GitHub has been the home of Bitcoin Core and many other software projects in the Bitcoin industry for over a decade, but it wasn’t the first social network to host the digital currency’s code, and it probably won’t be the last.
Recent developments at GitHub have sparked new criticism of the platform, reviving old concerns and dissatisfaction with its design and reliability. Matt Corallo, one of the biggest contributors to Bitcoin’s core, went to X recently to announce his decision to leave the platform, not just Bitcoin codes, but Rust Lightning dev toolscode base with which they are closely related.
In the X quote retweet thread that comes back in several posts complaining about the platform, Corallo said“Our organization currently does not have CI (quality control) because GitHub incorrectly listed a contributor, not an administrator or maintainer, with a new person who has opened several requests. After a week or so, he added: “GitHub has confirmed that our open source project has been permanently banned with no explanation and no way to appeal, pointing to a ToS that doesn’t mean anything we’ve ever done.” – “I think it’s time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub.”
A banned agent seems to be Luis Schwab, who answered “I have suspended my account twice in a week “by mistake.” Relying on the good things of GitHub is not a good long-term strategy. Several other Bitcoin and crypto developers responded with the same experience, saying that they also migrated from the platform or were banned without support, such as. Roman Stormwho responded, “In 2022, GitHub closed my account due to Tornado Cash sanctions. I’m a US citizen. They told me to get OFAC’s permission to access my account. Later the sanctions were ruled illegal and reversed. The account is still closed. I’ve filed ticket after ticket – now Git won’t even respond.”
Corallo blames the AI wave for the recent suspension of accounts and the aggressive tactics taken by the big platform. The popularity of coding vibes has brought new interest, kid projects and bot-like programming to the already overburdened platform. Today, GitHub he claims to be the host More than 420 million databases and more than 4 million organizations worldwide. GitHub was purchased by Microsoft in 2018which, for some, also explains its steady decline.
Even Andrew Poelstra, one of the main Bitcoin Kore and rust lightning assistant, with more than ten years of experience in the industry, wrote to delete GitHub, defending the decision to move. ” This site has too much LLM slop, and they have no intention of stopping it, wrote this crazy post based on the history of FOSS as a way to acknowledge the problem,” he began, going on to explain that the integration of the code into the main database “has been broken for several days.” This led to problems that compromised the “merge script,” a security program that ensures that changes to the code base are done correctly.
This problem means that tracking and integrating pull requests – contributions from other developers – did not work as expected. “Tracking PRs is one thing that GitHub has to do, and it’s broken. It’s no better to be here than to leave, which is the only reason we’ve been around this long,” Poelstra said. “The usual problems where diffs and comments are hidden, the site is slow and unreliable, the permissions system is crazy and broken, shutdowns, bad and limited API, etc. (all) things we could have if the basics worked, but they don’t.”
As a result, the next destination for Rust Lightning and possibly other Bitcoin projects in the industry may be Create ita lightweight GitHub solution designed for self-help and advanced projects. Corallo confirmed to Bitcoin Magazine that “rust-bitcoin has already moved to git.rust-bitcoin.org” and Rust Lightning followed.
The repository may continue to have a copy on GitHub, although no public comments have been made about any kind of long-term plans for the code base, meaning it will eventually be live. on their website.
