Bitcoin Core Maintainer Marco Falke announces his intention to step down

    <figcaption>Der von Falke gepostete Tweet.</figcaption>
</figure><p>Der produktive Bitcoin-Entwickler sagte am Dienstag zu Twitter: „In einer herausfordernden Entscheidung habe ich beschlossen, meine Rolle als Betreuer aufzugeben.  Ich bin nach wie vor begeistert von Open Source und Bitcoin und sehe der Zukunft positiv entgegen, aber ein Maintainer zu sein, passt nicht mehr zu mir persönlich.“

Falke also took the time to thank his sponsors. His most recent financial support came from a joint grant from Okcoin and Paradigm.

Falke was an incredibly active participant in the bitcoin development process, particularly because he made more changes to the bitcoin core code than any other person. Bitcoin Magazine previously reported on Falke’s day-to-day work as maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repository, including his rise to become the most prolific core developer judging by the sheer number of individual changes submitted for the project.

Falke’s contributions were most substantive around infrastructure testing, which he identified early on as an inefficiency of the project that he was passionate about improving, as testing is critical to ensuring continuity across the network and improving quality assurance.

With Falke’s departure, there will only be four official Bitcoin Core maintainers. While these roles are incredibly important, it’s also important to note that they don’t officially control bitcoin – bitcoin users running full nodes must opt-in to the code changes that Bitcoin Core maintainers approve and the protocol one layer add of checks and balances.