Who "controls" the Bitcoin source code?

Let's start with a little history. On 8 January 2009, the first release of Bitcoin was announced by Satoshi Nakamoto (satoshi @ vistomail . com.

The Windows-only version of the code was provided as a rar file which is still available at sourceforge. You had to unpack the files and run BITCOIN.EXE and it would automatically connect to other nodes.

A couple of years later, the Bitcoin project moved to GitHub.

When most people talk about the bitcoin source code, they are talking about a bitcoin client.

A bitcoin client is the "end-user software" used mainly for private key generation and signing transactions.

There are over a dozen bitcoin clients with the most famous being Bitcoin Core. There are 4 main GitHub repositories for this:

• bitcoin: Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree

• bips: Bitcoin Improvement Proposals

• libblkmaker: MIT-licensed C implementation of getblocktemplate

• libbase58: C library for Bitcoin's base58 encoding

As of today, these are the fingerprints of the "trusted PGP keys" for the GitHub repos:

• 71A3B16735405025D447E8F274810B012346C9A6

• B8B3F1C0E58C15DB6A81D30C3648A882F4316B9B

• E777299FC265DD04793070EB944D35F9AC3DB76A

• D1DBF2C4B96F2DEBF4C16654410108112E7EA81F

• 152812300785C96444D3334D17565732E08E5E41

• 6B002C6EA3F91B1B0DF0C9BC8F617F1200A6D25C

In a GitHub repository, PGP trusted keys are public keys verified and trusted by the repository owners. Trusted keys can be used to verify the authenticity of signed commits and tags in the repository.

So who finally "controls" the source code? Whoever has the private keys for the 6 keys mentioned above.

But remember that control of the Bitcoin source code does not necessarily mean control of the Bitcoin network.