could, in theory, influence the governance structure of Bitcoin. Nevertheless, in the end, decisions are made—or executed at least—by a team of core developers because only they have the technical permissions to accept submissions. So let us take a closer look at how this group is composed. The approaches may differ among the several software projects more or less, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss those similarities and slight variances within the open-source scene.
Many statements in this section might be characteristic for open-source software and others not. Our goal is only to conceive an idea—how the distributed governance group behind Bitcoin is formed—while having in mind that it is a distinctive example of open-source programming. According to the Bitcoin page on GitHub, people have contributed to the original client,[26] but only seven members in the organization are currently listed as core developers.
Becoming a member of an organization is not quite as simple: the owner or an administrator of the organization must add the user. It is not clear who exactly has this central membership authority in the case of Bitcoin.
Nor we did find any evidence for institutionalized rules of entry or exit laid down for this governance group. It seems fair to assume, then, that current core developers ask an ordinary member to join the core team if this user has made numerous valuable contributions over a certain period of time. The metaphor of a meritocracy also helps us understand how the group determines what code submissions are approved.
As noted above, members must approve code submissions. Generally, developers copy the whole code into their own personal accounts, work on it, and finally submit a request for the organization to add the code proposal into the repository. Eventually, another core developer closes the request or pulls it into the development code line. Our analysis of recent code changes to the Bitcoin client shows that trivial code proposals i. In contrast, non-trivial changes must achieve consensus before they are adopted. Core developers submit their own code changes using the same processes of participation; in many cases the core developers open their own proposals to public debate before pulling them into the main development line.
The most common avenue for participation is revising the source code, as described above. As we have seen, both ordinary and core contributors can propose new source code, which will either be accepted or rejected based on public discussion. BIPs are essentially concept papers on potential new functionalities in the Bitcoin software.
In most cases these new functionalities require more sophisticated changes or additions to the source code than smaller features or bug fixes. If a developer wants to add a new feature to the Bitcoin software, she can author a specification draft. This document must then be sent to the developer mailing list, to which the development community subscribes.
After discussion on the mailing list, the draft is added to the list of BIPs if a majority accepts the listing of the proposal. BIPs thus allow substantive debate on the changes in the protocol even before developers put any effort into programming source code. Furthermore, people without the will or the ability to program are able to take part in the discussion on the further evolution of Bitcoin.
This implementation draft can then be submitted as an ordinary source code pull request using the participation process described above. Jeff Garzik, a core developer of Bitcoin, made an insightful remark about the dynamics of the two mechanisms of participation. He told a news website that the Bitcoin community considered itself very conservative when it comes to new functionalities.
The core developers generally did not accept completely new features if these were made as concrete source code proposals. Instead the core development team would always seek to reach a high level of consensus among the Bitcoin community about new functionality. The development of multi-signature transactions began in the form of two different BIPs. Reviewing the discussions around those BIPs in the mailing list archives, we found several threads already discussing the details of these proposals. A possible explanation for this is that the community had already recognized the necessity of such a feature.
In the end, the BIP process helped to confirm consensus on the functionality and establish consensus on side issues of how to implement the arbitration mechanism in the Bitcoin system. Debates on new features could therefore also take place with the involvement of other stakeholders in the Bitcoin ecosystem like the miners, the users, etc.
As we have seen in sections C and D, decisions of core developers are shaped by the social norms of the Bitcoin development community and by the tools that are used to enable community participation and collaborative development. Consensus in the community is a hard guideline for decisions because this benchmark is strictly enforced as a requirement for implementation of proposals.
It is for this reason that the group is inherently suspicious of new features, and might even reject new features in the face of community support. Seven founding members established the Bitcoin Foundation in September Understanding the interaction between the Foundation and the core developers is challenging to answer just by looking at the founding documents of the Bitcoin Foundation. There are three different categories of membership: founding members, industry members, and individual members.