Bitcoin Getting Serious? MIT Partially Funding Bitcoin Core Development
Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields have taken their development efforts back to school, in a sense. Andresen, who lives about two hours from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Amherst, Mass., wrote on his blog yesterday: I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the MIT Media Lab's newly launched Digital Currency Initiative to continue my work on the Bitcoin project. So, does this mean that MIT has taken over from the Foundation as the center for "core development"? No. The Bitcoin Foundation was never the center of development; the Bitcoin Core open-source....
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The Bitcoin Core development team launched a “Sponsorship Programme” on Monday that intends to provide an easy access point for the Bitcoin industry to support Bitcoin's long-time reference client with both funding and other types of contributions. Bitcoin Core developer and Ciphrex CEO Eric Lombrozo: “The entire ecosystem depends on projects like Bitcoin Core, but most companies haven't really had a way of contributing resources for this effectively. We want to offer that, and encourage greater involvement in the development process.” The sponsorship program is not the first attempt to....
Funding Bitcoin development seems to have always been problematic. While the Bitcoin industry collectively has raised more than a billion dollars worth of investment over the past years, development of the Free and Open Source Software the industry largely relies on has always had trouble gathering sufficient funds and manpower for development. Several arrangements to raise funds have been tried over the years – but with varying degrees of success and longevity. Bitcoin Core, considered by many to be Bitcoin's “reference client,” therefore, announced a “Sponsorship Programme” earlier this....
The Bitcoin Foundation has announced that it will seek to wind down its education, outreach and public policy initiatives as it turns its focus to core development. The news coincides with the publication today of three surveys conducted by the Bitcoin Foundation suggesting that many community members, both inside and outside of the organization, want to see it adopt a stronger focus on core development. The organisation wrote in its official blog post: "In the beginning, the foundation did it all - public policy, education and outreach, core development - primarily because there was no....
Bitcoin Core has announced a new sponsorship program, a move that finds the largely volunteer community that develops the open-source bitcoin software opening its development process up to funding from industry stakeholders. The announcement comes weeks after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a $900,000 support fund aimed at promoting bitcoin development. In that instance, however, the funds are being directed to three specific developers – Gavin Andresen, Cory Fields and Wladimir van der Laan. In interview, Van der Laan, the project's lead maintainer told CoinDesk that....
Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen has publicly voiced his support for the organisation's plan to focus solely on core development. In a new blog post, Andresen defended prior efforts to support core development and stated that the Bitcoin Foundation is just one of several organizations that provide funding for the oversight of the bitcoin protocol. The statements follow the Bitcoin Foundation's formal announcement of the plan, which will find it shedding its education, public policy and outreach operations, as well as the healthy debate about the organization's pivot that....