The Hero's Fly Toward the Flame

Popular podcasters have had a good run. The latest OP_RETURN controversy was to juicy to resist. The hits, the downloads, the opportunity to get on the right side of something, the social side. Nver mind that it is a very subtle subject.

I am resisting this, in bitcoin we burn our hero's (or they burn themselves), social controls are diluted through math and privacy and bitcoin doesn't mix well with growing ego's. 

If you are a podcaster (or a blogger) Bitcoin isn't controlled by words, it is controlled by code. If you don't understand the code you have to interpret, and when you interpret you risk projecting yourself onto it and creating confusing hallucinations. For some it is technical, for others it is philosophical, actually it is both, but very subtle. 

If your not contributing to Bitcoin Core then I think that your right to complain is diminished. We need more implementations with more contribution and more users. If you don't like it or think you don't, it's time to get to work. Understand Segwit and Taproot, figure out the difference between node policy and consensus. Let's decentralise the code more, it's a good thing to diversify where the code comes from, it makes bitcoin more resilient. So it's not all bad to have a debate, a so called "war", but whilst I am researching pro's and cons, I'm not signing up to fight. 

Here are some current bitcoin implementations in need of your input.

🔒 Bitcoin Core
• Maintainers: Bitcoin Core developers
• Notes: The reference implementation; conservative and security-focused.

🔧 Bitcoin Knots
• Maintainer: Luke Dashjr
• Notes: A superset of Bitcoin Core with extra features for miners and power users. More experimental and policy-flexible.


🪶 LibreBitcoin
• Maintainer: Community-driven (Librechain project)
• Notes: A drop-in Bitcoin Core fork with hardcoded changes favoring decentralization and transparency (removes assumed trust points).


⚡ btcd
• Language: Go
• Maintainer: btcsuite
• Notes: Full node with a focus on modularity and clean Go code. Used by many in the Lightning ecosystem (e.g., LND).


🦀 Rust Bitcoin / Rust-bitcoind (under development)
• Language: Rust
• Maintainer: rust-bitcoin org
• Notes: Not a full node yet, but increasingly powerful libraries that may form a full implementation in the future.


⚙️ bcoin
• Language: JavaScript/Node.js
• Maintainer: Purse.io
• Notes: Full node and wallet library used for educational and dev-oriented deployments.


🧠 Bitcore
• Language: JavaScript
• Maintainer: BitPay
• Notes: Initially a full node implementation, now mostly focused on wallet infrastructure.