If your interest isn’t so much in participating in the ecosystem, but building the infrastructure behind it, that is just as permissionless.
Bitcoin Core is maintained by a voluntary team of Contributors, and anyone is free to propose changes, test code, review and make comments. Major changes to Bitcoin Core are proposed in what are known as BIPs – Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. These require a formal process of proposal, discussion and approval. Some of the biggest chances to Bitcoin, including Segwit – resulting from the so-called Block Size War – came via BIPs
Smaller bug fixer fixes and maintenance aren’t required to go through the formal BIP process, as on rare occasions they are fixes to significant vulnerabilities. This was the case in 2018 when a patch was required which could have led to the creation of bitcoin beyond the fixed supply cap which would have destroyed confidence in the entire system.
You don’t necessarily have to be a developer to help improve Bitcoin Core. You can help improve documentation, translation, suggest process change or improvements to the UI.
As an alternative to building and maintaining Bitcoin Core there are completely separate implementations of the Bitcoin Protocol, such as Libbitcoin, which act as collections of open source C++ libraries for building bitcoin applications.
Find out more about contributing to Bitcoin Core, but please note it is a support channel for Bitcoin. In the next article we’ll look at the role Miners play in supporting the Bitcoin Network and how you can participate in the mining process.
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