How many people actively develop Bitcoin software?

[cuttie018]

I'm writing a research paper and need an exact (or very close to reality) number. How many programmers are supporting the software now? I mean the software that works on most nodes.

Please, refer me to some article or statistics.

[mk4]

There are a few bitcoin node implementations, namely- Bitcore, btcd, etc, and the most famous and most used, Bitcoin Core.

In the case with bitcoin core, as a huge majority of people use bitcoin core rather than the alternatives anyway, here's the link to the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

Just click on the contributors tab to view every single user who has contributed to the software one way or another. Currently the number of contributors is 647, with various levels of contributions. If you want to be more accurate, you might want to do research on the other node implementations[1] and just individually take a look at their repositories.

[1] https://coin.dance/nodes

[DooMAD]

I'm writing a research paper and need an exact (or very close to reality) number. How many programmers are supporting the software now? I mean the software that works on most nodes.

Please, refer me to some article or statistics.

It depends what you mean by "now", I guess, since active coders come and go as they wish.  Technically, all the people who have contributed code to the Bitcoin Core repository over the years have supported the current build, in which case, mjglqw's reply of 647 is correct, but for those credited in the most recent release, the figure is just 19 people who "directly contributed".  But it's likely more people will contribute changes in later updates to 0.18.x, so you'll just have to keep an eye on the repository to see who's chipping in at the time.

[mk4]

It depends what you mean by "now", I guess, since active coders come and go as they wish.

Oh yea. Missed the "now" part.

OP: You can select your preferred time span on the GitHub contributors' section. Simply drag across the chart to select your preferred time span.


As an example, Since January 1 of 2019 up to today(August 31), there has been a total of 45 contributors. You can scroll to the bottom of the page to see how many contributors there are in total.



https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors?from=2019-01-01&to=2019-08-31&type=c

[BrewMaster]

you need to be a lot more specific that that.
first of all the term "Bitcoin software" is ambiguous. apart from full node implementations that was mentioned there are a ton of other projects. SPV nodes, wallets (for all different platforms), block explorers, libraries, ... and there is an alternative in different languages.
and second "actively develop" is also ambiguous. how much contribution do you consider "active"? and what kind of contribution do want to check? there are different things and different levels. for example code review, testing, creating pull requests,... all are contribution. for example someone might have been reviewing all the changes that are made to the code, fixing the issues with them but doesn't have any commits that GitHub could show.

[fiulpro]

I was studying in CSE department and the software developing team actually knew nothing about bitcoins , they had heard about it but at the same time considering the country it's being placed in people know about bitcoins but at the same time they stay off that thing , it is something that is taken by only the bold developers .
Therefore am sure of the fact that not many are working towards it .
But then again it depends on the country.

[Kakmakr]

Does your research paper cover off-chain development like the Lightning Network too? Even though it might not be directly linked to the core Bitcoin protocol, it should get a honorary mention too, because it has a huge impact on the scaling options for Bitcoin.

Would it also be correct to say that the commits that was calculated, only displays the code that was accepted? GitHub contributors that has submitted code, but not added to the protocol is not being displayed? <I am not a software developer, so I might not understand this correctly?>

[xabre]

Many people still active for developing of bitcoin, some of them only active for how to make bitcoin become more higher transaction with support become legal payment.