Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Wladimir van der Laan has decided to take “even more” of a “background role” for the sake of further decentralizing the project, according to a new blog post.
Bitcoin Core is the key software underpinning the Bitcoin network. While van der Laan’s work is mostly “janitorial” in nature, making sure the project’s code proceeds smoothly, some in the community view him as a leader of sorts. As van der Laan puts it, he’s become a sort of “centralized bottleneck.”
His announcement comes after finding himself in the midst of controversy on Thursday. Some Bitcoin users didn’t like his decision to pull the white paper from bitcoincore.org, following legal threats from Craig Wright. But van der Laan maintains that this decision to pull back from Core is one he’s been thinking about for a while.
“I will start by delegating my own tasks, and decreasing my involvement. I do not intend to stop contributing to Bitcoin, or even to the…