Bitcoin Magazine
The Core Issue: The Role and History of Bitcoin Core Maintainers
Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!
In the beginning there was only Satoshi Nakamoto and a powerful idea. Nakamoto started working on Bitcoin as far back as 2007[1], and as far as we know worked on it entirely himself, until a few weeks after his release of the Bitcoin white paper on October 31st 2008[2], when Nakamoto took on the first Contributor to the project, Hal Finney[3].
Running bitcoin— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
Finney, it turns out, was critical to Bitcoin’s early success. According to recently surfaced emails[4] Nakamoto’s node was unable to receive “incoming connections” for a couple of days after the minting of the genesis block, resulting in Finney being the only node other users could connect to. Nakamoto told Finney in a private email “Your node receiving incoming connections was the main thing keeping the network going the first day or two.”
Finney was also one of the first known reviewers and contributors to Bitcoin, Nakamoto shared the software with him and a few other cypherpunk legends before it was shown to the world. Finney even contributed code to the project before its first release, as revealed by Ray Dillinger who Nakamoto also shared pre-released versions of the code with.
In an interview conducted by Nathaniel Popper published on Dillinger’s blog, he said[5]; “It was when we started talking about floating-point types in accounting code that I learned Finney was involved in the effort. Finney was reviewing the transaction scripting language, and both the code he had, and the code I had, interacted with the accounting code.”The timeline roughly matches the activity page of the oldest Sourceforge web archive we have of the Bitcoin project page, where Nakamoto added Finney to the project on December 18, 2008. This decision by Nakamoto marks the first instance of Maintainer level permissions possibly being held by anyone other than Nakamoto. It is possible and likely that Finney gained developer status within the Sourceforge Bitcoin project, allowing him to download, modify and upload versions to Bitcoin to the site.
So, besides being a Contributor, reviewer, and a node runner, was Hal Finney also a Bitcoin Maintainer?
The strictest definition of a Maintainer is someone who has ‘commit access’ or write access to the primary development branch of a software project. Contributors to a project like Bitcoin may ‘commit’ code to development branches of the project, and submit ‘pull requests’ to have the code integrated to the master branch, but those updates can only be ‘merged’ into the master branch by its Maintainers[6] through “commit access”..
By that definition, Finney may very well count as the first Maintainer after Nakamoto, but being a Bitcoi
