In brief
- The original Bitcoin website is now set to change hands after its co-owner announced plans to step down.
- Cobra is now seeking suggestions from the Bitcoin community to find a suitable replacement.
- There is no mention of why he intends to leave, but Cobra likely "won't be around anymore" by year-end.
Bitcoin.org, the popular Bitcoin educational resource that was first registered in August 2008, is set to change hands.
Originally registered by Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin developer Martti Malmi, the website has remained one of the few unbiased sources of information about Bitcoin. When Nakamoto left the Bitcoin project in 2011, he transferred control of the domain over to an impartial group of individuals, in order to protect it from falling into the wrong hands.
The website currently acts as an on-ramp to Bitcoin, helping to evangelize the project and provide trustworthy resources for beginners.
What is Bitcoin?
—Bitcoin started it all. It was the first cryptocurrency, and it launched an industry that now includes thousands. But who invented it, how does it work, and why is it so important? What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin (BTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. Think of it as a digital token. You can't physically touch or hold Bitcoins, and all Bitcoin transactions are logged on a public, decentralized, immutable ledger. The first official purchase using Bitcoin was for pizza in May 2010. Two pizzas from Papa...
Now, according to a recent Github post by Bitcoin.org co-owner Cobra, control over the site will soon be transferred to somebody new, as Cobra plans to gradually reduce their involvement with the website throughout the rest of the year.
Although Cobra didn't reveal why they were stepping down, they did note that they "won't be around anymore" by the end of the year, adding: "The domain name will be left in trusted hands, I have a few people in mind already."
$500,000 Bitcoin stash from Satoshi era just moved
A long term Bitcoin hodler—or someone who just found an old wallet—has moved a large amount of Bitcoin, mined during the network's earliest days. Today, 50 Bitcoin, worth $500,000 today, was moved, and split up into two addresses in one transaction. As pointed out by Coindesk reporter Zack Voell, the coin was mined in block 3,654—and hadn't moved since then. It's not every day you see coins from the 3000s block heights moving around. https://t.co/ozHpq4m1Up pic.twitter.com/jkRhf7Kcme — Zack Voe...
Seeking suggestions from the community, Cobra plans to hand over control of the domain to the individual or organization that they deem to be most trustworthy.
Several noteworthy individuals have already been suggested, including Will Binns and Saivann, two of the most prolific Bitcoin developers—who together contributed more than half of all non-merge commits to Bitcoin Core on Github. Other noteworthy suggestions include Blockstream co-founder Gregory Maxwell and Craig Watkins, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin.org wallet page.
Since Cobra was added as a co-founder in 2015, the anonymous individual has found themselves embroiled in controversy. Back in 2017, Cobra was quoted saying, "the white paper is to blame for all of these dangerous beliefs – We seriously need to rewrite it, or produce a completely new white paper and call that the Bitcoin white paper.” The dangerous beliefs he’s referring to focus around how much control miners wield over the Bitcoin network. But many Bitcoin diehards are dedicated to the whitepaper (Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey even calling it poetry), and would be loath to change it.
Much ado about Bitcoin Cash
You can’t predict the future. In 1999, technologists fretted that when the clocks struck midnight on December 31st, the internal calendars of computers would read “00” causing them to crash en masse. Time Magazine asked if–what was known as the millennium or Y2K bug–would bring about the end of the world. In reality, very little went wrong. A similar hysteria seems to be developing around the Bitcoin Cash hard fork scheduled for November 15 by Bitcoin ABC. What is typically a bi-yearly software...
This has contributed to making Cobra a polarizing figure in the Bitcoin community. As such, plenty of people will undoubtedly be happy to hear they are stepping down. But who's to say his replacement will be any better?
"I guess for a lot of people, this will probably be some sort of relief. I can't say I've gotten along well with everyone, and some people have questioned my judgement. Hopefully whoever comes after me doesn't get sucked into drama as easily as I sometimes did (though that's also largely a product of being around in pretty dramatic times)."
