Bitcoin’s Longest-Serving Lead Maintainer Says It’s Quitting, and Names No Successor

Bitcoin’s top developer and Lead Maintainer, Wladimir van der Laan, has confirmed that he retires. Van der Laan is the second successor to Satoshi Nakamoto and is one of the few people in the world who has final access to Bitcoin Core’s GitHub.

Nakamoto had this administrative key, which was given to Gavin Andresen, and then to van der Laan. Van der Laan took the reins eight years ago when Andresen, who learned how to maintain Bitcoin’s code directly from Nakamoto, stopped working on the project.

Bitcoin’s Longest Serving Lead Maintainer

Van der Laan has maintained Bitcoin’s repository for even longer than Nakamoto but hinted last January that he planned to begin phasing out his involvement.

In a blog post, he cited “bizarre” arguments on social media and other interests that he wants to pursue, while expressing concern about being a centralized bottleneck for Bitcoin’s development.

And last week, he cited burnout as another main cause to resign, saying said he would hesitate to get involved in another “ungrateful idealistic open source or research project.”

Bitcoin developers are essentially volunteer workers. A few receive charitable donations from other wealthy Bitcoiners or companies to subsidize their labor. Even with these donations, most developers are underpaid compared to similarly skilled developers working in other industries.

Van der Laan pointed out that criticism for years-old mistakes was one reason why he grew tired of his profession. Despite his fatigue, he categorically denied rumors that he had become involved in other cryptocurrency projects.

Van der Laan’s career achievements

Gavin Andresen nominated van der Laan to become Bitcoin’s Lead Maintainer when he stepped down in April 2014.

Since then, van der Laan has been involved in the day-to-day maintenance of all aspects of Bitcoin’s development. It is impossible to summarize everything he has achieved over eight years of code review, upgrades, bug fixes, dispute arbitration and software maintenance.

An example of the work he performed was prioritizing splitting the Bitcoin-QT wallet away from the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) core code, speeding up the synchronization of the Bitcoin-QT wallet with the rest of the network. He also planned to create deterministic addresses and improve Bitcoin’s documentation.

Recently, he launched the option to switch ownership of Bitcoincore.org to an organization instead of a single owner. He also mentioned encourage others to set up mirrors for Bitcoin Core’s software. He wants Bitcoin to be decentralized away from Bitcoincore.org, one of the few places where people download the latest version of Bitcoin’s software.

In 2020, he oversaw a Twitter outcry over variable naming conventions in Bitcoin Core’s code that nearly led to his departure as Lead Maintainer.

Craig Wright harassed and sued van der Laan

Van der Laan has also been exposed to a lawsuit from the litigious self-proclaimed creator of Bitcoin, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright. In various courts around the world, Wright has repeatedly falsified documents and even allegedly incriminated himself in the presence of a judge.

Funded by billionaire and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) promoter Calvin Ayre, Wright has a long history of using his wealth to harass Bitcoiners in court. Wright once named van der Laan as a defendant in a lawsuit claiming ownership of Nakamoto’s white paper.

Despite years of claims to be Nakamoto, Wright has never publicly signed a transaction from one of Nakamoto’s wallets. Also, Ayre and Wright’s fork of Bitcoin, BSV, is worth only 0.3% of Bitcoin.

Read more: Craig Wright Returns to Copyright Strike Bitcoin Whitepaper

Wright sent legal notices to several websites demanding they take down Bitcoin’s whitepaper, but many government officials selected to defy his harassment, and hosted the paper on government domains. Bitcoincore.org briefly took down the whitepaper, which led to heavy criticism of van der Laan. Other sites such as Bitcoin.org remained defiant in the face of Wright’s demands.

He hopes Bitcoin will become even more decentralized

Van der Laan has no direct successors named, instead hoping that his departure will help Bitcoin become more decentralized. His ultimate hope is that Bitcoin will decentralize Satoshi’s GitHub commit access key to such an extent that Bitcoin no longer needs an official Lead Maintainer.

Van der Laan blogged that he planned to delegate most of his duties. He indicated a willingness to assume a background role leading to retirement, responding only in emergencies.

Commentators such as Eric Wall the blame bitcoin maximalists — commonly called “maxis” — for driving van der Laan out of his job by making maintaining Bitcoin “not super fun anymore.” Many digital assets community members have long called Bitcoin maximalists toxic. Responding to Wall’s claim, Van der Laan said he is not resigning for any single reason.

Last year, van der Laan outlined a possible plan for what might happen after his departure. His plan included the ability to decentralize development tasks, move away from relying on GitHub to host the code, and find someone else to send release candidates to the official Bitcoin-developer, bitcoin-dev, and bitcoin-core mailing lists. dev. The Bitcoin community has repeatedly thanked him for his eight years of service as Bitcoin’s Lead Maintainer.

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