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.
Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
7 entries
Weighing the 'Blockstream controls Bitcoin' charge against the documentary record: where it comes from, and how each link in the chain holds up.
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.
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.
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.
Bitcoin's migration from SourceForge SVN to GitHub, and the chronological record of developers who received commit access to the GitHub repository in 2011.
Peter Todd proposed BIP 65, introducing OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY — an opcode locking transaction outputs until a future time. Deployed as a soft fork, enabling escrow and payment channels.