Bitcoin developer Gloria Zhao becomes first female Bitcoin Core maintainer

[Majestic-milf]

Gloria Zhao becomes the first recognized woman to join the select group of Bitcoin Core maintainers. A Bitcoin Core maintainer is granted permission to change or add codes in a project and is saddled with the responsibility of merging the contributions of other developers on the codebase.
 The right to commit is left in the hands of open source project owners because they get to decide whose contribution will be added into the project.
 In the case of Bitcoin Core, this function lies in the hands of a small school of developers known as maintainers.
Zhao was able to achieve this status on Thursday, July 7th after her pull request to add her PGP key fingerprint was accepted and this conincided with the departure of famous developer, Pieter Wuille whose contribution to the community are addition of Bitcoin upgrades, 32 seed phrases, segwit and Taproot/schnoor.
 This promotion should help encourage women get involved in it, not just being aware of it as currency but to know how it's being developed.  source

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[Zilon]

It is interesting seeing more females getting involved in tech and this time not the regular front end or UI/UX but rather Bitcoin development(Blockchain) A big plus to the Bitcoin community. Gloria Zhao will also become as good as Pieter Wuille over time, her pull request(PR) was a bold step. Having the permission to commit to the open source project tells her good her proposal was which has earned her a place as part of the Bitcoin core maintainer is more than a huge achievement.

[franky1]

im reserving judgement on this one but first impression, this is a positive

one less "blockstreamer" in the maintainer group is always a positive. so we are now diluting the maintainer group away from one main "sponsor" more and more.

edit:
she seems to be "team chaincode/brinks" where her boss is J newberry. so lets see where that leads
(so not so diluted as first thought)

i will be looking into her meaning of when she says her interest is in the mempool acceptance code.. as that can lead into censorship of tx's before they can even get a chance to re-relayed to other nodes to be seen by the network/block templates. so for now reserving judgement and taking on the positives as they lay today.

she does seem to be swaying towards wanting fee bumps and high fee's and disregarding cheap fee tx's before they even get to mempool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byUf8r61qc0

she discusses things like wanting to have algo's to stop tx's with large signature segments that can delay validation at the mempool acceptance stage of tx relay.. (seems she is over complicating an easy fix)
the easiest solution.. by limiting txsigops and having a max 'in counter' of a tx.
thus not need all of her 'process and analyse then judge if acceptable' fluff

you dont need to process a tx and count the delay time by running it through time test scenarios and check time delay limit variables to judge things before putting into mempol/re-relay to other nodes.(which takes time in itself added onto the validation). instead you simply dont even start processing a tx with large 'in counter' or 'witness'(signatures)

[Artemis3]

What?! I have been waiting to do 0.1 sat/B transactions, all my current transactions are at 1 sat/B and they work FINE.

[franky1]

What?! I have been waiting to do 0.1 sat/B transactions, all my current transactions are at 1 sat/B and they work FINE.

she is laying out her roadmap (future plans)
watch the video

im not judging her just yet, she is new to the position.. but its good to see what maintainers mindset/plans are as it indicates the direction bitcoin will go

as for your wish of a 0.1sat/byte
bitcoin would be ruined if they change all the code to try allowing 0.1sat. or 0.001sat(it breaks/changes many other rules to even allow that as a feature)

what may be an option is not a 0.1 but instead a 100sat per kb (which means your 250byte tx is only 25sat) which gets you the same fee amount as you want to see.. without messing with the structure of multiple hard rules that affect many other things

..
as for gloria's role. its not just deciding the rules on fee's of what TX are acceptable. she is ultimately the "validation maintainer" of all things that gets to be put into mempools or/thus ends up getting relayed before it even gets to a block template collation of transactions. which has some implications on many things.. so its not a small role

[NotATether]

...this conincided with the departure of famous developer, Pieter Wuille whose contribution to the community are addition of Bitcoin upgrades, 32 seed phrases, segwit and Taproot/schnoor.

It's sad to see Pieter go (but I guess its like the case of gmaxwell and other former devs - people move on).


I've always wanted to break into the Bitcoin Core contributors' pool - those group of people making changes that actually get merged by a maintainer, but it's quite hard to get people there to accept your commits [lots of stuff has stalled for this reason].

[mindrust]

Cool but bitcoiners don’t care about developer gender one bit. As long as she can get the shit done, she will be OK.   Why would we care about a bitcoin dev’s gender? Male, female, gay, lesb, android, genderless, AI… they are all the same for me when it comes to developing something. This is not female sports where transgenders are participating in we are talking about. Developing is all about your brain power. Gender has no meaning.

[Leviathan.007]

Firstly since bitcoin is an open-source project everyone can contribute and help the project and they can even fork it from GitHub, then do their own changes, and then create a pull request so it's not just about a group of people or only Gloria Zhao to help the project. but some people will have more access to the project and gladly Gloria Zhao will be one of them to help the project more than before, there are also many other female developers in the world but unfortunately compared to the men they are not very famous between people, sadly I'm not a blockchain developer otherwise I would like to help the project as well.

[kryptqnick]

I looked at her LinkedIn profile, and she seems quite qualified for the job because she's been doing crypto-related work for years, including working on Bitcoin Mempool for the last year. I guess we'll see what sort of suggestions she makes as she gets more accustomed to the role, I think it's too early to judge on preliminary ideas that she outlined. As for the gender thing, yeah, of course it's cool to not care about gender, but it's also good that she's a woman because things like that empower other women to see that they can also do something like that.

[darkv0rt3x]

Just to be clear, Peter didn't left. He said as he was doing a lot less mantainence coding, etc, he decided to drop his own permissions, if I understood correctly. Therefore, someone else (Zhao) was named for those permissions, so Peter will still keep contributing but less and Zhao hopefuly will fill the gap and keep up the good work and the improvements for the Bitcoin network and community.

I just whish both the best of luck and mainly Zhao to keep supporting Satoshi vision and what Bitcoin represents!

[Welsh]

I've always wanted to break into the Bitcoin Core contributors' pool - those group of people making changes that actually get merged by a maintainer, but it's quite hard to get people there to accept your commits [lots of stuff has stalled for this reason].

As with anything that has a good amount of support. Plus, Bitcoin has a lot of people relying on it, so it makes sense to be careful about what's adding or not. Even without that you should be careful. Development is painfully slow as you might know. Even massive companies which have a ton of devs are quite slow, and usually time frames are thrown out of the window, even when overestimated. At least, that's what I've found.

[SatoPrincess]

Cool but bitcoiners don’t care about developer gender one bit. As long as she can get the shit done, she will be OK.   Why would we care about a bitcoin dev’s gender? Male, female, gay, lesb, android, genderless, AI… they are all the same for me when it comes to developing something. This is not female sports where transgenders are participating in we are talking about. Developing is all about your brain power. Gender has no meaning.

It matters, the tech industry is a male-dominated field. Yes bitcoin isn’t bias towards gender, bitcoin is a software and there aren’t as much female software developers as there are males. This is motivation that women can thrive in a male-dominated space. Gloria Zhao success will encourage more women to come into the tech sector.  

[o_e_l_e_o]

Just to be clear, Peter didn't left. He said as he was doing a lot less mantainence coding, etc, he decided to drop his own permissions, if I understood correctly. Therefore, someone else (Zhao) was named for those permissions, so Peter will still keep contributing but less and Zhao hopefuly will fill the gap and keep up the good work and the improvements for the Bitcoin network and community.

Pieter Wuille will cease being a maintainer but will continue being a developer. Gloria Zhao will continue to be a developer and now also be a maintainer.

See also this pull request for a new MAINTAINERS.md file which will list the active maintainers: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/25560

And also see this OP_RETURN message from /dev/fd0: https://mempool.space/tx/830e6cb9ae8a35efa23c1053db942db8abe7d3f362f6173638860ee7849507ae