![]() This makes it easier for different players across the industry to ease into the transition. Similarly to SegWit, Taproot was also a soft fork upgrade, meaning network participants that do not install it right away will not be cut off from the network. In short, the SegWit upgrade allowed bitcoin miners to process more transactions with each block. In August 2017, an upgrade called Segregated Witness increased Bitcoin’s transaction throughput capacity within a given block by giving a discount to certain data used in transactions. As you can already tell from these dates alone, getting consensus with an open source developer community takes years of work. On November 14, 2021, the Bitcoin network got its first major makeover since the SegWit (segregated witness) fork in 2017, first introduced by developer Pieter Wuille in 2015. Let’s take a look at one example of how bitcoin’s open source development process works. This is only possible because all of the code related to crucial Bitcoin network functions is already widely broadcasted and freely available from many different sources, and each node operator has a choice in which version of the code they will use. The bitcoin developer ecosystem, with hundreds of active contributors, gets funding and contributions from so many different people that there is no single entity that could force a change. As became evident in the Taproot upgrade we’ll explore shortly, these organizations can only influence public opinion about Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, called BIPs. There are developer organizations, like the nonprofit Brink and the research institute Chaincode Labs. ![]() This helps keep the bitcoin network out of the control of any one company or developer group. However, most open source bitcoin software developers, including toolmakers like wallet creators, earn grants and accept community donations for independent work. A few companies keep open source contributors on staff, as Blockstream and Coinbase have in the past. A wide variety of bitcoin companies, from exchange companies like BitMex to wallet producers like Jack Dorsey’s charitable Square spinoff, Spiral, sponsor grants for independent, open source developers to maintain Bitcoin Core code and other like-minded software projects.
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