Topic: Can the Bitcoin Core developers make crucial changes? (Read 74 times)

Sounds like bitcoin is kinda centralized to a handfull of maintainers who hold the keys. What happens if they all die in a car crash or become dictators?

As far as I understand, in theory, major changes could be proposed by Bitcoin Core developers (which actually has more than 900 people in it not just 5, as many people has mentioned in other replies), but even in the case when most of them are in support of a decision, they can't push it through. All in all, any modification to Bitcoin must achieve broad consensus among the greater Bitcoin community including miners, node operators, and users. Since Bitcoin is designed to be a decentralized model, no single group can force an outcome on it. For any modification or change to be implemented and take effect, it has to be adopted by a considerable number of nodes on the network.

So, while the majority of developers could technically force changes, those changes still must be accepted by the global Bitcoin community through some consensus mechanism, in a decentralized manner such that no single group can force key changes by themselves.

contributors make REQUESTS but the maintainers do the merging of those requests or reject them. and yes the maintainers can force merge their own code without anyone else. in short it needs the maintainers to decide. they govern bitcoin code

most contributors are not helping with code, but instead just spell checkers or translators. when you look at whom helms the code changes of the big features you see the same short list of names that do the real coding

in short contributors do not have the same power, access, privilege or rank of control as the maintainers
..
as for if another brand of a full node has equal chance of making a protocol change vs how easily core changing the protocol is just accepted without any notice/conflict/consent. well in recent years core have taken control and other brands of nodes if changing the protocol are treated as altcoin proposals, not bitcoin proposals. everything these days needs to go through the core maintainers governance to change bitcoins protocol

Van der Laan voluntarily gave up his access to the bitcoin client software after being at the helm for more than nine years. As the second successor to Bitcoin’s mysterious inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, he was one of the few individuals having final commit access to Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository.

Nakamoto first owned this administrator key and then transferred it to Gavin Andresen. When Andresen, who received direct instruction from Nakamoto on maintaining bitcoin’s code, stepped down from the project nine years ago, Van der Laan took over. Van der Laan has played the lead role in maintaining all aspects of Bitcoin’s development for even longer than Satoshi. He led all operations involving bug fixes, code reviews, upgrades, software maintenance, and dispute resolution.

Only five Bitcoin Core maintainers remain. With Van der Laan’s departure, Bitcoin’s development will now be steered by five people: Hennadii Stepanov, Michael Ford, Andrew Chow, Marko Falke, and Gloria Zhao.

Each is responsible for an aspect of Bitcoin; for example, Stepanov maintains the network’s graphical user interface, while Ford oversees the build system.

Gloria Zhao, the only woman in the maintainers’ team, writes and reviews the code that governs Bitcoin’s transaction validation process. Andrew Chow is in charge of programming for crypto wallets, which allow investors to store their bitcoin, while Marco Falke focuses on testing.

Together, these coders keep Bitcoin’s digital ledger up to date on its network’s thousands of computers. They must ensure that the software remains compatible with the latest versions of operating systems like Windows or MacOS and that it keeps up with transaction volumes.

Many of the cryptocurrency’s proponents claim that its current value and future potential are partly in the hands of these maintainers.

https://crypto.news/bitcoin-core-has-only-5-developers-left-as-key-maintainer-departs/

You sure did well, but, yeah, you can't be considered a tester in that regard. Only a helper for testers
Thanks for sharing your experience. Never did something similar to your case.

Oh, that's me. I constantly make transfers in the Bitcoin network and not only. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Why choose only one Bitcoin when there are other coins, tokens? Many people just don't know about the existence or just don't trust? What's going on? What to do?

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Naturally, there are many more Bitcoin network developers than 5. It has already become a truly grandiose project that has proven its viability and effectiveness to the entire world. Entire countries cannot be mistaken about this when they have adopted crypto at the official level.

No, no developer can make a significant change to the Bitcoin Blockchain. Also, as everyone else said, it's open source. You can contribute to it, so the number you came with (5 Devs) is very stupid and irrelevant to this conversation. Here is a screenshot of the GitHub Repo of number of contributors. And it's surely above 5... (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin)

If you are a developer who contribute to Bitcoin Core Developments, like code it, report bug, you are one of maintainers.
If you are a translator who contribute to Bitcoin Core, you are a maintainer.
If you are a Bitcoin node operator, you are a maintainer of Bitcoin blockchain decentralization.
If you are a Bitcoin user, you are a maintainer too because you make transactions, spend fees to keep the network alive.

Surely you can find more than 5 people are doing one of these maintaining contributions.

The short answer is no.

Any Bitcoin developer including Satoshi can't make crucial changes just because they want, because in order the proposal to be implemented, they need to get votes by majority of developers.

Just like in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, not all of them were accepted.

Anyone can make changes. It doesn't matter. What really matters is: who runs your software?

For example, I shared the code for mining coins on a CPU in testnets. And guess what: some people applied all of my changes, including accepting blocks, up to 20 hours in the future. As a result, some nodes saw a chain reorganization of more than 100 blocks, because if you have a lot of CPU-mined blocks, then the chainwork is similar in different chains.

And then, I was quite surprised, when I saw ASIC-mined blocks in my fork. But well, CPU miners only provide some content for testnets, and then, ASIC runners can decide, which chain they want to build on top of, and that chain then becomes real, when the time of the network will reach the time put inside blocks.

So, am I a testnet developer now, because some nodes adopted my changes?

I mean the maintainers.

Only 5 developers, really?
The list is more than 5 https://bitcoindevlist.com/

And you can contribute to Bitcoin Core developments too. https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/contribute/

Don't know where you're getting the "5 developers" part from. There were 79 contributors to the latest release of Bitcoin Core. So far, 963 people have made contributions to Bitcoin Core in all.

From my understanding Bitcoin Core has only 5 developers. Can they make crucial changes to the Bitcoin network if they want to?