‘Bitcoin Always Needed More Than One Body of Developers’: An Interview With Libbitcoin’s Eric Voskuil

Launched in 2011 by an ensemble of dedicated open-source developers led by Bitcoin’s rebellious hacker Amir Taaki, Libbitcoin was born a tool of resistance.
Offering an alternative to the original Bitcoin client, its goal was to diversify the Bitcoin development ecosystem, ensuring no single development team retained effective control over the network. ‘Centralized software is vulnerable to the dictates of whoever controls development of that software code, and any dictates pressured onto them,’ Taaki’s Libbitcoin manifesto reads.
Five years later, Taaki has vanished from the Bitcoin scene. But Libbitcoin, a set of cross-platform, open-source libraries that serve as building blocks for a variety of Bitcoin applications, continues to grow. They are now maintained by a loosely tied team led by Seattle-based software architect and former naval aviator Eric Voskuil, and form the basis of services including Airbitz, DarkWallet (alpha) and OpenBazaar(soon in alpha).
Bitcoin Magazine sat down with Voskuil to learn more about this maverick implementation.
Eric, first of all, what happened to Amir? Do you know what he’s up to these days?

This post was published at Bitcoin Magazine on March 1st, 2016.

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