Bitcoiners Need More Coders As Popularity Increases
Peter Donnell / 12 years ago
Bitcoin has gone from strength to strength this last couple of years and while it may have seen a few setbacks recently we can’t ignore the system because put simply, it’s not going to go away, and it’s incredible that it’s progressed as far as it has, a lot of people clearly want and need this service.
“Our bottleneck is not new code, it’s code review and testing,” said Gavin Andresen , chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, but with just two full time members the foundation needs more help on coding the back end software that keeps everything running, not to mention keep up with security and future applications.
“If you want to make developers happy, start reviewing their requests [on GitHub]. Start testing. Say, ‘I tried this,'” Andresen said. When talking about how they need a new lead programmer but also need new testers at a lower level to make sure everything is running smoothly, especially in light of the DDOS attacks that struck the service back in April.
The peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin makes it decentralized from major banks and other financial networks, a truly digital currency and one that is rapidly emerging from the shadows in to the real world and gaining massive popularity in the process too.
It’s unknown how many people use the service, but it is said to be many millions and hundreds of thousands more are expect to join over the next few month via both mining services and buy cash transaction.
“Little tasks like writing test scripts, test plans … Those sorts of things are not super brainy, algorithmic heavy research, but we desperately need that sort of stuff,” said Jeff Garzik of BitPay, the leading Bitcoin payment processor.
Bitcoin has been around 18 million transactions since it started 4 years ago and more and more places are starting to accept the currency as a form of payment, so even with all it’s issues, the future of Bitcoin is looking pretty promising, but lets not forget that the service is still truly in its infancy.
