Bitcoin development
Find more information about current specification, software and developers.
Documentation
If you are interested in learning more about the technical details of Bitcoin and how to use existing tools and APIs, it is recommended you start by exploring the developer documentation.
Core developers
The Bitcoin system was originally designed by Satoshi Nakamoto. His original Bitcoin codebase is now being maintained as Bitcoin Core by the following developers and a community of volunteers.
Responsible disclosure
bitcoin-security@lists.sourceforge.net
If you find a vulnerability related to Bitcoin, non-critical vulnerabilities can be emailed in English to any of the core developers or sent to the private bitcoin-security mailing list listed above. An example of a non-critical vulnerability would be an expensive-to-carry-out denial of service attack. Critical vulnerabilities that are too sensitive for unencrypted email should be sent to one or more of the core developers, encrypted with their PGP key(s).
Get involved
Bitcoin is free software and any developer can contribute to the project. Everything you need is in the GitHub repository. Please make sure to read and follow the development process described in the README, as well as to provide good quality code and respect all guidelines.
Development discussion takes place on GitHub and the bitcoin-development mailing list at sourceforge. Less formal development discussion happens on irc.freenode.net #bitcoin-dev (web interface, logs).
More free software projects
You can choose a project to contribute to by answering a few questions about your skills.
- Armory - A Bitcoin client with enhanced security features.
- BFGMiner - Modular Bitcoin mining software.
- bitcoinj - A Java implementation of a Bitcoin client-only node used in thin SPV Bitcoin clients.
- Bitcoin Wallet for Android - A thin SPV Bitcoin client for mobiles.
- Bits of Proof Enterprise Bitcoin Server - A modular implementation of the Bitcoin protocol in Java.
- btcd - A full node bitcoin implementation written in Go.
- btcwallet - A hierarchical deterministic wallet daemon written in Go.
- Electrum - A fast Bitcoin client relying on remote servers to store the block chain.
- Eloipool - A fast Python mining pool server software.
- libbitcoin - An asynchronous C++ library for Bitcoin.
- libblkmaker and python-blkmaker - Client side libraries for the getblocktemplate mining protocol.
- NBitcoin - A cross-platform .NET Bitcoin library. (Mac,IOS,Android,WP,Tablets,Mono,Desktop)
- libbitcoin-server - A libbitcoin-based blockchain query server.
- picocoin - A tiny bitcoin library, with lightweight client and utils.
- python-bitcoinlib - A Python2/3 Bitcoin library.
- sx - Modular Bitcoin commandline utilities.
- Show more...
Developer communities
The following chatrooms and websites host discussions about Bitcoin development. Please be sure to read their rules of conduct before posting.
Bitcoin Core contributors
(Ordered by number of commits)
