Did Blockstream control Bitcoin? — the block-size war's biggest 'centralization' charge
Weighing the 'Blockstream controls Bitcoin' charge against the documentary record: where it comes from, and how each link in the chain holds up.
Keyword reference — entries that mention this term in body prose.
12 entries reference this keyword in body prose.
Weighing the 'Blockstream controls Bitcoin' charge against the documentary record: where it comes from, and how each link in the chain holds up.
Cross-cutting reading of Bitcoin's 2015–2017 block-size war by phase, faction, and turning point: Bitcoin XT, BIP148 UASF, the New York Agreement, Bitcoin Cash, SegWit2x cancellation.
Why Bitcoin's 2015-2017 fork wars ran as identity contests, not OSS disputes: the post-2011 authority vacuum, the economic weight on rule choices, and the three layers that bound code to currency.
Russian-Canadian programmer (1994–). Bitcoin community member from 2011, Bitcoin Magazine co-founder, pybitcointools author, Ethereum whitepaper author (late 2013).
Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen released Bitcoin XT 0.11A, a Bitcoin Core fork implementing BIP 101 — 8 MB blocks doubling every two years. The launch opened the public phase of the block-size war.
Editorial reading of how the 2014 'Bitcoin Core' rebrand reshaped Bitcoin's authority vocabulary — PR #3408 internal disagreement, the 2015-2017 fork episodes, and Hearn's 2025 retrospective regret.
On November 20, 2011, Bitcoin v0.5 shipped with the Crypto++ SHA-256 subset removed and replaced by OpenSSL. Wei Dai's library, a direct codebase dependency since v0.1, was gone.
Long-time Bitcoin Core contributor (gmaxwell), Blockstream co-founder, co-developer of libsecp256k1. Authored CoinJoin, co-designed Confidential Transactions. Known for deep technical write-ups.
Dutch developer (handle laanwj). Built the original bitcoin-qt GUI; succeeded Gavin Andresen as Bitcoin Core lead maintainer (April 2014 - August 2022); withdrew merge privileges in February 2023.
On January 15, 2016, Bitcoin Core v0.12 replaced OpenSSL with libsecp256k1 — Wuille and Maxwell's custom elliptic-curve library — for consensus-critical ECDSA verification.
Complete record of all four developers who had commit access to Bitcoin's SourceForge SVN repository. 252 revisions were recorded from August 30, 2009 to September 13, 2011.
Bitcoin's migration from SourceForge SVN to GitHub, and the chronological record of developers who received commit access to the GitHub repository in 2011.