here are the initiatives to support Bitcoin development

Event The B Wordheld yesterday, July 21, included in its programming a panel on how to support the open development of Bitcoin, where specialists and entrepreneurs participated who shared their opinion about the current state of this crucial area for the evolution of this technology.

In different talks, the panel “Supporting the Developer Ecosystem”, or in Spanish, “Supporting the Developer Ecosystem”, showed the opinions of specialists such as John Newbery (Developer, Brink), Alex Gladstein (Human Rights Foundation), Conor Okus (Square Crypto), Beth Kurteson (Gemini), Hong Kong (CEO of OKCoin) and Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), among others.

To log in, your host, Yassine Elmandjra, an analyst at ARK Invest, pointed out that the lack of a central authority on Bitcoin is its main feature, but that does not imply that there should not be coordinated and rigorous efforts for its development.

“Today Bitcoin is maintained by a passionate group of volunteer developers and distributed organizations, but its long-term success requires a funding model that is sustainable,” he said.

From this same premise came John Newbery, Bitcoin developer and founder of Brink, an organization focused on providing funding, mentoring and education to Bitcoin developers. For Newbery, Bitcoin is “Open source Money,” whose fundamentals are based on decentralization, collective collaboration, and freedom of expression applied to software.

After reviewing the history of open source software and Bitcoin, Newbery detailed a developer’s “critical” responsibilities and tasks: reviewing and testing the code, finding and fixing the bugs or failures of the same, improve its performance (more if it is an interconnected network), improve security and add new functionalities.

Regarding the history of Bitcoin development, Newbery assured that the number of changes made, the comments reviewed in total, and the number of commentators participating in this task, has increased over the years.

However, considering that the price of Bitcoin and its market capitalization has increased exponentially, Newbery considers that bitcoin development is not funded to the extent required to protect the value this network retains: a market capitalization of approximately $ 600 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

In this sense, during the presentation of Peter McCormack and John Pfeffer, entrepreneur and co-founder of Brink, the question arose about how much financing is really needed to drive the development of Bitcoin.

Pfeffer said this depends on how much work, how much time and how many people are needed to achieve a specific goal. “It does not require 10 times more than what is already being given, because it may not be productive,” he said, referring to how the dispersion of efforts can generate the opposite effect to what is sought.

He also stressed that it is necessary to finance Bitcoin developers with money, as it is a job that requires dedication and specific skills. It is also positive that more organizations can train and educate developers in various parts of the world.

“The community of developers is quite open and receptive, but also demanding, because it defends a really important monetary network, so it relies on the high standards of its community,” Pfeffer said, advising those who want to be developers to interact in the ecosystem in search of opportunities and projects.

I want to be a Bitcoin developer: who can I count on to support me?

Newbery, like other participants throughout the session, mentioned the various organizations that support the development of Bitcoin, for various purposes.

Among the non-profit initiatives, Newbery mentioned Chaincode Labs, The Bitcoin Foundation, MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and Brink. As for organizations that do have business interests, but support the development of Bitcoin, they are Blockstream and Square Crypto, who to develop their products need to work on Bitcoin and its allied network Lightning.

Also, in recent years some exchange houses such as OKCoin, Bitmex, Xapo and Gemini, they have also issued sponsorships to Bitcoin development. In the panel where representatives from OKCoin, Gemini and Square participated, they stated that they will continue to present initiatives to support the development of Bitcoin.

On behalf of Gemini, as reported by CriptoNoticias, recently approved $ 1.5 million donation to support 2 Bitcoin Core developers, aiming to keep improving the protocol.

“Bitcoin is not ready”

In her speech, the Dr. Neha Narula, Director of the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)announced that the organization he represents would be launching an initiative focused on improving Bitcoin security.

As he stated, the goal of the initiative is to bring Bitcoin’s global security infrastructure to be a system capable of protecting a US $ 1 trillion market.

For this, they will form a team of 10 experts and developerswill be dedicated to eliminating and preventing bugs on Bitcoin’s main network, they will conduct research on economic security (for example, balancing the network’s commission system with the rise in the price of BTC). They will also seek to automate processes, identify best practices and not rely so much on experts with uncommon skills.

Narula invited anyone interested in becoming a Bitcoin developer or getting support for their projects to contact the DCI on their official website.