Bitcoin’s Long Road to Smart Contracts

According to  Satoshi Nakamoto’s (its founder) 2008 whitepaper, Bitcoin is originally described as “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

There are only 21,000,000 Bitcoins that will ever exist.

Number of Contributors

Contributors to the Bitcoin Core project are welcome to contribute in the form of peer review, testing and patches. 

A system of meritocracy is embraced on the network’s open-source model allowing contributors to earn trust from the developer community. This eliminates the idea of “privileged” contributors giving a chance to everyone to work their way up the hierarchy.

More than 750 contributors are listed on Bitcoins source code repository on Github including Marco Falke and W. J. van der Laan who are some of the most prolific Core Developers considering the number of individual changes to the project.

Accordingly, the number of contributors has risen considerably since August 30, 2009, with the largest number of contributions to Bitcoin Core (Master) being witnessed in Mid 2020.

Number of Issues

Out of the 6 currently open projects, developers of Bitcoin Core have been able to close 5,968 issues since Bitcoin’s debut. 

610 issues are still on the working table. According to statistical data, the rate of issue resolution has risen in the past years and currently, an average of 10 issues is resolved weekly.  

Further, 403 pull requests remain open while 15,909 have been closed so far.

Number of Commits

The first Bitcoin commit was written back in August 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It remains unclear if Satoshi Nakamoto used any kind of source control before the source codes were available to the public. 

However, evidence that the original source files were distributed privately through email remains undisputed. The source code was originally hosted in a rar file on Bitcoin.org. It did not use any Source Control Management. 

Later, when more people began working on it, one of the earliest developers, Sirius, moved everything to SVN on Sourceforge. That was later moved to the current Github repository and switched to using Git.

Since then developers have managed to increase their commits. An average of 50 commits per week is pushed to the master code. May 2020 saw the largest number of commits in the last 2 years on the network at 105 based on Github data. 

Number of Releases

Since 2009, over 55 Bitcoin cores have been released, some being major and others being minor. 

Whereas Satoshi created the bitcoin network on 3rd January 2009 mining the genesis block of the chain,  it was not until 27th April, 2011 that the first notable release from other developers, the Bitcoin Core version 0.19.1, went mainnet.

 The upgrade was mainly aimed at enabling Universal Plug and Play support thereby  Enabling automatic opening of a port for incoming connections 

Fast forward to 2021, the latest release is the Bitcoin Core 22.0. This release includes new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.

Read more about Bitcoin core releases HERE.

Number of Forks

Bitcoin is one of the largest blockchain networks and boasts countless repositories.

So far there have been 100 forks, 74 of which have remained intact. A Bitcoin hard fork, which denotes the process by which a node is onboarded on the network to upgrade. It was created to solve the disagreements within the Bitcoin community over speed, fee of transactions among other issues.

To date, some of the most notable upgrades have been the 2017 Segregated Witness( SegWit) hard fork which was designed to help increase the block size limit on a blockchain.

On 14th November 2021, the Taproot upgrade went live introducing  Bitcoin to the smart contract era as well as enhancing security, privacy and efficiency on the network.

PN: “This data is not final and may be updated from time to time”