please delete

[SapphireSpire]

nothing to see

[jackg]

It's just a number? I think it's 0.x so that theres space for more version numbers. Maybe we'll see 1.x in 30 or 40 years but if bitcoin goes a long time it makesore sense to keep the middle nber growing instead of the first imo. Bitcoin is still pretty new, only 11 years old it's still finding it's feet...

[nc50lc]

Over the past 11 years Bitcoin has been tested, hacked, hammered, drilled, sawed and torched. The core security and consensus models appear to be fully implemented so why is it 0.1x instead of 1.1x?

Yeah I'm pretty sure Bitcoin was hammered and torched before, but it's never been drilled.

For the version, there's an old topic in stack overflow (that you can google search) that received a couple of replies,
but the developer, Gavin Andresen didn't replied on-topic.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/705/why-hasnt-the-bitcoin-client-advanced-to-version-1-0

My personal opinion: Bitcoin is still in beta because of these (761 open issues: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues).

[Deathwing]

1.0 is a very, very big milestone for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in general. Usually 1 means a global release or something like that. It has to be mainstream with a handful or no issues at best. There are currently 30 pages of suggestions/reports/bugs/potential issues already reported on GitHub, there is no reason to rush the development to make it "1.0" slow and steady ensures long term stability.

[DaveF]

Why can't it be all of the above.?

1) There are still a bunch of pending issues.

2) They are still tweaking some feature (BIP 70 in, BIP 70 out as an example) once you have a 1.x version taking out a feature in financial software can and has to take multiple years.

3) Once you hit the 1.x release you have to be more careful how you do some things. You can have the 0.19.0.0 has an issue here is 0.19.0.1 in games and your word processor but not in financial software.

-Dave

[Lauda]

My personal opinion: Bitcoin is still in beta because of these (761 open issues: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues).

This is an uneducated, and wrong opinion. No really active project ever will reach 0 number of issues, unless nobody is using it nor testing it. Most really active projects do indeed all have tens if not hundreds of open issues (and PRs). That's not the reason.

1) There are still a bunch of pending issues.

See above.

2) They are still tweaking some feature (BIP 70 in, BIP 70 out as an example) once you have a 1.x version taking out a feature in financial software can and has to take multiple years.

Taking out things is already taking years (not that it should in some cases). BIP 70 should have been removed ages ago, among other things. It gets discussed, agreed upon and then they wait. Then in some major revision they disable it on default (see, not yet removed). They remove it completely only in some subsequent major version. Years.
You need to look through Github discussions or read the IRC chats. Bitcoin software is by no means anywhere close to 1.0, if it ever gets there that is. This is just a flaw in most humans, you're trying to assign meaning to something meaningless like a 1.0 version number. If instead of 0.19.0.1, the last released version was released as 1.0. What difference would there be? None whatsoever (other than an play on emotions - look at the part about the flaw again above).

[HeRetiK]

Over the past 11 years Bitcoin has been tested, hacked, hammered, drilled, sawed and torched. The core security and consensus models appear to be fully implemented so why is it 0.1x instead of 1.1x?

And yet it's still highly experimental technology

I guess Bitcoin staying at 0.x is a reflection of there still being a lot of work to be done. Increasing the major version would also imply a certain amount of incompatibility between releases so the question becomes how big of a change would warrant a bump of the major version. SegWit was probably as close as it got in this regard but yet again it seems more like work is just getting started rather than being wrapped up.

Either way, Gmail stayed in beta for what, 5 years? So I guess we can give Bitcoin Core a bit of leeway in this regard.

[jackg]

My personal opinion: Bitcoin is still in beta because of these (761 open issues: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues).

This is an uneducated, and wrong opinion. No really active project ever will reach 0 number of issues, unless nobody is using it nor testing it. Most really active projects do indeed all have tens if not hundreds of open issues (and PRs). That's not the reason.

1) There are still a bunch of pending issues.

See above.

We got taught a software becomes stable for release if the number of bugs is fairly stable. Most time when you remove a bug you make one somewhere else.

If there's normally 2000 bugs in 1 million lines of code, as the code grows those bugs move... Issues tell you there are active users. If the number of issues is high its usually not a bad thing. Many issues may be non critical feature suggestions too.

[achow101]

1.0 is a  magic number which  indicates  some  sort of finality and readiness. While changing the version number to 1.0 would probably mean absolutely nothing, people would perceive it as some sort of  milestone. Furthermore, some  developers do actually believe that making a version 1.0 would actually implementing certain features, and in that case, getting everyone to agree on what should be in a 1.0 release is rather difficult.

It is unlikely that there will ever be a 1.0 release or that the versioning convention will ever change.

It has been suggested in the past that we simply drop the leading "0." and just continue with the current numbering scheme. We are already using the second number as a major version number anyways so this wouldn't change much and it would not have the same societal implications as a version 1.0. There has also been another suggestion to change to using a date version scheme like Ubuntu does.

But every time changing the version numbering scheme is brought up, it usually dies quietly with people going "meh", "who cares", and "what's the point". It really isn't worth the effort and time for what amounts to a cosmetic change. So the version numbering scheme is probably not going to change, and it's probably never going to become 1.0. It's literally just a counter for releases.

[pooya87]

you have to keep in mind that there is no universal versioning rules that all the programmers stick to! although there are versioning systems such as Semantic Versioning, developers still stick to their own defined conventions. for example windows used numbers (1.0, 2.0, 3.0) then switched to years (95, 98) then switched to names (ME, XP, Vista) then switched to numbers again (7, 8, 8.1) then jumped to 10. or their .net core (1, 2, 3, jump to 5).
same thing is true for definition of "beta". having a version <1.0.0.0 does not necessarily mean not-final, untested, insecure,... but just like versioning conventions, meaning of beta can be different.
it is bitcoin core (the main/reference implementation of the protocol) developers decision to use this convention and @achow101 already explained the logic. other implementations of Bitcoin protocol such as Electrum chose a different path (use 3 numbers and it is already up to version 3 and version 4 is coming).